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How much planning is enough?
Few years back, I was sitting in Bunker Coffee with Luke for our 1:1. Luke tells me, “you know, no matter how hard you plan, the error rate of our decision doesn’t change much. If we take path A today versus next week, after having a whole lot more meetings, we still don’t know what…
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🎧 Difference between RGB, CMYK and Pantone
AI Photoshop, robot art, and a big fight about the future of colors. We covered all that on the latest episode of The Vergecast, along with what Dall-E and other platforms will mean for copyright law, the difference between CMYK and RGB, and much more. AI art is coming, y’all!
I finally know why Pantone colors exist.
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Conflict Resolution
Recently, my friend shared this story over dinner. He is an iOS developer. He had been tasked to create a core component for his company’s design system: a container view that sweeps over other views. But there was an issue with how padding was applied. The designer in charge of the component insisted there should…
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🎧 Is Google Search getting worse?
Great Freakanomics podcast episode to inspect if Google Search is getting worse.
There is a part in there about how Google accidentally ran a 1% hold out group that don’t see ads for 8 years. They found “3 percent more searches from people who had ads than didn’t”.
Great insight.
If you liked that episode, here’s another recent favourite of mine: Are personal finance gurus giving you bad advice?
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Companies Grow
As successful products increase in revenue, companies grow. Growth allows a company to improve their products, support more customers and create additional value-add services. Growing up isn’t easy. As a handful of engineers become hundreds, or even thousands, the added weight introduces many issues. These can often lead to the opposite outcomes of what growth…
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Wise words from a tall man: playing the long game
Vithun with some words of wisdom: vithun.com/posts/playing-the-long-game
…the longer the game one is in, the more they have got to be able to let something go. And not just let it go, but take it off their mind and start from blank for the next thing coming their way. Reacting to everything is something one does when having a shorter-term mindset.
Leave some balls. Thanks @vithungajendra.
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Changing jobs
I left my job at the end of August. It was scary to leave Expedia Group after 8 years. There were a lot of good times, growth and friendships 💌. Given the global spread of 125 makers reporting up to me, the job was challenging and stressful. In the last 8 weeks, I’ve refocused my…
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App Store
Something we used to talk about in university was the impact an operating system can have on people. A system designer imagines the future and creates capabilities that its users can leverage. It is a form of influence on users to adopt the imagined future. Users, however, behave in unpredictable ways. A system starts to…
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🎧 The amazing history behind The Pirate Bay and its fight to stay open
A gripping story about a few kids getting together and fighting power in the open Internet. Account given by one of the founders. Love it. Have a listen.
https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/92
The Pirate Bay is a website, a search engine, which has an index of torrent files. A lot of copyrighted material is listed on the site, but the site doesn’t store any of the copyrighted material. It just points the user to where you can download it from. So for a while The Pirate Bay has been the largest places you can find pirated movies, music, games, and apps. But this site first came up 2003. And is still up and operation now, 18 years later! You would think someone would shut this place down by now. How does the biggest source for copyrighted material stay up and online for that long? Listen to this episode to find out.
If you liked this episode, Money Maker #102 and Synthetic Remittance #124 are great too!
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Hackathons
I don’t like Hackathons. I remember when they went from fun to not-so-fun. I was part of the frontend modernisation project at Expedia. It was a long arduous project, filled with many many technical and people challenges. I loved it. Every day felt like a rush and we were doing something difficult that was going…
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A messy change in direction for iPad
Enjoyed reading this article from David Pierce at TheVerge on Stage Manager. It is not going well for Apple as far as iPadOS is concerned.
Here in the real world, trying to figure out how Stage Manager works turns into a wild puzzle requiring a wall of Polaroids and a ball of yarn.
The issue seems to lie in “product vision” part. I think David nails it.
The company has a complicated history with multitasking in general. Jobs was famously and loudly against the entire concept — he believed in helping people focus on one thing at a time, not in helping them overwhelm themselves with windows. In Jobs’ mind, the best thing to do for users was to make it easy to switch between tasks rather than do several tasks at once.
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This tension is only becoming more acute, too. Apple is now all-in on keyboard attachments for iPads — it even moved the camera on the new 10th-gen iPad to the center in landscape mode, which is as clear a sign as you’ll ever see that most people use their iPads horizontally on a desk. Apple’s also trying to break down barriers between Mac and iPad so that you can do all your work on all your devices.
It is not easy to switch out the direction of a product that is already performing well in the market. Expectations are high. It is even harder to do it with yearly releases cycles for software and 2-3 year release cycles for devices. We’re in that messy transition where it isn’t quite clear whether Apple’s confused about what role iPad plays in their line up, or is it just taking so many years to change course for their new vision for the device…
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Learnings from “Seeing like a State” by James C Scott
Seeing like a State inspects attempts of states bringing “administrative order of nature and society” that’s led to disastrous outcomes. It is an interesting window into inspecting how large, people based systems work at scale. High Modernism The book inspects state’s appetite to use “high modernism” to solve issues at scale. “High modernism is a…
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Tasmania, take #2
Took a week off in Tasmania to unwind. It was full of excitement! After our first visit to Cradle Mountain cancelled by a metre of snow, we were determined to stick out the 300mm rain in one day to walk the mountains. It was worth the wait. We got some spectacular walks in. We managed…
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Twitter thread on “preventing frustration”
Found this awesome Twitter thread by Ken Kocienda while reading about iPhone keyboard complaints in Hacker News. “This gets back to the idea of preventing frustration. I determined that it would be more frustrating to have autocorrection “guess wrong” and erroneously fix broken typing.” Read the full thread. It is great, including the constallation algortihm…
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Getting a taste for making
Few years back, my brother and I decided to work on an iPhone app together. It was a little note taking app that I dreamt up to help me record lectures while taking notes. We gave it a terrible name… “notes + u”. App didn’t make it. It wasn’t a million dollar idea. We didn’t…
by Dineth Mendis