If you only read one thingValveās Steam Deck prototypes: the best, the worst, and the utterly cursed (25 minute read) Very interesting, Valve tried many prototypes of their gaming console, until they came up with one that works. Apple does the same. There was a video that showed many Apple prototypes of the first iPhone. My clients often want to be like Apple. But they donāt spend months on a web prototype until everything clicks. They do some UI, then developers execute, with a focus on speed. Then next feature. Let me repeat, they want to be Apple. But they donāt like the hard work. If you want to be a cheap website, go for it, there is nothing wrong with it. But if you want to be Apple (or money raining Valve), put in the effort. Center your development effort around that idea. Forward the link to your CEO. Perhaps they see what the company is doing wrong.
Stories Iāve enjoyed this weekEric Garside as CTO at Freshly: how flat should the tech team be? (15 minute read) First, you do whatever works for you. But too many of my clients and CTOs I meet are bogged down in day to day work because they canāt delegate enough things. There is that magic moment when you need to let go of things. The article says about the Freshly #CTO āTrusting the tech team to his two lieutenants freed him to spend more time interacting with the rest of the company.ā and has some wonderful way of thinking that I will adapt: āHe was looking down the hierarchy, but at a certain point he needed to look up.ā Looking down vs. looking up the hierarchy. Nice picture. Also keep in mind skip-level-meetings, which I call CTO-Cafe, for ādeep insight into what the team was doingā, despite a middle management layer. https://respectfulleadership.substack.com/p/eric-garside-as-cto-at-freshly-how Y Combinator Traded Prestige for Growth (9 minute read) Y Combinator peaked quite some time ago - Iād say with AirBnB. This quote gets the root of the problem āIn particular, Sam Altman didnāt grasp what truly made YC successful. [..] To him, this seemed obviousāthere were plenty of companies eager to join YC, and since predicting which ones would succeed was unreliable, why not just accept more?ā The old problem of expanding your product. Does it break the brand? If you do burgers, can you sell coffee? (McDonalds shows, you can - better than Starbucks!) At what point does your brand break? āHarvard knows its success lies in exclusivity. If everyone could get in, no one would care.ā Why is the article about you? Startups widen their brand, because they urgently need customers (for their next VC round or to lengthen the runway). Often they break their brands with their products. Which brings in money in the short term, but kills the brand off - I have seen this with clients who burned their company for further investment because of brand spread. I told them, I would close the company, it would be easier to get investment that way, with a brand that isnāt burned down. āHowever, theyāll soon realize that once their reputation capital is exhausted, rebuilding it will be nearly impossible.ā I also saw many large companies change their brand name, so there stupidity could no longer be googled. https://unfashionable.blog/p/yc/ Linus Torvalds advises open-source developers to pursue meaningful projects, not hype (20 minute read) āāIn the tech industry, so much is about the hype. Everybody is following everybody else like lemmings off a cliff, trying to chase the next big thing, and I donāt think thatās a successful strategy,ā Torvalds said. āI think you need to find something that isnāt what everybody else does and excel at that and be the first to do something slightly different.āā Redis to SQLite (14 minute read) When we act like robots and automatically do the same thing over and over again we need to stop and reflect. Everyone uses Redis (I did!) for lots of use cases. Or Postgres Sometimes something different is better. In this case SQLite is the better choice (and SQLite and Litefs are amazing!) compared to Redis. What have you done without thinking? The āobviousā decisions are the dangerous decisions. https://wafris.org/blog/rearchitecting-for-sqlite Against service layers in Django (16 minute read) So donāt use service layers in Django.
Iām also against service layers, I no longer use them. Service layers are too generic,
they are magnets for all kinds of code and functionality. They easily become a ball
of hair that is hard to understand with loooooong services classes that with their gravity
pull in all functionality. A developer wonders where to put code? In a service class.
But I also donāt think you should put logic into controllers. For a decade now I use https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2020/mar/16/no-service/ Donāt build your castle in other peopleās kingdoms (18 minute read) Nice article, very unique illustration style (check it out!). Should you use a platform for content or own the content the article asks. There is so much content on Linkedin (other peopleās kingdom in the words of the article). People put long posts on Linkedin. I always struggle with that. I use Linkedin to point to the articles to my website (my kingdom). The downside, I donāt get us much engagement. I get more traffic in other peoples kingdom but I might lose everything I have built. A dilemma. Is your content on your website or on social media sites? Do you own it? https://howtomarketagame.com/2021/11/01/dont-build-your-castle-in-other-peoples-kingdoms/ Join the CTO newsletter! | |
