Reclaim unreasonable software.

Big Ball of Mud was published twenty years ago and rings just as true today: the most prominent architecture in successful, growth-stage companies is non-architecture. Crisp patterns are slowly overgrown by the chaotic tendrils of quick fixes, and productivity creeps towards zero.

After a couple years wallowing at zero, many companies turn towards The Grand Migration pattern and rewrite their software. These rewrites are quite challenging and often fall.

On Drafting an Engineering Strategy

During the first weeks in a new role, one of the things I’ve most recently focused on is to assess the direction of the engineering department as a whole. Will Larson has written at length about the first ninety days in a senior engineering leadership role. He also mentions documenting the existing strategy as one of the key milestones to take care of.

At the time I started there was no explicit strategy in place. Which is also not an unusual thing for a young company, just to be clear. So I set out to draft one.

The Rise of the Outrage Machine — The Creative Factor

Hello, Amanda writing from a rainy San Francisco this week. After attending an art show recently, my husband and I found ourselves standing outside the venue chatting with groups of other attendees. Although strangers, the discussions between all of us were easygoing and lively, spurred by a feeling of familiarity through our shared experience. It was fleeting – after a while the groups broke apart, phones were fired up, and we all retreated back into our technology and out into the night.

Your first 90 days as CTO or VP Engineering.

Whenever I transition to a new opportunity, I think about how to start well. How can I ramp up as effectively as possible? How do I balance the urge to “show value” early with making the right decisions?

The canonical book on starting a new role is The First 90 Days, and I got a fair amount out of it when I read it six or seven years ago. That said, its advice skews generic at times. Yes, I should learn as much as possible. Yes, I should achieve alignment and negotiate for resources. Yes, I should build a team and partner with other organizations. In my first leadership role, these ideas reshaped my perspective, but these days I want more.

Sending weekly 5-15 updates.

The trendy thing to do on the internet is to start publishing a newsletter.

Trendy enough that even I started sending out my blog posts each week in email format.

I’ve consistently noticed that emails generate far more discussion than other distribution

methods, which really shouldn’t have surprised me: I’ve been sending company-internal updates for some time

and they’ve frequently created important, spontaneous conversations.

About a year ago I started my most recent approach to sending weekly updates to relevant public (within the company)

Exerting Influence Without Authority

Congratulations—you’ve been asked to lead a change initiative! But there’s a catch—its success hinges on the cooperation of several people across your organization over whom you have no formal authority.

If you’re like most managers, you’re facing this sort of challenge more often these days because of flatter management structures, outsourcing, and virtual teams. For those reasons, a greater number of managers now need to get things done through peers inside and outside their organizations. In this age of heightened business complexity, moreover, change itself has grown increasingly complicated. A majority of change initiatives now involve multiple functions within and even between companies, and many such efforts encompass an entire firm.

The “Care” in “Self Care”

Credit: Pixabay / Alexas_Fotos

On my weekly todo list, there is an item “do something nice for a friend”. Last week, I assembled a care package. I asked myself, “what does a useless man need but won’t buy for himself?” – the answer, incidentally, was an exceptionally fluffy blanket, some really nice chocolate, vitamins, and assorted skincare.

As I impatiently waited for it to be delivered, I thought about care, how easy it is for me to do things like that, and the journey I’ve been on to have that care for myself. That perhaps the clearest outcome of the year I spent in therapy (I finished at the start of December, a move that felt both completely right and completely time and absolutely terrifying), is the shift in my attitude and approach and how I relate to the idea of “self care”.

40 Lessons From 40 Years

Steve Schlafman Oct 6, 2019 · 4 min read

I turn forty today. I can’t even believe I just typed that sentence. Over the past month, I’ve been reflecting on the lessons I’ve learned directly through experience or indirectly from family, friends, mentors and teachers.

I wanted capture and share these learnings for one important reason: I’m now a father to a beautiful baby girl and I’m not going to be here forever. Preserving myself digitally is becoming more important as I enter middle age.

The new drugs of 2019

The 48 medicines represent another highly productive year for the pharmaceutical industry, with cancer and rare-disease drugs again dominating the list

by

January 17, 2020

| APPEARED IN

VOLUME 98, ISSUE 3

Credit: Will Ludwig/C&EN/iStock Photo

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Most Popular in Pharmaceuticals

• The new drugs of 2019
• EQRx launches to develop me-too drugs at a steep discount
• The new drugs of 2018
• It was back to earth for new drug approvals in 2019
• C&EN’s Year in Pharma 2019
• n-Lorem Foundation launches to develop individualized therapies for ultra-rare diseases

Although pharmaceutical companies last year were unable to top the record-shattering 59 new drugs approved in the US in 2018, they were still on a roll. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration green-lighted 48 medicines, a crop that includes myriad modalities and many new treatments for long-neglected diseases.

Effective Mental Models for Code and Systems

Cindy Sridharan Dec 30, 2018 · 16 min read

As always, I’m greatly indebted to Fred Hebert for reviewing a draft of this post and offering some invaluable insights.

A little over a month ago, Carmen Andoh gave a talk at a meetup in Copenhagen about visualizations, though it really was a talk on mental models. In her talk, Carmen described a mental model as:

The Lesson to Unlearn

December 2019

The most damaging thing you learned in school wasn’t something you

learned in any specific class. It was learning to get good grades.

When I was in college, a particularly earnest philosophy grad student

once told me that he never cared what grade he got in a class, only

what he learned in it. This stuck in my mind because it was the

only time I ever heard anyone say such a thing.

Defining Aggregators

(Note: this is not a typical Stratechery article; there is no over-arching narrative or reference to current news. Rather, the primary goal is to provide a future point of reference)

Aggregation Theory describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregation Theory should serve as a guidebook for aspiring platform companies, a warning for industries predicated on controlling distribution, and a primer for regulators addressing the inevitable antitrust concerns that are the endgame of Aggregation Theory.

2019 in Review

1w agoJanuary 2, 2020 (1w ago)28,526 views

This post is a quick summary of the evolution of our company, our open-source work, interesting news and lessons in product design and engineering throughout 2019.

#Static is the new Dynamic

Throughout 2019 we have continued to see the growth of the JAMstack. The idea is quite simple: Any website or app you build and deploy will use the stack of client-side JavaScript, APIs, and Markup.

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

In 1999, music industry revenue in the United States peaked at $14.6 billion (all numbers are from the RIAA). It is important to be precise, though, about what was being sold:

• $12.8 billion was from the sale of CDs
• $1.1 billion was from the sale of cassettes
• $378 million was from the sale of music videos on physical media
• $222.4 million was from the sale of CD singles

In short, the music industry was primarily selling plastic discs in jewel cases; the music encoded on those discs was a means of differentiating those pieces of plastic from other ones, but music itself was not being sold.

Quality and Effort

It seems as though the opposite of “careless” ought to be “careful.” That the best way to avoid avoidable errors is to try harder, to put more care into the work.

This means that if surgeons were more careful, there would be fewer errors. And that so many of the mistakes that mess things up would go away if people just tried harder.

And this is true. For a while. But then, it’s not effort but systems that matter.

Bill Gates Says You Must Provide This Perk if You Want to Hire and Keep the Best Employees

The unemployment rate in the U.S. is at its lowest level in more than four decades. In response, companies have been in a veritable arms race to offer bigger and better perks and win over employees, from the cliché office ping pong table to quirky Google Nap Pods.

According to Bill Gates, these efforts and many others miss the mark while the most important perk is hiding in plain sight: flexibility.

Google Spent 2 Years Researching What Makes a Great Remote Team. It Came Up With These 3 Things

As someone who’s worked remotely for several years, I know the challenges of a virtual workplace. Building relationships with colleagues I’ve never actually met (in person), working across various time zones, technology that doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to– handled wrong, any of these can sabotage your team’s chances at success.

Google knows this, too. The company has nearly 100,000 workers spread over 150 cities. In more than 50 countries. On five continents.

My Approach to 1-on-1s — Marco Rogers

This is an outline of how I approach having 1-on-1s with my direct reports. I think of 1-on-1s as my primary tools for connecting with an individual and working on their morale, engagement, productivity and growth.

I usually like to find out if my report wants to lead the conversation. You might start with a simple question. Do you have an agenda or something that’s on your mind? If not, then I think about which one of the major points below I want to get into.

11 Ideas About the Decade That Killed iTunes

1. One of the great cultural events of the 2010s was the slow abandonment and ultimate death of iTunes. By the time the software was euthanized earlier this year, it had become an embarrassment, a mess of greasy preference panes and grayed-out, unreliable content. We were glad to see it go.

2. When iTunes launched in January 2001, Apple’s software was a place to organize the MP3s and other music files on your desktop computer. (It was not yet even a tool to sync an iPod, because the first iPod didn’t come out until October 2001.) But within a few years, it became a “digital hub,” a place to organize your music and movies and, eventually, iPhone, which debuted in 2007. (Note for younger readers: An iPod was like an iPhone, except it could not make phone calls, or search the internet, or sext, and the sexts would have been terrible, because it had a black-and-white screen.) But iTunes kept guzzling other functions: digital movies, TV shows, and then apps.

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What Makes a Good Goal?

John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery:

I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thinking for Innovation and Growth “, by Brian Mathews.

In the prologue, the paper tells the origin story of Swiffer — Proctor & Gamble’s billion-dollar hit product line. It all started with a simple question: “ how can we make the floors cleaner? “

Jack Dorsey wants to decentralize Twitter – Decrypt

Jack Dorsey wants to decentralize Twitter

The Twitter CEO has put forth a vision for a more decentralized version of social media, leading with his own platform.

By Tim Copeland 4 min read; Dec 11, 2019

image: pixabay

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed he wants to create an open standard for decentralized social media. And the goal will be to have Twitter conform to that standard.

Portability and Interoperability

In Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s March 2019 op-ed in the Washington Post calling for federal regulation of technology, he included something that caught some observers by surprise:

Regulation should guarantee the principle of data portability. If you share data with one service, you should be able to move it to another. This gives people choice and enables developers to innovate and compete.

This is important for the Internet — and for creating services people want. It’s why we built our development platform. True data portability should look more like the way people use our platform to sign into an app than the existing ways you can download an archive of your information. But this requires clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services.

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The 70-20-10 Rule for Innovation – Innovation Excellence

by Greg Satell

One of the things I always get asked about from the companies I work with is how to manage their innovation resources. Should they bet big on an unproven, but possibly breakthrough idea? Or focus on improving the products that they already know their customers want? Or maybe leveraging existing resources into a new market?

This is an important question. As Steve Blank recently pointed out in an article in Harvard Business Review, it was the failure to deal with this issue that led to many of General Electric’s current problems. The company became so focused on “disruptive opportunities” that it let execution slip.

Inefficient Efficiency

Kent Beck Nov 26 · 4 min read

Now I’m Feeling Thirsty

You’re making morning drip coffee. You need to make 2 cups. Do you:

• Put 1 cups worth of water in the boiler so the water boils sooner and the first cup is ready sooner or,
• Put 2 cups worth of water in so both cups are done sooner?

I posted the question above on Twitter and received 50 replies (a lot for one of my tweets). Most of the comments were either snark or thoughtful coffee making advice, so I don’t think I got my point across.

How Soylent Uses Zapier to Automatically Transcribe Phone Calls and Build a Database of Legal Advice

Bread, meat, fruit, veggies, dairy. Those are the essential building blocks of a nutritious diet, the ones mom taught you about when you were five. We’ve been working with the same formula since the dawn of time, and it hasn’t failed us yet.

Food is food. Why change what works?

John Coogan would argue that food doesn’t work. At least, not as well as it should. He’s the co-founder/CTO of Soylent, a company that wants to provide your daily dose of macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals in a more convenient package. Think of it as food 2.0.

On Messing Up Your Remote Team—And Then Getting It Right

Charity Majors is the CTO and founder of Honeycomb, a platform offering full stack observability for event driven debugging. Below is her story about how Honeycomb built a fully distributed team of over 30.

I knew from the very start that I wanted Honeycomb to be geographically distributed. Long before we had any thoughts of hiring anyone, I knew it was the right thing to do and the direction I wanted to take.

The 4 Biggest Mistakes First-Time Managers Make

After years of quality hard work, you, the star employee, have been promoted to be a manager of a team, a first-time accomplishment for you. Congrats! You should take time to feel proud of this achievement. But you also don’t have time to waste.

As soon as you accept this new role, your superiors and your reports will be judging how you lead, and once opinions are formed, they will be hard to shake off. You have to prove yourself all over again. And what worked for you as an individual performer may be your downfall as a manager of warring egos and goals.

Field Report for the Calendar Year Triple Crown

About the Calendar Year Triple Crown

The first person to conceptualize and complete the Calendar Year Triple Crown was Brian Robinson. He completed his trek in 2001. By the end of 2018, 8 additional people had completed it. The Calendar Year Triple Crown entails completing the entirety of three of the longest and oldest National Scenic Trails in the United States all within a single calendar year. These trails are the 2,190 mile Appalachian Trail (AT), the 2,660 mile Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and the ~3,000 mile Continental Divide Trail (CDT). This comprises well over 7,000 miles of hiking across nearly half the states of the Union (22!) in less than 365 days. Only about 400 people total have completed all three of these trails over a lifetime, most of whom take 4-6 months for each hike. I was the first female to complete the Calendar Year Triple Crown and I am the only woman to have completed the Triple Crown trails each 3 times.

Forget About Setting Goals. Focus on This Instead.

This article is an excerpt from Atomic Habits, my New York Times bestselling book.

Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals.

For many years, this was how I approached my habits too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realize that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed.

The Work Required to Have an Opinion

*“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that

I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”*

— Charlie Munger

***

While we all hold an opinion on almost everything, how many of us do the work required to have an opinion?

The work is the hard part, that’s why people avoid it. You have to do the reading. You have to talk to anyone competent you can find and listen to their arguments. You have to think about the key variables and how they interact. You have to listen and chase down arguments that run counter to your views. You have to think about how you might be fooling yourself. You have to see the issue through multiple lenses. You need to become your most intelligent critic and have the intellectual honesty to kill some of your best-loved ideas.

Deploys to Production: It’s Not Actually About Fridays

I just read this piece, which is basically a very long subtweet about my Friday deploy threads. Go on and read it: I’ll wait.

Here’s the thing. After getting over some of the personal gibes (smug optimism? literally no one has ever accused me of being an optimist, kind sir), you may be expecting me to issue a vigorous rebuttal. But I shan’t. Because we are actually in violent agreement, almost entirely.

Everything is Broken

Everything is broken, and it’s actually starting to sort of scare me that we’re not willing to acknowledge how bad things have become. It’s starting to scare me that the industry tends to have discussions about morals and ethics in bars, and sometimes in the hallways and dark corners at conferences, rather than in the harsh light of day. It’s really starting to scare me that nobody in the industry reads or understands history any more.

Informal Communication

1. You are here:
2. About GitLab
3. GitLab Culture
4. All Remote
5. Informal Communication

On this page

• Introduction
• Formally design informal communications
• Devote time to fostering relationships
• Using emojis to convey emotion
• Coffee chats
  • Scheduling a Coffee Chat
    • The Donut Bot
  • GitLabber Mixer Calls
• Team Social Calls
• Celebrations and holidays
• Coworking calls

Introduction

On this page, we’re detailing how informal communication occurs at GitLab, and why it matters in an all-remote culture.

Why Execution Is Everything In Business

There were search engines before

Google

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, social networks before Facebook, and lending platforms before

Lending Club

. So how did these latecomers win? I find the answer interesting.

One word: Execution.

. Lending Club was at best the third online consumer lending platform when it arrived on the scene in 2007, but it grew into the market leader through its awesome execution of a clear vision, and it is now poised for what will likely be a blockbuster initial public offering.

Peacetime Productivity, Wartime Productivity

Productivity should adopt an idea from military and business strategy: the distinction between peacetime and wartime.

Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, made this distinction for business strategy in his 2014 book The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Peacetime and wartime “require radically different management styles” from CEOs:

Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage over the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.

Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley

Why “few successful startup founders grew up desperately poor”

My co-founder David and I both grew up in poverty and can call ourselves “battle-tested” when it comes to both life and startups, so when the talk in the Valley turned to income inequality, our ears perked up. For a moment, our two worlds were colliding. Here’s a quote from Paul Graham that got our attention.

“Closely related to poverty is lack of social mobility. I’ve seen this myself: you don’t have to grow up rich or even upper middle class to get rich as a startup founder, but few successful founders grew up desperately poor.” (link)

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Software Architecture Patterns

Chapter 3. Microkernel Architecture

The microkernel architecture pattern (sometimes referred to as the plug-in architecture pattern) is a natural pattern for implementing product-based applications. A product-based application is one that is packaged and made available for download in versions as a typical third-party product. However, many companies also develop and release their internal business applications like software products, complete with versions, release notes, and pluggable features. These are also a natural fit for this pattern. The microkernel architecture pattern allows you to add additional application features as plug-ins to the core application, providing extensibility as well as feature separation and isolation.

The Last Business System You’ll Ever Need

How To Write A Standard Operating Procedure

I read a post from Dylan Hassinger on a private entrepreneurship forum I’m a member of that compared business to software at some point last year. That analogy has stuck with me ever sense.

I don’t have a software background, though so I like to envision businesses as manufacturing machines.

You put something in one end and then it goes through all these defined processes of scaling in business and then it comes out the other end as profit (or not). Depending on how those processes work, you get something different out the backend.

5 concerns the US must tackle to compete in AI

A group of technology experts chartered by Congress to guide American efforts in artificial intelligence have released their initial report on how to ensure AI development stays on track inside the United States. And, overall, there’s a lot of work to do.

Created by the National Defense Authorization Act in 2018, the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence is explicitly tasked with reviewing “advances in artificial intelligence, related machine learning developments, and associated technologies,” for the express purpose of addressing “the national and economic security needs of the United States, including economic risk, and any other associated issues.”