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Engineers love clean architecture. It feels good to design something elegant, layered, and theoretically future-proof. But “clean” is not free. Every shiny abstraction adds weight. And when you multiply that weight across dozens of pipelines, the cost sneaks up on you in fragility, in maintenance, and in developer sanity. The Spaceship Problem 🚀 Imagine you need to cross the street. You could just walk. Or you could spend three years designing a spaceship that technically gets you across too. Oxygen tanks, heat shields, navigation controls, all to fetch groceries. ...

Paper wasps recognize and remember faces. Their unique markings act like name tags, and their brains process faces as a whole. They pull off facial recognition with under a million neurons.

Infinite libraries, finite satisfaction. We live in a time where nearly every piece of media ever made is accessible. Yet most people spend longer scrolling through catalogs than actually consuming content. Browsing as the New Watching The experience of streaming often feels like an endless loop: open app, browse, get overwhelmed, close app. It mirrors the paradox of choice, where more options do not equal more happiness but instead create paralysis. ...

Life breaks like code. Both can be debugged. We hit runtime errors: burnout, bad decisions, habits that do not scale. Sometimes the stack trace is obvious, other times it is buried five layers deep. Either way, the process of fixing things looks suspiciously like debugging software. And maybe that is a good thing. Step 1: Reproduce the Bug In engineering, the first step is always reproducibility. If you cannot reproduce the bug, you cannot fix it. ...

Why do we brush our teeth every single day of our lives? Because it only takes 2 to 3 minutes and it would be incredibly hard to justify not spending such a small amount of time on our maintaining our own personal hygiene. What if exercising becomes as simple and habitual as brushing our teeth? So much so that you’ll have no excuse to skip it. If you don’t feel like exercising, just tell yourself this: how busy can I be to not even take 15 minutes out of my day to take care of my own body? Yes, exercising for only 15 minutes a day won’t result in massive weight loss or muscle gain. But it’s the perfect amount of time to start with to turn it into an unbreakable lifelong habit. ...

Imagine you’re teaching a few students. You’ve spent the last 3 weeks teaching them how to solve a quadratic equation. You’ve announced an upcoming test next week and released a sample test containing 20 questions. The students will apply one of the two available strategies: Cram the sample test and hope the actual exam’s the same Use the sample test to judge their level of understanding and go back to the source material and fill in the gaps Clearly, strategy 1 is the path of least resistance but strategy 2 is what will help a student truly master the course material. As a teacher, you have 2 strategies available to evaluate your students: ...

Tech stocks have been wobbling all over the place for the last couple of days. The dominant narrative around this has been that the investors are pulling away from the tech stocks and moving into cyclical stocks. But what are cyclical stocks anyways? And why are investors pushing their way into them? Cyclical Stocks 🔁 Cyclical stocks are tied to the economic cycle. They are highly correlated with how the overall economy is performing. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, some industries such as tourism, hotels took an expected downturn in their revenues. As such, the market responded by moving their funds from cyclical stocks to tech stocks. Stonks. This is why the tech stocks bounced even higher than expected. ...

Trying to control the outcome is futile. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. It can only be transferred from one form to another. We can spend it on thinking about and desiring for a certain outcome OR we can utilize the same energy on our actions (doing something). Trying to control the outcomes is akin to day dreaming. Its good to indulge ourselves a little, but we are better off by not becoming a slave to it. ...

Your biggest flex right now is that you can post on social media while the 45th President of the United States can’t. As we are all aware, Mr. Trump has been banned from a lot of social media platforms. The list below is absolutely not exhaustive: Twitter Facebook Instagram Snapchat YouTube Reddit Updated list here. This is what cancel culture looks like when stretched to its fullest existence. While I wholeheartedly believe that inciting a riot at the US Capitol is deserving of an impeachment not just a social media ban, many others don’t.

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nil Eyal discusses how some of the world’s most successful products, like smartphones and social networking apps, make us form habits around them and why that’s crucial to their success, before teaching the 4-step framework that lies behind them. The Hook Cycle Trigger Prompt the user to take an action. 2 kinds Internal - “feeling bored” → Open Instagram External - Ads, emails The idea is to use external triggers, form a habit and make the use of our product to be prompted by internal trigger Action Trigger leads to a reward through an action The action has to be as streamlined, delightful, and simple as possible. Eliminate as many steps between the trigger and reward as possible. The goal is to make this action a habit. Doing something out of habit means doing it without even thinking. Variable reward User takes an action in hope of receiving a reward - something entertaining, something useful. The important thing here is variable. If it’s the same reward everytime, the law of diminishing returns kicks in and the action is never turned into a habit. Investment Make the user work a little and store some sort of value in the product - upload their pictures (action) to connect with their friends (reward) This is also known as The Ikea Effect Why is this important? Charge premium price for a more engaging product. Increase your customer lifetime value (CLV). Increase your growth rate via organic channels like word-of-mouth. Develop a stronger competitive advantage with the combined effect of the previous points. TheNextWeb Talk by the Author