Proof of Work

Working with a poorly thought-out, or overengineered technology stack, or an overly bureaucratic organization is also a form of proof-of-work.

#Engineering #Career #Organizations

How to Solve a Problem in Three Steps

If you don’t know what a refridgerator is nor what an elephant is you are likely to think that opening the door, putting the elephant in, and closing the door is a viable strategy for putting an elephant in the refridgerator.

#Organizations #Career

Asian Is Not a Useful Category

Asking if someone is “Asian” in a question of ethnicity or demographics or pretty much any context is bad. There is no reasonable conclusion you can arrive at about a person based on the fact that they are “Asian”.

#Culture #Organizations #Inclusion and Equity

The Have-Loop

Have-loops are positive feedback loops which cause unsustainable concentration of limited resources. Once you learn to recognize them, you will see them everywhere.

#Culture

When Your Feature Gets Someone Hurt

If Google Photos incorrectly tags a photo, what’s the worst that could happen?

#Culture

Secret Life of Systems

Lifecycles of software systems that solve real world problems can be broken down into distinct phases based on where it is with respect to the problem and the eventual solution.

This article presents a taxonomy of these phases that should help you understand how each part of the lifecycle fits together.

#Engineering #Curiosity

Why I Hate Carousels

  • Don’t use carousels in your UI.
  • Instead, if you must stick content into little cards, let the horionztal layout wrap to additional lines.
  • If you end up with too many horizontal lines of content, then you definitely have too many items that can be accessed via a horizontally panning UI. You need a different UI altogether.

#Usability #Engineering

Inclusion/Equity and Evaluating Negatives

Evaluating properties like inclusion and equity of products can’t be done through exhaustive enumeration of product outcomes. Instead we will need to increasingly rely on the controls that we place how we construct the products.

#Engineering #Inclusion and Equity

Happy New Year 2024 and Year in Review 2023

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Thirteen Years

Some reflections from thirteen years at Google.

#Career #Culture #Organizations