Dan Hon’s Things that Caught My Attention is one of my favorite blogs / newsletters, because it’s just chock full of Dan-ness. This is a good thing. The past few days he’s been responding to a challenge from Robin Sloan, who wanted him to “try writing about something that had…

Ken Norton, who always brings the donuts, delivers some wisdom from his career in product management. The “art” of product management matters more than the “science” over the long term. In product management, there’s an art and a science. The science is all of the stuff you read about: managing…

Robin Sloan, in The slab and the permacomputer, puts a finger on what makes deploying a contract to the Ethereum blockchain feel so…different. Even so, I can’t deny that Ethereum’s “world computer” is interesting and, even more than that, evocative. The Ethereum blockchain is one entity, shared globally, agreed upon…

It’s college application season, and I can personally attest that there are a lot of high school seniors that are currently stressing about their GPAs, their standardized test scores, their essays…and their extra-curricular activities. As a reminder of just how absurd this whole process is, here’s a list of the…

Lorin Hochstein has a great, short post about the distinction between modernism and post-modernism, and the connection to software engineering. In short, modernists believe that the world is turbulent and dynamic, and can be constantly remade anew; while post-modernists believe that “we can never cast off our history and start…

Winslet, Phair, Mehrotra, Panzarino, Venice, Saraceno, Eno — Kate Winslet’s performance in Mare of Easttown. I spent a few formative teenage years living outside of Philadelphia in Delaware County, so the moment just a few minutes in where she says the word “homeowner” I had to pause the stream and put my head between my knees. This Maureen…

Gibson Biddle has an amazing retrospective of 20 years of personalization at Netflix, and its role in the company’s product strategy. The screenshots alone are worth the trip down memory lane. It took Netflix more than a decade to demonstrate that a personalized experience improved retention. But consistent growth in…

wolves do the work all year long at their own expense — The Number Ones: Guns N’ Roses’ Sweet Child O’ Mine. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan has been every #1 hit in the Billboard Hot 100, chronologically. “For years, Slash claimed to hate Sweet Child O’ Mine. The song, he thought, went against the sound that the band had established for themselves. He’s…