SWLW #610: Competitive Game Day, Second-class interactions are a first-class risk, and more.

Like always, sharing my best findings for the week. 

 

This Week's Favorite

The Sarumans and the Radagasts
21 minutes read.

Alex Komoroske's writing is so fun to read and so easy to draw lines into our reality: "Sarumans can’t see the value of systems; it will seem too fuzzy and abstract; [...] For similar reasons, a Saruman is deeply skeptical of other people’s perspectives on what’s a constraint, because the only constraints that are real are physical constraints, and everything else is just a fiction in people’s minds that can be overcome with boldness. Sarumans are the kinds of people who build impressive, powerful cathedrals. When you’re building a cathedral, you can’t have naysayers pointing out imagined constraints. You need decisiveness. As they get more powerful, accumulating followers, capital, and respect, it becomes easier and easier to cast the naysayers away. [...] Radagasts intuitively understand the power of the swarm: the system, in its buzzing, blooming, emergent glory. Radagasts know how to let go and dance madly with the system. They don’t try to control the system and its components. They love the system and its components: a love borne out of respect."

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Culture

FAANG Engineer vs. Startup Founder
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face.

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Punctuated Equilibrium in AI: Is It Better to Be A First Mover or A Last Mover?
3 minutes read.

It feels that the era of LLM and how to leverage the technology will benefit more from learning (last mover) than the one to find a first practical approach. We started to scratch the surface with copywriting (marketing), technical support, image generation, and video generation. There is so much progress and innovation around the interaction of LLM systems (aka Agents).

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Competitive Game Day
5 minutes read.

How do you create an environment where people can learn how to become better operators in production while replicating some of the stress that comes with real incidents? If you invest in making your system more resilient and are successful at that, you'll have fewer incidents. Competitive Game Days is an excellent way to both learn and play as a team while also getting more confident in our ability to debug and resolve production incidents quicker. Disclaimer: I work at Forter.

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The Guide to Going Multi-Product
14 minutes read.

The biggest challenge when you develop the 2nd product is packaging and pricing. This is why there is a significant upside to addressing it earlier, right after the product-market-fit of the first product (sales feel there is a flywheel effect). This requires you to observe competition strategical choices (strength, differentiation) and where you want to invest. It requires a different approach to go to market (e.g. do you build a special team to make the first few sales?) It requires a different narrative that won't feel like moving from 1 to 2 but rather 1 to 10.

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Peopleware

Second-Class Interactions Are a First-Class Risk
4 minutes read.

Nurturing operational excellence as a skill is incredibly important today in a world where successful companies reach internet scale, and we meet these "edge-cases" almost regularly: "Hence the irony: these second-class interactions tend not to be represented in our system models when we talk about reliability, because they are generally not problematic. And so we are lulled into a false sense of security. We don’t think about how the plumbing works, because the plumbing just works. Until the plumbing breaks. And then we’re in big trouble."

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How to Scale Any Business (Video)
22 minutes read.

I've been following Jason Cohen for the past 15 years now (his blog, "A Smart Bear", is one of my favorites) and this interview with him is excellent if you consider building a business or understand how to run and scale one effectively.

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It Is Better to Dissolve a Problem Than to Solve It
3 minutes read.

Interesting framing around the four ways to treat a problem. Are there areas you want to "disolve" but you "solve" instead?

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@OfficialLoganK: Your likelihood of success is largely determined by the number of people on your team who won’t accept anything other than that outcome.

@naval: Suffering leads to success by way of agency.



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.