Denner's Digest - 2022-08-15

A long post on a subject that I feel is increasingly important. It's been especially interesting to experience the variation in this during my no code explorations. The environments where engineering works well have low friction to build, assemble, and observe their products. If you consider that the users of those products may well be other developers, then its turtles all the way down.

I stumbled onto this whilst re-reading Kent Beck's Explore-Expand-Extract model, and looking into the adoption of new technologies within companies. Both contain the sigmoid curve. This is a detailed breakdown of where these S curves appear ("everywhere"), and their 3 sections. What's missing is observation that these curves can reverse when the limits move. If the sysem is in hypergrowth and the bounds get halved, then there's a good chance the growth will reverse. Except if your curve has room to flatten, or there are adjacencies into which you can redirect that growth.

LessWrong is one of those sites that always helps me further my understanding. I came to this whilst reading an article on Schelling Points (coming next week as it's taking a while to digest!). These are "focal points", drawing people towards them. The classic example is the Empire States Building in NYC.

Kunal rocketed into my list of "high signal, low noise" sources from an interview on The Knowledge Podcast. The Delta-4 theory was a significant contribution to that. Don't think this is just for startup ideas. This is equally applicable to any time you want to introduce something new, from tools to processes. I'd expect this to also apply to hiring into the higher echelons of a company.