SWLW #561: The cost of convenience, The weird future of work, and more.

Heya,

As always, below you can read my best findings for the week.
 

This Week's Favorite

The Cost of Convenience
7 minutes read.

"I get frustrated whenever I have knowledge (specifically Web Platform knowledge) to solve a problem, but the abstraction prevents me from using my knowledge. [...] If you care about DX and the adoption of your abstraction, it is much more beneficial to let developers use as much of their existing skills as possible and introduce new concepts one at a time. As a secondary benefit, by intellectually elevating the developer from platform to abstraction slowly, they are much more likely to understand how the abstraction works and how they can help themselves when they get stuck." -- a must-read post if you're building a framework, library, or platform. Using a Layered Architecture is a powerful way to consider when considering DX in your infrastructure. The example of Pure CSS / Web Components / React, with the ability to use the layers as "dogfooding" your decisions, drives the point well.

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Culture

Bury Me With My Domain Names
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face. I have a serious problem, buying too many domains. The solution has to be to buy another domain and build a community for people with similar problems, right?

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AI and the Automation of Work
8 minutes read.

"If you do understand this [It’s not doing a database lookup: it’s making a pattern], then you have to ask, well, where are LLMs useful? Where is it useful to have automated undergraduates, or automated interns, who can repeat a pattern, that you might have to check? The last wave of machine learning gave you infinite interns who could read anything for you, but you had to check, and now we have infinite interns that can write anything for you, but you have to check. So where is it useful to have infinite interns? Ask Dan Bricklin - we’re back to the Jevons Paradox." -- This is an excellent framing of LLM, and applications like ChatGPT, that might shed some light on the future of LLM-driven apps.

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Anything but Tech Debt
5 minutes read.

"While tech debt may not be a useful label when advocating for the next interval’s work, it’s still useful at another point: the moment of potential debt creation, when making the choice to invest in a particular effort now or wait for the future. The concept reminds us that the timing of an investment and its cost are connected, and that usually things cost much more (in engineers’ time) to address later, but increasing flexibility in the present (opportunity cost) may still be the right choice." -- Emily Nakashima's observations that Tech Debt can be the wrong framing (or at least not enough) is spot on. Looking at it as "Tool chain investments" to measure how quickly the investment will return itself can be a better way to help the business understand its value.

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The Weird Future of Work
8 minutes read.

Dror Poleg's post is terrific in two aspects: having a view into Dror's view of the world and also the quality of answers by ChatGPT that is surprising in terms of quality. I wonder how many of us will be able to "talk with ourselves" to learn more about the pattern matching (as Benedict Evans frames it) LLM produces to learn about our public perception.

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Peopleware

Beyond Controls: The Power of Risk Scenarios
5 minutes read.

I've learned a lot from Ryan McGeehan's post to understand the downsides of control-based approaches (what do you do when an attack vector is new?) and how to think about risk from a scenario-based perspective. It reminds me a lot of "Job to be done" for some reason, where we look at the world as it is instead of enforcing our perception of it.

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Some Common Traits of the Most Successful People I've Been Around (Thread)
3 minutes read.

I'm not sure what's the common traits of highly successful people (or what is the definition of success), and yet, it's worth considering as areas to invest in. For example, "Leveraging their networks" and "Sense of urgency" feel universally true, while "They're master delegators" and "They listen much more than they speak" are almost the opposite of what I've noticed of successful (by wealth) people.

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Putting the “You” in CPU
12 minutes read.

Lexi Mattick, a 17-year-old, captures his understanding (and learning) of CPU work - An incredible view that we can learn from how we can learn better (and faster) while producing value for the world. This is exactly how you make the right perception to get hired.

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@AlexHormozi: Hot take: People obsessed with their morning routines makes less money than people obsessed with making money.

@shl: Those working from a coffee shop with 18% battery remaining and no charger are 10x more productive than those in the office.



p.s. if you're interested in joining SWLW's Slack channel, simply reply to this email and let me know. If you're leading a team, consider writing your Manager README (it's free) or getting my e-book and interviews Leading Snowflakes: The New Engineering Manager's Handbook. You can also support me by becoming a SWLW Patron. Thank you ❤️




Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.