If you only read one thingHow to organise your teams (32 minute read) I have been using Simon Wardley’s Explorers-Villagers-Town Planers (EVTP) model for years now. It says there are three kinds of people. Those who explore the world, those who build a village and those who make the village a town. You have the same kinds of people in your company. You need to match the these personalities to the stage of your company. Too many startups I see hire town planners too early to make everything neat, safe and stable. Then explorers leave and innovation dies down. Here is a very deep dive into how to build teams by Simon Wardley with EVTP in mind. Must read. https://medium.com/mappingpractice/how-to-organise-yourself-f36f084a611b
Stories I’ve enjoyed this weekThoughts On A Month With Devin – Answer.AI (27 minute read) Everything is new. Everything changes. Currently to me it is not clear if a code focused AI tool like Cursor is better, or a chat “agent-based” tool like Devin. This is a long list of tasks tried with Devin, e.g. “Add feature to check for conflicts between user input and database” -> Failure, “Migrating data from Notion Into Google Sheets” -> Success. But see for yourself. What do you think? Code or Chat? https://www.answer.ai/posts/2025-01-08-devin.html To-Do ≠ To-Think (4 minute read) Short one, but I found “Separating Tasks Into “To-Do” and “To-Think”” a good idea, already splitted my todo list for today. https://www.v01.io/posts/2025-to-think/ Move Fast & Document Things (22 minute read) Documentation is where most development organizations fail. A good
article with practical advice, that I hadn’t read before, like
“Please Update Comment (#PUC)” or better todos for
https://olshansky.substack.com/p/move-fast-and-document-things The tyranny of structurelessness (34 minute read) A classic. If there is not structure in your company, there will be an informal one, based on extroversion and power plays “Contrary to what we would like to believe, there is no such thing as a structureless group. Any group of people of whatever nature that comes together for any length of time for any purpose will inevitably structure itself in some fashion.” People will fill all the gaps you leave as a manager. https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm The Effects of GPU Export Controls (10 minute read) Second Order thinking. I came to the concept years ago reading an article via Hackernews called “Second-Order Thinking: What Smart People Use to Outperform” Second-Order thinking means considering the reactions to your actions, then your reactions, then those of the people affected again. Chess players are good at this. Politicians are very bad at this. For every action there is a reaction. We implement this policy in our company, employees will not just accept it, but react to it, but not in the way we expect them to. We roll out this new metric, employees will change their ways - but not only in the way we want them to. Export controls on powerful GPUs led to a powerful AI model that uses less memory (I’m not arguing about the pros and cons of export controls). PS: The model is DeepSeek, the new shooting star in the AI space - you might have heard of it. https://www.vincentschmalbach.com/deepseek-and-the-effects-of-gpu-export-controls/ Master the Art of the Product Manager ‘No’ (4 minute read) ‘No’ is the art of focusing says Steve Jobs. Prioritizing is “A, not-B, not-C”. Most people do it wrong with “A, then-B, then-C”. If you can’t say no, this page has many random ideas, “That’s worth considering once we have more resources” is one of them. After becoming good at this, it will be easier to just plainly say no. Rule-Based Programming in Interactive Fiction (26 minute read) On the surface this is about interactive fiction (adventure games), but it is one of the best explanations on how think about architecting your code with the thinking on where to put functionality and how to reuse functionality. I’d give this one to every junior developer as a must read. https://eblong.com/zarf/essays/rule-based-if/index.html Oh S###, Git!?! (9 minute read) Very handy cheat sheet for git to save you. - helps with “Oh s###, I accidentally committed to the wrong branch!” or Oh s###, I need to undo a commit from like 5 commits ago! Know this exists to save your future self. It did save me. Join the CTO newsletter! | |
