4 Lessons From the Improbable Rise of QR Codes

Top highlight

Tech that seems totally useless can suddenly become crucial — like during a pandemic

Clive Thompson

Jul 28·7 min read

The first time I saw a QR code, I scoffed.

It was 2010 and the code was in the bottom corner of a movie poster. To scan it, I had to download a special app on my Iphone. The software was still buggy and fiddly — I was hunched over for 15 seconds, scanning and rescanning, until finally it worked. Lo and behold: A crappy browser opened up, showing me the website for the movie.

Serving cell-grown meat to high-end restaurants

A food tech startup is partnering with an avant-garde San Francisco chef to serve the company’s cultivated, cell-grown chicken at her restaurant.

Why it matters: Cultivated meat — animal products grown from cells, rather than processed from slaughtered animals — faces technical and economic challenges, but it also has to gain consumer acceptance.

• Placing the products in high-end restaurants could help speed that process.

What’s happening: Cultivated chicken from the Oakland-based startup Upside Foods will be served in San Francisco chef Dominique Crenn’s Atelier Crenn restaurant, Upside announced on Thursday — the first such partnership between a cultivated meat maker and a three-star Michelin chef.

Lawyer Is Shot Months After Unsolved Killing of His Wife and Son

Alex Murdaugh, the descendant of a prominent family of lawyers in rural South Carolina, was shot on Saturday, nearly three months after his wife and son were killed at their home.

An entrance to the rural estate of Alex and Maggie Murdaugh in Colleton County, S.C., in June.Credit…Michael M. DeWitt, via Imagn Content Services

By

Published Sept. 4, 2021Updated Sept. 6, 2021

Opinion | The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free

Guest Essay

The Simplest Tool for Improving Cities Is Also Free

July 16, 2021

Credit…Son Eunkyoung

By

Ms. Hendren is an artist and design researcher, a professor at Olin College of Engineering and the author of “What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World.”

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — For decades, a stretch of Memorial Drive here that runs along the Charles River has been closed to automobiles on Sundays for the warmer half of the year. In the absence of cars on a four-lane thoroughfare beside the water, all kinds of other street uses blossom: skateboards, bicycles, hoverboards, strollers, wheelchairs and walkers, people on feet and on wheels now moving slowly enough to witness the late spring goslings, the ever-present sea gulls or the rarer magic and grace of a heron feeding along the water’s edge. A towering line of stately, centenarian sycamores forms an unbroken canopy over several blocks.

When **it Gets Real

The heat has come.

In Portland, Oregon, it was hotter (108ºF) Saturday than it’s ever been there. . Yesterday, it was hotter still (114ºF). Records are dropping in Seattle and Vancouver and scores of smaller Pacific Northwest cities. That green and rainy corner of the world is baking in greenhouse sun and drought.

All this is, the National Weather Service informs us, “unprecedented.” No one has ever experienced what it’s like to live in these places at these temperatures. We’re in the unknown, now; Terra incognita. And here be dragons.

How Many People Can Someone Lead?

Contents

The Short Answer

A common question I hear in my technical leadership workshops is, “How many people can someone (e.g. a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager) lead?”

What’s the magic number?

My answer is generally 5-7 people for an experienced leader, but many factors affect the final number. Some of these factors include their leadership scope, other leadership roles, the experience level of the leader, the experience level of the team, and the level of organisational bureaucracy.

Why does it cost so much to build things in America?

As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?

In an interview in early June, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg acknowledged the problem, but he offered no solutions except the need to study it further.

Google’s New AI Photo Upscaling Tech is Jaw-Dropping

Photo enhancing in movies and TV shows is often ridiculed for being unbelievable , but research in real photo enhancing is actually creeping more and more into the realm of science fiction. Just take a look at Google’s latest AI photo upscaling tech.

In a post titled “High Fidelity Image Generation Using Diffusion Models ” published on the Google AI Blog (and spotted by DPR ), Google researchers in the company’s Brain Team share about new breakthroughs they’ve made in image super-resolution.

Structure Eats Strategy

Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense from a business and innovation perspective. For various reasons, within the current organization, agreements have been reached where some functions have responsibilities that others can not intrude upon without causing major hassle and disturbance in the company. The result is a situation where the current organization dictates what the company looks like going forward, no matter if this is the right setup or not.

The Art of Not Taking Things Personally

Psychology

Why other people’s emotions might not be about you — and your emotions might not be about them

Dave Bailey Follow

Aug 18 · 6 min read

Photo by Norbu Gyachung on Unsplash

‘That’s irrational.’

‘That’s stupid.’

‘They’re making things difficult for the sake of it.’

When we encounter emotions and behaviours that don’t make sense to us, it’s often because we don’t have all the information. And in the absence of information, we tend to assume the worst.

How to take a vacation – Jo VanEvery

Just because your work doesn’t always look like work , doesn’t mean you don’t get to take a real vacation.

You already deserve this vacation; it’s not a reward for achieving summer goals. In fact, not only do you deserve a vacation, you need a vacation.

Why you need a holiday.

You work hard. Fatigue impairs cognitive function . Being tired at the end of the academic year is a feature, not a bug. Rest of all kinds helps you recharge so that you are able to do the work you do. Taking a vacation is an important part of that.

Better Coordination, or Better Software?

TL;DR: When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often.

Software systems get big, and they have lots of parts, and those parts need to talk to each other. Maybe we’re building a new customer portal, and the new web services need to talk with existing CRM, and with warehouse systems for returns, and with invoicing. The software crosses organizational boundaries.

A Manager’s Guide to Holding Your Team Accountable

Management

If you struggle with holding people to account, try this.

Dave Bailey

Jun 30·7 min read

Being held to account for our decisions, actions, and results can drive high performance. It helps clarifies our commitments, increases our diligence, and improves our self-awareness.

Most of us report to someone. For CEOs, it’s a board of directors. For others, it’s their manager or their coach. But despite all our reporting structures, real accountability is elusive for many teams.

People Who Brag About Being in Back-to-Back Meetings Deeply Misunderstand Productivity

The Buddha’s empty calendar explains an alternate reality.

Tim Denning Jun 23 · 5 min read

Image Credit: Kingsman/RexFeatures

Looking back at corporate life, it becomes apparent: I don’t miss meetings.

One recruiter I encountered left me with a moment I will never forget. They reached out to me on LinkedIn. They wanted…

How Figma Became Design’s Hottest Startup, Valued At $10 Billion

As Google Docs did for word processing and GitHub for code, so Dylan Field’s Figma is doing for design. Employees at companies like Netflix, AirBNB, Zoom and Discord are all users.

BY ALEX KONRAD

In April, Dylan Field had his craziest day since he skipped out on Brown University to try his hand at startups nearly a decade ago. At the virtual conference of his design software company, Figma, popular with customers including Airbnb, BMW and Zoom, he announced just its second-ever product, a tool for online whiteboarding sessions punnily called FigJam. Hours later, he found out his wife, Elena, was pregnant with their first child.

Discovery When Working Remotely

Normally the question I focus on in my work and in my writing is “How can we leverage the best practices of the very best companies in order to give ourselves the very best chance for continuous innovation?”

While there are many practices that are important and contribute to this, I have long been a champion of the power of the co-located product team.

This Jeff Bezos quote sums up my experiences quite well:

Simple Systems Have Less Downtime

The Maersk Triple-E Class container ship is 1,300 feet long, carries over 18,000 containers across 11,000 miles between Europe and Asia, and… Its entire crew can fit inside a passenger van.

As a former naval architect and a current marketing consultant to startups , I found that the same principle that lets a 13-person crew navigate the world’s largest container ship to a port halfway around the world without breaking down also applies to startups working towards aggressive growth goals:

Shifting Modes: Creating a Program to Support Sustained Resilience

Key Takeaways

• Incidents cannot be prevented because incidents are the inevitable result of success.
• Organizations must shift from a “prevent and fix” safety mode to a “learn and adapt” (Learn & Adapt) safety mode to manage reliability and resilience. This shift helps to more effectively cope with increasing complexity and scale.
• Finding advocates to help socialize the movement and communicating broadly are key aspects of creating a sustained shift to a Learn & Adapt mode.
• Normalizing behaviors — such as stating assumptions, asking more questions, increasing cooperation between diverse roles, and broadly sharing incident write-ups across the organization — help with the mode shift by increasing the flow of information.
• Developing the cultural traits of opportunity creation, flexibility, agility, and trust are necessary for an organization poised to shift to Learn & Adapt.

To most software organizations,Covid-19 represents a fundamental surprise- a dramatic surprise that challenges basic assumptions and forces a revising of one’s beliefs (Lanir, 1986).

He predicted the dark side of the Internet 30 years ago. Why did no one listen?

In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.

Metaverses

Satya Nadella, for the record, was first: on May 25, 2021, during the keynote for Microsoft’s Build developer conference , he characterized a collection of Azure offerings as a metaverse:

Finally, as the virtual and physical worlds converge the metaverse made up of digital twins, simulated environments, and mixed reality, is emerging as a first-class platform. With the metaverse the entire world becomes your app canvas. With Azure Digital Twins you can model any asset or place with Azure IoT and keep the digital twin live and up-to-date. Synapse tracks the history of digital twins and finds insights to predict future states, and with Azure you can build autonomous systems that continually learn and improve. Power Platform enables domain experts to expand on and interact with digital twin data using low-code/no-code solutions. And Mesh and Hololens brings real-time collaboration.

(more…)

Team Meeting Audit: 3 Tests for an Effective Meeting OS

Copy this doc Connect with a Rituals Architect

Meetings are important — and they suck.

No matter the size of your team, some amount of meetings are necessary to get work done. The problem is that most people don’t actually like their Meeting Operating System

. Have you ever wondered how much time your team spends in meetings? Or which of them has the best technique for managing free time? Or wanted to take a hacksaw to a particularly ineffective meeting?

Reducing Product Risk and Removing the MVP Mindset

I originally wrote this piece internally at Eventbrite and thought it might be valuable to folks who do not work at Eventbrite as well. Slightly edited to remove Eventbrite jargon.

What is the right way to build products? Earlier in my career, I would have told you everything should be AB tested, and that you should build only as little as you need to validate a hypothesis. Every problem should have user research involved at the beginning, aligned on the problem instead of just validating or invalidating solutions. Every key result should be outcome based. Every engineer, designer and product manager on the team should be involved in defining the problem and the solution. These are all good ideas. However, once you add enough of these “best practices” up, it reads kind of like those articles talking about the morning habits of the most successful people in the world. If you actually try to follow all of those habits, it would take you six hours a day and cost a lot of money. I was once reading an article about what a futurist at Google eats for breakfast every morning to live longer. The article added up that his diet of food and pills cost him $1 million per year. My morning ain’t that long, and I ain’t got that much money.

Mind the Platform Execution Gap

Leaders of software development organisations are under great pressure to

ensure that their employees spend their time on value-adding activities. One

way to achieve this is to use SaaS to outsource functionality that isn’t

part of their organisation’s core business. Another way is to consolidate

infrastructure capabilities required by many teams and services into a

digital platform (which might in turn rely upon SaaS and cloud providers).

The Problem With Prioritization Frameworks

Why prioritization frameworks have little value for empowered product teams

Product managers often complain that prioritization is one of the most challenging aspects of the job: there is always so much to do and so little time. It is therefore not a surprise that there are a ton of frameworks out there that are meant to help make difficult prioritization decisions, for example:

• ICE/RICE scoring (reach, impact, confidence, effort)
• Value vs complexity 2X2 matrix
• Stakeholder scoring

These frameworks are used to make prioritization decisions by classifying opportunities (or features) according to some measures, and then making prioritization decisions based on the resulting list or matrix.

How to Find Your Zone of Genius

Mathilde Collin

1 day ago·6 min read

The saying goes: “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” I don’t think it’s accurate: if you want to do your best work, it’s going to take a lot of effort. The opposite, however, is absolutely true: if you do what you hate, you’ll be miserable every single day. Yet a lot of people find themselves in that very situation, spending their time on tasks that drain their energy, fully convinced that there’s no other way. There is another way: to find your zone of genius, and to progressively move to a job where you spend 80% of your time in it. Hat tip to Matt Mochary who shared this method with me years ago.

Mark Zuckerberg is betting Facebook’s future on the metaverse

As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. The future of the company would go far beyond its current project of building a set of connected social apps and some hardware to support them. Instead, he said, Facebook would strive to build a maximalist, interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi — a world known as the metaverse.

The Metaverse Has Always Been a Dystopian Idea – VICE

A big shift is apparently underway in Silicon Valley.

The company that operates the world’s largest and most profitable social media network will not, according to its CEO, be a social media company much longer. In an announcement that inspired a fervid wave of speculation, analysis, and mockery, Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook is going to become a “metaverse company” instead.

Guiding Critical Projects Without Micromanaging: The Limits of Flexible Management

The limits of flexible management

Camille Fournier

Jul 17·5 min read

I’m a big believer in flexibility as a senior manager. I do not think I know or even can know the exact way to run any given team in my organization. The magic of effective teams is a combination of the personalities involved, the project lifecycle they’re in, and so many other factors. Forcing every team into a single process, whether it’s classic Agile-type two week sprints or Scrum or whatever is optimizing for uniformity of process at the likely expense of the needs of the teams themselves. Being outcomes-driven (is the work getting done, with good quality, in reasonable time, without burning out the people involved) is the only way I know how to work.

Incremental Note-Taking

I’ve been delving deeper into the vast and strange world of knowledge organizing tools (notes apps, contact organizers, personal search engines). During this rather abstract expedition, one of my goals has been to emerge with some opinionated thesis about the way these tools should be designed to harbor and extend our knowledge effectively.

Though I’m hesitant to say I’m there yet, I’ve found myself repeatedly coming back to a group of related ideas I’m going to call incremental note-taking about how to best gather knowledge into notes, and how we should design tools built around this workflow . This post is one attempt (of hopefully many more) to share them with you. This is a longer post, so here’s a roadmap. If you’re impatient, I suggest you begin with the principles.

MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.

A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.

As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic ‘normal.’

Concepts I Use Every Day: BAPO

Jason Yip Jul 4 · 3 min read

Because org structure change can get messy, there’s a tendency to have structure drive strategy

Changing org structure can be messy

There are several reasons why org structure changes can get messy:

• Changing org structure can mean changing managers. Given “people leave managers, not companies”, the org structure change can trigger problems including departures;
• Changing org structure typically means responsibilities are re-allocated. People are no longer responsible for work they used to be responsible for and/or they are now responsible for work that they might not want to do. This can lead to disengagement or even departures;
• From the manager side, changing org structure can mean more or less direct reports. This can mean overwork with too many reports and contexts to stay on top of. This can mean status threat and political jockeying with too few reports;

Organisation constrains architecture; architecture constrains strategy

“Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.”

(more…)

The Limits of Optimization

Welcome to the Convivial Society*, a newsletter about technology and society, broadly speaking. If you find the writing helpful, you can sign up if you haven’t already, share it with others, or subscribe.*

I’m a Mets fan. Right at this moment, that’s not such a bad thing. Despite having up to 17 players on the injured list earlier this season, they’ve been in first place in their division for nearly two months. Over the past three decades, however, being a Mets fan has meant mostly disappointment and frustration, punctuated by rare moments of joy. Naturally, I’m bequeathing this legacy of emotional turmoil to my daughters.

Developing Resilience: Overcoming and Growing from Setbacks

© iStockphoto
subman

Find the strength to keep going.

I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. – American inventor, Thomas Edison

According to legend, Thomas Edison made thousands of prototypes of the incandescent light bulb before he finally got it right. And, since the prolific inventor was awarded more than 1,000 patents, it’s easy to imagine him failing on a daily basis in his lab at Menlo Park.

Focus on Your First 10 Systems, Not Just Your First 10 Hires

Introduction

In his six years at HashiCorp , **Kevin Fishner **has strung together a unique set of startup experiences. He joined the cloud infrastructure automation company in 2014 as the first business hire, going on to spin up the sales, solutions engineering, account management, and marketing teams. Afterwards, he spent a few years building out the product management and education groups as VP of Product. But for the last year and a half, he’s had a different perch — as the Chief of Staff.

David Rock’s SCARF Model – Career Skills From Mindtools.com

© GettyImages
coldsnowstorm

Enhance the “feel-good factor” by maximizing your people’s reward response.

Jan is managing a new team, and she notices that one of her team members, Carl, is using a new piece of software incorrectly. She offers him some advice and returns to her work. But later, she notices that he’s still misusing it. So, she decides to sit with him until he gets it right.

The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

After years of starting the day with a tall morning coffee, followed by several glasses of green tea at intervals, and the occasional cappuccino after lunch, I quit caffeine, cold turkey. It was not something that I particularly wanted to do, but I had come to the reluctant conclusion that the story I was writing demanded it. Several of the experts I was interviewing had suggested that I really couldn’t understand the role of caffeine in my life – its invisible yet pervasive power – without getting off it and then, presumably, getting back on. Roland Griffiths, one of the world’s leading researchers of mood-altering drugs, and the man most responsible for getting the diagnosis of “caffeine withdrawal” included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the bible of psychiatric diagnoses, told me he hadn’t begun to understand his own relationship with caffeine until he stopped using it and conducted a series of self-experiments. He urged me to do the same.

What we learned after one month of operating a hybrid office

Fifteen months after shutting down “out of an abundance of caution,” Quartz’s office in New York City reopened to employees on June 1 under new guidelines befitting our changed world, increasingly far-flung workforce, and rapidly evolving ideas about the future of work. We’ve learned a lot in our first month operating a hybrid office, and wanted to share those lessons for managers and executives thinking through similar questions right now.

An Incomplete List of Skills Senior Engineers Need, Beyond Coding

For varying levels of seniority, from senior, to staff, and beyond.

Camille Fournier

Jun 6·2 min read

1. How to run a meeting, and no, being the person who talks the most in the meeting is not the same thing as running it
2. How to write a design doc, take feedback, and drive it to resolution, in a reasonable period of time
3. How to mentor an early-career teammate, a mid-career engineer, a new manager who needs technical advice
4. How to indulge a senior manager who wants to talk about technical stuff that they don’t really understand, without rolling your eyes or making them feel stupid
5. How to explain a technical concept behind closed doors to a senior person too embarrassed to openly admit that they don’t understand it
6. How to influence another team to use your solution instead of writing their own
7. How to get another engineer to do something for you by asking for help in a way that makes them feel appreciated
8. How to lead a project even though you don’t manage any of the people working on the project
9. How to get other engineers to listen to your ideas without making them feel threatened
10. How to listen to other engineers’ ideas without feeling threatened
11. How to give up your baby, that project that you built into something great, so you can do something else
12. How to teach another engineer to care about that thing you really care about (operations, correctness, testing, code quality, performance, simplicity, etc)
13. How to communicate project status to stakeholders
14. How to convince management that they need to invest in a non-trivial technical project
15. How to build software while delivering incremental value in the process
16. How to craft a project proposal, socialize it, and get buy-in to execute it
17. How to repeat yourself enough that people start to listen
18. How to pick your battles
19. How to help someone get promoted
20. How to get information about what’s really happening (how to gossip, how to network)
21. How to find interesting work on your own, instead of waiting for someone to bring it to you
22. How to tell someone they’re wrong without making them feel ashamed
23. How to take negative feedback gracefully

Enjoy this post? You might like my book, The Manager’s Path , available on Amazon and Safari Online!

Single Decisive Reasoning (SDR) at Superhuman

At Superhuman, we use Reid Hoffman’s “Single Decisive Reason” (SDR) principle

. It’s an incredibly powerful decision-making tool, especially for rapidly scaling startups.

Here’s why you should use SDR — and how to apply it to your next big decision.

The perils of “blended reasoning”

When you have a dozen reasons to do something… don’t .

As Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains in Antifragile

, giving myriad justifications for an action exposes inner uncertainty.

Mise-en-Place for Knowledge Workers: 6 Practices for Working Clean – Forte Labs

Knowledge work is unique among skilled professions in that we lack a culture of systematic improvement.

Other skilled trades – from carpenters to welders to nurses to pilots – have been around long enough and are repeatable enough that the best practices are widely understood.

How to frame a door, how to weld a seam, how to prepare an IV, how to prepare for landing – these tasks aren’t a mystery. Other professions have developed training over time to teach every novice how to master them.

How to Work Hard

June 2021

It might not seem there’s much to learn about how to work hard.

Anyone who’s been to school knows what it entails, even if they

chose not to. There are 12 year olds who work amazingly hard. And

yet when I ask if I know more about working hard now than when I

was in school, the answer is definitely yes.

One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you’ll

Protein, Carbs, or Fat? Choose the Right Calories for Cycling

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Protein, Carbs, or Fat? Choose the Right Calories for Cycling

June 23, 2021

If you’re serious about cycling, there’s a good chance you’re serious about nutrition. You may closely track your calories each day to make sure you’re getting enough to meet the demands you’re putting on your body.

So why, if you haven’t changed your total calorie consumption, would you suddenly feel like you don’t have enough energy for your long rides? Well, there’s more to calories than a simple number. If you’ve changed the source of those calories, it could have a significant effect on your cycling success.

The 4 Ds of Time Management | Definition and Overview

What are the 4 Ds of Time Management?

The 4 Ds of time management, sometimes referred to as the 4 Ds of productivity, is a popular strategy for discerning whether or not a task or project is worth your time. It involves making a quick decision about what to act on now either by doing it yourself or delegating to someone else, what to act on in the future, or what to drop from your to-do list.

Why We Need to Rethink the Computer ‘Desktop’ as a Concept

Thoughts about a new direction for desktop UI

Ben Zotto

May 18·13 min read

Just contemplating some Serious Business before hitting the tennis court. From “Macintosh ” (1984) by Apple Computer.

The long-lived “desktop” operating system has been with us for almost 40 years. Although some of the mechanics have proven remarkably durable, contemporary computer usage is very different from the context these were born in, and it’s time to do some rethinking.

The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination – The Atlantic

Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The internet—how we both communicate with one another and together preserve the intellectual products of human civilization—fits Clarke’s observation well. In Steve Jobs’s words, “it just works ,” as readily as clicking, tapping, or speaking. And every bit as much aligned with the vicissitudes of magic, when the internet doesn’t work, the reasons are typically so arcane that explanations for it are about as useful as trying to pick apart a failed spell.

A Project of One’s Own

June 2021

A few days ago, on the way home from school, my nine year old son

told me he couldn’t wait to get home to write more of the story he

was working on. This made me as happy as anything I’ve heard him

say — not just because he was excited about his story, but because

he’d discovered this way of working. Working on a project of your

On Workplace Productivity – Future

What does it mean to be productive? At the beginning of the pandemic, when many workers went remote, some managers were tempted to start counting things — whether hours, objects, or other things. But they’re about 100 years and two industrial revolutions too late: In the mechanical and electrical revolutions, productivity was indeed a measure of output, and it helped drive the economy. We created cars, machines, widgets by successfully measuring things this way.

No Code Reviews by Default

At Raycast, we do not require code reviews. Engineers push to the main branch and request reviews when they think it’s necessary. In this blog post, I outline how we built an engineering culture that is based on trust and allows us to move incredibly fast.

The beginning

When Petr and I started Raycast, we were sitting next to each other in the same flat for three months. Every day, we built features to iterate as fast as possible to something users want. At this time, we didn’t do any code reviews and trusted each other blindly. If there was a technical question, we solved it in person, committed the code to the main branch and moved on to the next problem.

Becoming an engineering director | LeadDev

I was promoted to director less than a year after becoming a manager. In the movie version of my life, getting promoted was a recognition of years of hard work and undeniable, innate leadership ability. The truth is probably closer to me being the available warm body to throw at the problem.

To set the scene, it had been about eight months since I had switched tracks from individual contributor (IC) to manager. I walked into a meeting with the VP of Engineering for what I thought would be a compensation adjustment to go along with the change in my role. Instead, I got a hearty handshake and a ‘Congratulations, you’re the new Director of Infrastructure. Keep doing what you’re doing.’ And, mustering as much fake confidence as I could, I smiled, mewled a quick thank you, and walked out the door.

Why It’s Difficult to Build Teams in High Growth Organisations

Jason Yip

May 31·4 min read

By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant.

Two reasons why building teams in high growth is difficult: can’t assume stable teams, can’t rely on cultural osmosis.

In high growth, the odds are the teams won’t be stable

There are several options to accommodate new people:

Product Management in Infrastructure Engineering

Recently a bunch of teams I work with have turned the corner, having paid down technical debt to a long-term sustainable level. The future unfurls with possibility. We can do anything. That’s exciting! It can also be pretty disorienting. For me, this is the most inspiring moment of management, and one of the hardest.

When we were completely focused on system reliability or churning tasks, most teams pulled their roadmaps down to a month or two, and we got so focused that we disconnected from our internal users. With less time soaked by maintenance, we’ve scurried to understand our users’ needs and define an optimistic, future-facing roadmap to support them.

Incident Writeup as Sociological Storytelling

Back when Game of Thrones was ending, the sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci wrote an essay titled The Real Reason Fans Hate the Last Season of Game of Thrones . Up until the last season, Game of Thrones was told as a sociological story. Even though the show followed individual characters, the story wasn’t about those characters as individuals. Rather, it was a story about larger systems, such as society, norms, external events, and institutions, told through these characters. The sociological nature of the story was how the series maintained cohesion even though major characters died so often. In the last season, the showrunners switched to telling psychological stories, about the individual characters.

The Power of Product Thinking

In many design, product management, engineering, or even venture capital interviews and pitches, you’ll be assessed on a dimension called “product thinking,” sometimes also called “product sense.” If you’re a builder aspiring to create something new and valuable (or someone who invests in such builders), having well-honed product thinking will help you — and the products you work on — stand out from the crowd.