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There is a level where a leader is separated from the rest of team, but not yet part of the executive layer. ...the reality is that they are mainly entrusted to re-transmit decisions made by others, and primarily exist to execute on behalf of the business.

Are persistent and obstinate people actually behaving differently?

To be great, you need to be polarizing... Have opinions, say those opinions out loud.

If I say you got lucky, I look jealous. If I tell myself that I got lucky, I feel diminished.

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

The average essay is written not to be read, but to be found—by a search engine, that is—so it can monetize every fiber of your eyeballs.

Corruption everywhere, even in YouTube's kids content

The smaller the change, the less memorable the time.

Why is it that punched paper tape and the teleprinter were the most obvious way to interact with the first electronic computers? As you might suspect, the arrangement was one of convenience.

Imagine if all these programmer hours spent on all these products actually centered around a proper standard, which evolved along with consumers' needs rather than these companies' ongoing need to fiddle with the knobs and sliders until profit comes out. The thing is, if this actually happened, then what would these employees spend their time on? At some point society would be pretty much done implementing messaging software.

What I discovered by casting a wide net was that I have very little ability to predict how useful a call will be in advance. Relevance is easier to predict, but it’s not a very good proxy for usefulness, which is a product of lots of other things including the other person’s enthusiasm and the breadth of their interests.

The Shirky principle is the adage that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution”. More broadly, it can also be characterized as the adage that “every entity tends to prolong the problem it is solving”.

Everyone who says 'tech debt' assumes they know what we’re all talking about, but their individual definitions differ quite a bit.

“Have nothing in your home,” wrote Morris, the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which aimed to elevate the lives of the working and middle classes, “that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” This would be a tall order nowadays.

There’s a mismatch between what we thought doing a good job was and what a significant part of the industry considers profitable, and I think that explains the increasing discomfort of many software professionals.

Imprecise asks from managers and leaders cause a disproportionate amount of turmoil and wheel-spinning. To combat this, leaders should be very precise with the amount of time investment they’re asking for when they ask for things.

Within the Grift Shift paradigm the topics and technologies addressed are mere material for public personalities to continuously claim expertise and 'thought leadership' in every cycle of the shift regardless of what specific technologies are being talked about.

Or, how to ensure you learn absolutely nothing.

Prioritization is an euphemism for sacrificing.

There’s an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web...Then there’s the tech-savvy web.

We humans have little short term memory, and tend to forget things over time. Our screens offers only a small window, and even the smartest IDE can’t give us instant access to everything. It’s easier for us to act upon code that we’ve just read. It’s even easier to act upon code we can see right there on the screen.

The next time you start on a major project, I want you to write code for a couple of days and then delete it all. Just throw it away...And you should probably have some of your best engineers doing this throwaway work. It's going to save you time in the long run.

What I’d really like to share with you more than anything else is my sense of wonder at the storage systems that are all collectively being built at this point in time, because they are pretty amazing. In this post, I want to cover a few of the interesting nuances of building something like S3, and the lessons learned and sometimes surprising observations from my time in S3.

...any time someone achieves success in a way they don't want to admit publicly, they have to come up with an excuse for their abilities. And that means misleading a bunch of people into (potentially) wasting their time, or worse.

My first hype exposure was 'use the Extensible Markup Language for everything'. Learning from it allowed me to live through the front end stack explosion, the micro-service overdose and many, many more silly trends.