Recent content by Hugo Ferreira
In a word: recovering After a period of turmoil and escalations, was settling the team back into a workflow promising to stabilise us again in lot a good delivery flow… only to be thrown back into the company’s “washing machine whirlwind” For the past 4 months was able to get into a regular exercising routine (weight drop of -5 kg) when a seemingly small but persistently nagging and limiting…
Something very useful in a disorder is: it’s only a disorder if you can’t manage it. — Kindle Customer in comment to Backfired: Attention Deficit Audiobook
What is this? | Xmrit Xmrit (pronounced ‘xam-mer-it’) is a free tool by Commoncog to help business operators quickly create and share XmR charts. An XmR chart helps you analyse your data. In a sentence: it helps you separate signal from noise. It is particularly useful to business operators. … XmR charts are so named because they consist of an ‘X’ chart (the ‘X’ variable, or the metric you care…
Atomic Design by Brad Frost Atomic Design details all that goes into creating and maintaining robust design systems, allowing you to roll out higher quality, more consistent UIs faster than ever before. This book introduces a methodology for thinking of our UIs as thoughtful hierarchies, discusses the qualities of effective pattern libraries, and showcases techniques to transform your team’s…
Do Things that Don’t Scale Recruit The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them. Fragile Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and engaging in person with users…
Default Alive or Default Dead? Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die? Trevor Blackwell has made a handy calculator you can use to find out. The reason I want to know first whether a startup is…
The deadline doom loop - by James Hawkins Here’s how the loop plays out: Phase 1: “We’re gonna make it!” 👍 Phase 2: “Are we gonna make it?” 🤷 Phase 3: “We’re not gonna make it!” 🥵 Phase 4: “We (sort of) made it.” 😵💫 Phase 5: “We’re gonna make it this time!” 🙏 Principles for escaping the doom loop The alternative, an approach that helps us ship faster, relies on a few key principles:
Karpman drama triangle - Wikipedia The Karpman drama triangle is a social model of human interaction proposed by San Francisco psychiatrist, Stephen B. Karpman in 1968. The triangle maps a type of destructive interaction that can occur among people in conflict. … The triangle of actors in the drama are persecutors, victims, and rescuers. Drama triangle proposed by the psychiatrist Stephen B.…
Explore vs Execute | A Smart Bear The two main business modalities are more different than you expect. When you hit PMF, it’s a culture-shift to switch from one to the other. … So, what needs to be done? A radical shift in working style, from “Explore” to “Execute”: Explore Figuring out what works, as quickly and flexibly as possible. Execute Becoming excellent at doing what works, while scaling.…
Introduction | The Guide to SaaS Metrics The Software as a Service (SaaS) model is different since the initial sale rarely covers the cost of acquiring the customer. Instead, SaaS companies recoup their upfront investment over time, often in monthly or annual subscription fees. The critical question is: How quickly can despair turn into profitability? And how big is the prize outside the triangle?…
The perfect pricing model doesn’t exist - by Matt Hodges You’ll never be done … At the end of the day, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to pricing. There are just many things you can and should probably test. Be ready to make trade-offs – whether that’s knowingly leaving money on the table or being OK with fewer customers who pay you more. Make peace with the fact that your…
How to ship fast - by Ben McRedmond - Wrap Text by Equals Protect momentum Beware of prioritization Stay close to the design You should be wrong sometimes Only doers can plan what you work on Always plan the How There is no quality vs. speed tradeoff Capture inspiration
Introduction | Engineering Ladders This framework allows software engineering managers to have meaningful conversations with their direct reports around the expectations of each position and how to plan for the next level in their career ladder. The framework relies heavily on radar charts to visually represent the different perspectives and expectations of a given position: The chart shown above…
Radarz | Team Calibration Made Simple Build your team on this page and calibrate their level on their radar charts. See also Engineering Ladders: This site is inspired by jorgef’s Engineering Ladders.
Coding Font by Typogram Choose your favourite in a coding font shootout (don’t show the names to remove bias). My winner: 🏆 Fira Code A representative bracket for me: 🥇 Fira Code 🥈 JetBrains 🥉 Source Code Pro
Postel’s Law | Laws of UX Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.
Home | Laws of UX Laws of UX is a collection of best practices that designers can consider when building user interfaces. Aesthetic-Usability Effect Chunking Cognitive Bias Cognitive Load Doherty Threshold Fitts’s Law Flow Goal-Gradient Effect Hick’s Law Jakob’s Law Law of Common Region Law of Proximity Law of Prägnanz Law of Similarity Law of Uniform Connectedness Mental Model Miller’s Law…
Warm Handoffs :: Luckymike’s Tech Notes … generally the guidelines are: If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you know the right channel, link their question in the right channel, tagging them, and explain why you’re making the handoff, along with any additional context you have. If someone asks a question in the wrong channel, and you’re not sure where it should go, link…
German Naming Convention Using as many words as necessary to clearly name something. Everything. I called this “German” naming convention as a reference to the fact that the German language is known for its compound words, which can become comically long and specific at times.
FounderJar | Top Business Software (Comparisons & Reviews) FounderJar helps you choose the right software tools to start a business and grow more profitably
Fast git handover with mob | Tool for smooth git handover. mob is an open source command line tool written in go mob is the fastest way to hand over code via git mob keeps your branches clean and only creates WIP commits on temporary branches mob has a shared team timer timer.mob.sh mob is on ‘assess’ in the Thoughtworks Technology Radar mob has VSCode integration
Homepage | European Alternatives European alternatives for digital products We help you find European alternatives for digital service and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.
Portfolio Performance An open source tool to calculate the overall performance of an investment portfolio - across all accounts - using True-Time Weighted Return or Internal Rate of Return.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one. — Mark Twain
The Captain Class - by Kent Beck [emphasis added] These captains, in turn, shared traits (some of which we don’t always associate with leadership). The traits are: Doggedness. Captains just keep coming. Their example causes the rest of the team to raise their effort level to match. Edges. Captains play right to the edge of the rules. (This is why he says Derek Jeter didn’t see many World Series…
Fight or Flight - Sketchplanations Fight-or-flight psychology, coined by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915, is only part of a broader spectrum of acute stress responses. A more accurate sequence we experience may be freeze, flight, fight, or fright. Freeze: Our immediate reaction to danger might be to “stop, look, listen,” remaining hyper-vigilant while we assess the threat, and…
Pay Once Alternatives Pay once. Use forever. Find the best one-time purchase alternatives to popular subscription tools and never pay another subscription ever again.
GitHub - TwoBitCoders/jx: jx: Memory-Safe JSON Processing using JavaScript implemented in Go Welcome to jx, a powerful command-line tool for JSON processing! … jx fuses the memory-safety and performance of Go with the flexibility of JavaScript syntax. Unlike other tools like jq that require learning a new domain-specific language, jx allows you to use your existing JavaScript knowledge to handle…
How It Works – Holacracy Foundation Holacracy is a management framework for organizations made of 5 distinct —but complementary— modules. Holacracy is a management framework codified into a constitution — the “rules of engagement” for working in an organization. It takes a leader willing to delegate their authority into a set of foundational rules that everyone will follow, including themselves.…
11 tips for how to keep your readers reading - Josh Bernoff 1 Scare the crap out of them. 2 Ditch the introduction. 3 Keep it short. 4 Use the reader questions method to design the book before you write it. 5 Start chapters with stories 6 End chapters with teasers. 7 Write directly to the reader with “you” and “we.” 8 Vary the length of sentences and paragraphs, and keep paragraphs short.
“The Varieties Of Human Work” by Steven Shorrock (Safety Differently) Early ergonomists realised that the analysis of work could not be limited to work as prescribed in procedures etc (le travail prescrit), nor to the observation of work actually done (le travail réalisé). Both have to be considered. But these are not the only varieties of work. Four basic varieties can be considered:…
Travelling to work ‘is work’, European court rules - BBC News (Sep. 2015) Time spent travelling to and from first and last appointments by workers without a fixed office should be regarded as working time, the European Court of Justice has ruled. “Employers may have to organise work schedules to ensure workers’ first and last appointments are close to their homes,” he…
Work Is Work | codahale.com (Jan. 2020) The Ceiling Is Low The work capacity of an organization scales, at most, linearly as new members are added. … The ceaseless pursuit of force multipliers is the only possible route to superlinear productivity improvements as an organization grows. The Floor Is Lava Contention costs grow superlinearly as new members are added. … Staffing highly sequential…
Not Just Scale - Marc’s Blog One Machine Is All You Need? … It’s Not Just Scale Availability. … Durability. … Utilization. … Latency. … Specialization. … Isolation. … Changes. … … Simplicity is a System Property … Scaling Organizations Just like computer systems, organizations scale by avoiding coordination. The more the organization needs different pieces to coordinate with one another to…
We tend to regret things we didn’t do over things we did do. — Several different authors in Wisdom Trove Ask “What if?” and follow through…
“Little Billy Ignore Instructions” by Philippe Schrettenbrunner (LinkedIn) Remember Little Bobby Tables? I think he has a sibling. Just some iPad doodles. Stay safe, sanitize all inputs. (Original xkcd comic: Exploits of a Mom) [aka “Little Bobby Tables”] School: Hi, this is your son’s school. We’re having some computer trouble. Parent: Oh dear - did he break something? School: In a…
How to write a cold email Here are a few things I’ve learned about powerful/wealthy/interesting people. This is almost universally true. They read their own email. Moreover, they’re good at responding to email. They’re very, very curious people. They have very little time. Anything with friction gets sorted into a “later” bucket. The perfect cold email is Short and grabs attention. Super clear on…
Essays on programming I think about a lot | benkuhn.net Every so often I read an essay that I end up thinking about, and citing in conversation, over and over again. Here’s my index of all the ones of those I can remember! Nelson Elhage, Computers can be understood Dan McKinley, Choose Boring Technology Sandy Metz, The Wrong Abstraction Patrick McKenzie, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names…
How LLMs Work, Explained Without Math - miguelgrinberg.com In this article, I’m going to attempt to explain in simple terms and without using advanced math how generative text models work, to help you think about them as computer algorithms and not as magic.
GitHub - azet/community_bash_style_guide: Community Bash Style Guide: writing useful and modern bash scripts, seriously. When to use bash and when to avoid bash it’s rather simple: does it need to glue userland utilities together? use bash. does it need to do complex tasks (e.g. database queries)? use something else. Why? … It consumes a lot of time and is often very difficult to debug in…
Rule of Silence definition by The Linux Information Project The rule of silence, also referred to as the silence is golden rule, is an important part of the Unix philosophy that states that when a program has nothing surprising, interesting or useful to say, it should say nothing. It means that well-behaved programs should treat their users’ attention and concentration as being valuable and…
If you process less than 10k requests per second, you’re not Google nor are you Facebook. — Henryk Plötz in Should I Use JWTs For Authentication Tokens? - Tinker, Tamper, Alter, Fry
Hara Hachi Bu - Sketchplanations Hara Hachi Bu is a saying from Okinawa in Southern Japan that advises people to stop eating when they’re 80% full. Okinawa is famous for the longevity of the people who live there. The more literal translation of hara hachi bu is stomach eight parts (out of ten).
GitHub - LemonAppDev/konsist: Konsist is a powerful static code analyzer tailored for Kotlin, focused on ensuring codebase consistency and adherence to coding conventions. Konsist is a powerful static code analyzer tailored for Kotlin, focused on ensuring codebase consistency and adherence to coding conventions. Konsist is a linter that guards the consistency of Kotlin projects by enforcing a…
GitHub - dandavison/delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, and blame output Code evolves, and we all spend time studying diffs. Delta aims to make this both efficient and enjoyable: it allows you to make extensive changes to the layout and styling of diffs, as well as allowing you to stay arbitrarily close to the default git/diff output.
Voicenotes | AI note-taker that’s truly intelligent A place to dump your thoughts. Record new ideas, family moments, meetings, podcast takeaways, anything. Ask your AI to review past notes or brainstorm new ideas. It has perfect memory. Create summary, to-do list, blog post, and more using your notes. Intelligent suggestions, 50+ languages, and a zillion small things. Available on the Web, iOS,…
markmap Markmap is a combination of Markdown and mindmap. It parses Markdown content and extracts its intrinsic hierarchical structure and renders an interactive mindmap, aka markmap.
“Ikaguei” é o completo oposto de Ikigai: não gosto, não sou bom, ninguém precisa e não me pagam… “kaguei” — Luís Rodrigues
“Equality and equity” by Jono Hey (Sketchplanations) Equality is fairness through uniformity, and equity is fairness through a recognition of individual needs. If everyone gets the same—equality—this is fairer than some people getting something and others nothing. In contrast, equity considers each person’s individual needs to give everyone the same opportunity.
From Lenny’s Podcast episode: A framework for PM skill development | Vikrama Dhiman (Gojek) Vikrama Dhiman heads all things product at Gojek, including product management, design, program management, and research, across Indonesia, Singapore and India. The 3 W’s framework for PM career growth: What you produce? Start by focusing on your outputs Don‘t lose sight of outputs when you start…