The Productivity Mirage
What I once thought about programming productivity was wrong
frantic.im
Occasional posts on technology and stuff
Latest posts
80/20
The 80/20 rule says that 80% value come from 20% effort. What if we apply the 80/20 rule to the first 80%? So 80% of 80% of value come from 20% of 20% of effort. Or 64% of the value come from 4% of the effort. Apply it again and you’ll get ~51% value from ~1% effort. Which is ballpark close to “ Dimidium facti, qui coepit, habet ” — Well begun is half done.
Building Symphony
Behind-the-scenes notes about the agent orchestrator I built at OpenAI
Willingness to Get Bored
Vjeux once told me a story that stuck with me. It was about the good old days of the World of Warcraft . Blizzard shipped regular updates to the game, but their change logs were very sparse. The community had to figure out the details on their own, and there were a few websites that tried to provide in-depth reviews of the new stuff. But one of them had an unparalleled level of details. Every…
Slow, Then Suddenly
Many years ago, I was invited to an adventure. My colleague from Facebook was assembling a little skunk works crew for a mission at Apple’s headquarters. We were to build the first prototype of the Facebook app for Apple TV. It was 2014. An engineer from Apple met us at the Infinite Loop. His task was to show us the new APIs and answer technical questions. We got to work. But instead of building…
Thoughts on Remix 3
The pendulum is about to swing the other direction
A Side Project Story: Music Player
One of my most successful side projects had exactly 2 daily active users.
The Get Your Shit Together Day
Everyone needs a Get Your Shit Together day every once in a while...
Who Cares
In 2017 I gave a talk at Chain React about building great user experiences with React Native. At the time the tech was new and the quality of the mobile apps built with React Native was poor. The gist of my talk was that it’s possible to build great apps with React Native, one just needs to care enough. My message didn’t resonate as well as I’d hoped. It’s hard to make people care about quality…
The Hacker News Stack
If you want to build a web app The Hacker News Way, here's the stack you should use.