SWLW #455: Better coordination or better software, The web browser as a tool of thought, and more.

Heya,

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

This Week's Favorite

​​Better Coordination, or Better Software?
4 minutes read.

"When different parts of an organization need to coordinate, it seems like a good idea to help them coordinate smoothly and frequently. Don’t. Help them coordinate less — more explicitly, less often." -- Jessica Joy Kerr offers a different approach. One that is pretty common (in that extreme) in Amazon, where teams work together via APIs. How strict should you be with it? When should you optimize for it? At some size and maturity (product and technology) of the company, you might find yourself looking to apply this approach.

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Culture

I Guess It's a Good Book
1 minute read.

My humble effort to help you start the weekend with a smile on your face, even in this difficult time.

Read it later via Pocket or Instapaper.
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The Rise of the One-Person Unicorn
5 minutes read.

I think it's important to look at a different way to build companies, as Christian Owens covers. I can see many entrepreneurs looking to take the bootstrapping route. We need diversity as it can often leverage better global trends (e.g., working remotely). Such companies often create very interesting "brands" both for the company and the founder(s).

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New Technologies Often Arrive With Flaws: Toy-Like, Expensive, Janky, Lacking Clear Applications, Etc. (Thread)
3 minutes read.

This is not the first time Chris Dixon writes about how new (disruptive) technologies often look when they only start. Look around you. Do you spot some patterns?

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Working at the Center of the Cyclone (Video)
35 minutes read.

"You build things differently when you expect them to fail. Failure is normal, the failed state is the normal state." -- as more and more companies reach the need for distributed systems and big data patterns and tools, these observations become clearer. You see it happen daily. Edge-cases become normal and expected. It changes how you do Design Reviews and how you invest in your operations skills.

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Peopleware

The Web Browser as a Tool of Thought
11 minutes read.

"We are busy making more effective command-line apps for thought, rather than dreaming up graphical interfaces." -- You cannot help but stop and think when Linus is writing and delivering new tools (soon to be medium?) to build a "second brain".

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An Epic Treatise on Scheduling, Bug Tracking, and Triage
23 minutes read.

This post is a long one, and it's worth every minute of your time. I've been building software and teams for 20 years now, and these insights capture so well what I've seen. If you prefer the video version, there is a link to it at the top of the page.

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The Local Minima of Suckiness
7 minutes read.

Vicki Boykis writes on how to create an environment where we can nurture talent: "Learning how to ask the right questions at the right time is one of the fundamental skills of being a developer. Formulating the right question takes a lot of time, a lot of trial and effort, and a lot of tinkering with different solutions until the question even makes sense. [...] This is why an environment where it’s ok to ask stupid questions is important."

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And finally, inspiring tweets...

@chrishlad: Grab a notebook. Create a section titled “I Don’t Know”. Every time you don’t understand something, write it down there. After a week, you may have 50 concepts or questions. 1) Google the simple ones 2) Ask a friend for the hard ones. This is exponential learning.

@vboykis: If I could explain what having kids is like, it’s basically like being on-call for six years so far.



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Keep reading, keep learning.
-- Oren Ellenbogen.