Language thought-orientation
You can tell a lot from somebody based on their speech patterns
sbensu
On APIs, business, and random things I find interesting
Latest posts
On becoming a person (book)
It reframes therapy as a relationship instead of a treatment.
The person behind the idea
When reading, it is worth understanding the kind of person authors are.
Love's Executioner (book)
Countertransference applies to regular conversation.
Risk-takers decide faster
Unsurprising connection between risk and speed.
When coordination pays off
Stories about Stripe Link where we have to do a lot of upfront coordination but it was worth it.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Notes on the book.
Default blind
In a software business, it is hard to even know what is going on.
The Perfectionists (book)
A great book that covers the ideas and people behind modern industry.
The Market for Takes
Solving for the Twitter equilibrium
But I want to turn people into dinosaurs
Beware of what you actually want.
Vibes are music, arguments are lyrics
Losing My Religion is not about religion and Arguments are not about arguments
We need visual programming. No, not like that.
Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
Creative kernels
Artists can often trace entire pieces around one idea that drives everything else.
Industrial macros
Most industry codebases use macros, aka code-generation to solve practical problems like talking to the database.
Incentives as selection effects
When you apply a new incentive, you select for a new population that prefers the incentive.
Hiring from Big Tech
Some brief notes about the subject
The battlefield where arguments fight
A lot of speech is about convincing others of what type of arguments have merit
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union
Notes from reading the book by Zubok
The birth of a (pseudo) currency
A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they coming back in 2024?
Designing for support teams
Support agents spend their entire lives using the same software. Their needs are very different from consumer software. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Twitter's Sith and Jedi
In Star Wars, hate gives the Sith power from the dark side of the Force beyond what the Jedi can reach. But when they lean into hate, they lose their soul to it. Twitter offers the same bargain as the Force.
Enterprise sales meets product development
What I’ve learned from selling enterprises while developing a new product. This is less of a guide and more of a cautionary tale.
Pricing APIs
Lessons from AWS S3 and others on how to price APIs.
Semantic gaps
Swedish has a specific word for each of the four grandparents: mormor, morfar, farmor, farfar. English doesn’t. So when you mention your 'grandma' to a Swede, they are left wondering 'which grandma?' even if it is not relevant to the story. That is a semantic gap.
Notes on UX and LLM integrations
I analyze 8 apps (ChatGPT, Notion, Perplexity, etc.) that use or integrate LLM and try to break down when and why they work well, or poorly.
How to: friction logs
Friction logs are a technique to improve your own products and understand others. You use the produdct the way a real user would and write down every single moment you experience some form of negative emotion.
Lieutenants are the limiting reagent
Why don't software companies ship more products? Why do they move more slowly as they grow? What do we mean when we say "this company lacks focus"?
Interfaces for logical migrations
This post explains how you can use interfaces to make data model and database migrations easier.
Everybody is the main character
People are motivated and engaged with the work only if they feel in charge of their own destiny. Make it clear to them that they are!
Team-oriented, outcome-oriented
Some people care about helping their team. Others care about achieving outcomes. It is important to know who is who.
Breaking changes in JSON APIs
A collection of common breaking changes to JSON APIs for you to keep in mind as you design.
How to avoid breaking APIs
The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
Payments vs Transfers
Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has a lot more requirements than a transfer system and I rarely see the crypto ecosystem acknowledge these when building "payment" products.
Math intuitions on variance
This is a supplement to High Variance Management, where I build some intuition on the different probability distributions involved.
High Variance Management
How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
APIs as ladders
APIs are hard to learn. If you think about the learning curve of your API, you can design one that works for beginners, novices, and experts.
The secondary market in gift cards
This post by patio11 covers a few things that I learned working with gift cards over the years.