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With photoshop we could come up with things that we couldn’t build with CSS. But nowadays we can build things with CSS that are impossible to create with our design tools. We have scroll-snap, we have complicated animations, we have all kinds of wonderful interaction, grid, flexbox, all kinds of shapes, and so much more that you won’t find in the drop down menus of your tool of choice. Yet our websites still look and behave like they were designed with photoshop.

If you were magically given 10,000 hours to be amazing at something, what would it be? The more clarity you have on this response, the better off you’ll be.

Scott Adams popularized the idea of finding the intersection of 2-3 things you’re best at even if you’re not best at any of them individually. He wasn’t neither the best cartoonist nor the best writer nor the best entrepreneur, but he was the best combination. It could be a combination of expertise, relationships, sensibilities, and skills that you’ve accumulated over the years. If you’re just starting out, ideally it picks up where your childhood left off. Now, I spent my childhood trying to make the NBA. So if like me, you misallocated your childhood in the skills department, you have to be more creative. Later on, I realized I could apply the self-discipline and systems thinking I deployed when trying to be good at basketball into other fields, and found some that better fit my natural abilities.

If you’re a generalist, you want to be the best at the intersection of a few different skills, even if it’s a few disparate things. The challenge is it's easy to lie to yourself & say that you're a generalist when in reality you've tried a bunch of things and you've flaked out when things got hard and then tried something else.

Some people who you think are generalists have also specialized. Malcolm Gladwell for example writes about lots of topics, but he's mastered the art of translating academic work for a mass audience. Tyler Cowen self-defines himself as specializing as a generalist, but he spent a couple decades going deep on economics.

A personal moat is a set of unique and accumulating competitive advantages in the context of your career. Like company moats, your personal moat should be a competitive advantage specific to you that's not only durable, but compounds over time.

Whenever Facebook changes its interface, it has an impact on how millions of people communicate. In this sense, user interfaces are cultural artefacts.

What is our purpose on this planet? Do we have a responsibility to one another? Who even are we?Answering those questions alone is asking a lot of a person. The easier option is to choose from the platter of social-strata-acceptable possibilities we’re presented with for education, occupation, geographical location, personality, etc, and call it a day.

if you spend all your time constantly sketching (probably quickly outdated) pictures of your thinking on the bigger questions we’ve all been tasked with answering, you neglect the actual doing that would reveal answers with richer hues

incredible opportunities are unlocked by constructing a digitally consumable caricature of yourself that makes you legible to literally anyone in the world. It’s probably the most far-ranging bat signal possible to find people who think and feel similarly to you.

There’s simply so much friction in the process of turning belief into action online — meaning that most of the time all you actually get from internet attention is internalized impossible-to-attain expectations for yourself and an extremely confused ego.

If you care about personally choosing the shape, scale, and direction of your impact on the world, you might find that playing off-the-shelf games turns out to be a remarkably risky bet. There’s just no money/time-back guarantee that any of the off-the-shelf options will continue to fit you as your desires evolve. And maybe that’s ok — but continually reinventing yourself is a tiring and time-consuming task that too often leads you away from the real “calling”-finding-and-defining work.

In my book, big things are only worth committing to if the answer to the question “would you do this thing even if no one was watching?” is an immediate and unequivocal yes

Avoid getting too specific at a feature level. For example, it's too specific if you say "Page navigator" and it's too high level if you try to explore "A blog builder app." The sweet spot to go for is something that is conceptual where you can explore an interaction for a concept, such as, "Exploring spatial viewing of pages".

It is sort of miraculous that modern video codecs like H.265 have made it possible to fit videos of increasing quality and resolution into shrinking amounts of space. But when it comes to software, the pattern is exactly backwards.

the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

What made me love the wretched thing was its tender and intimate portrayals of friendship, how friendship can, if not save a life, make it bearable and offer innumerable joys for those who are shut off from the traditions of marriage and family.

these reactions seem to signal that our understanding of virality is evolving. When people first started going viral online, there was a real curiosity about what to do with these people. For a while they were basically just a new kind of America’s Funniest Home Videos contestant. In fact, Tay Zonday and Rebecca Black actually performed on America’s Got Talent in 2011. But about five years ago, right around when TikTok was first taking off in the US, we started to view virality with assumption that you could make money on it — if you went viral in a good way. And, now, I think it’s possible that as users continue to learn how to attention-hack on TikTok, we’re going to see more creators who just don’t care what kind of attention they’re getting as long as people are watching. Which makes sense. These newest creators have never known a non-viral world. And the algorithms that put this content in front of us don’t care how it makes us feel, as long as we feel something. So why should we, right?

A common example of diminishing returns is choosing to hire more people on a factory floor to alter current manufacturing and production capabilities. Given that the capital on the floor (e.g. manufacturing machines, pre-existing technology, warehouses) is held constant, increasing from one employee to two employees is, theoretically, going to more than double production possibilities and this is called increasing returns. If we now employ 50 people, at some point, increasing the number of employees by two percent (from 50 to 51 employees) would increase output by two percent and this is called constant returns. However, if we look further along the production curve to, for example 100 employees, floor space is likely getting crowded, there are too many people operating the machines and in the building, and workers are getting in each other's way. Increasing the number of employees by two percent (from 100 to 102 employees) would increase output by less than two percent and this is called "diminishing returns."

In software development, technical debt (also known as design debt[1] or code debt) is the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.[2] Analogous with monetary debt,[3] if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate "interest", making it harder to implement changes. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy and cost of further rework.

Common causes of technical debt include: Ongoing development, long series of project enhancements over time renders old solutions sub-optimal.

Parallel development on multiple branches accrues technical debt because of the work required to merge the changes into a single source base. The more changes done in isolation, the more debt.

A good industrial designer understands the capabilities and limitations of the human body in manipulating physical objects, and of the human mind in comprehending mechanical models. A camera designer, for example, shapes her product to fit the human hand. She places buttons such that they can be manipulated with index fingers while the camera rests on the thumbs, and weights the buttons so they can be easily pressed in this position, but won’t trigger on accident. Just as importantly, she designs an understandable mapping from physical features to functions—pressing a button snaps a picture, pulling a lever advances the film, opening a door reveals the film, opening another door reveals the battery.

When the software designer defines the interactive aspects of her program, when she places these pseudo-mechanical affordances and describes their behavior, she is doing a virtual form of industrial design. Whether she realizes it or not. #The software designer can thus approach her art as a fusion of graphic design and industrial design. Now, let’s consider how a user approaches software, and more importantly, why.

If I had to guess why "math reform" is misinterpreted as "math education reform", I would speculate that school is the only contact that most people have had with math. Like school-physics or school-chemistry, math is seen as a subject that is taught, not a tool that is used. People don't actually use math-beyond-arithmetic in their lives, just like they don't use the inverse-square law or the periodic table.

Teach the current mathematical notation and methods any way you want -- they will still be unusable. They are unusable in the same way that any bad user interface is unusable -- they don't show users what they need to see, they don't match how users want to think, they don't show users what actions they can take.

They are unusable in the same way that the UNIX command line is unusable for the vast majority of people. There have been many proposals for how the general public can make more powerful use of computers, but nobody is suggesting we should teach everyone to use the command line. The good proposals are the opposite of that -- design better interfaces, more accessible applications, higher-level abstractions. Represent things visually and tangibly. And so it should be with math. Mathematics, as currently practiced, is a command line. We need a better interface.

Anything that remains abstract (in the sense of not concrete) is hard to think about... I think that mathematicians are those who succeed in figuring out how to think concretely about things that are abstract, so that they aren't abstract anymore. And I believe that mathematical thinking encompasses the skill of learning to think of an abstract thing concretely, often using multiple representations – this is part of how to think about more things as "things". So rather than avoiding abstraction, I think it's important to absorb it, and concretize the abstract... One way to concretize something abstract might be to show an instance of it alongside something that is already concrete.

The mathematical modeling tools we employ at once extend and limit our ability to conceive the world. Limitations of mathematics are evident in the fact that the analytic geometry that provides the foundation for classical mechanics is insufficient for General Relativity. This should alert one to the possibility of other conceptual limits in the mathematics used by physicists.

be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don't just extrapolate yesterday's technology and then cram people into it.