November 22, 2020 • #
Julian Lehr is onto something here. All modern organizations are plagued with a problem of managing internal documentations. We have ample tools and keep squishing the problem from one place to another: wikis, search, tasks — it’s a game of whack-a-mole to find the right version of a document. He ponders at what size it makes sense to invest in a “digital librarian”:
A friend at Stripe recently suggested – half-jokingly – that we should hire a librarian to organize all our internal data and documentation. The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. Perhaps every company should hire a Chief Notion Officer once it hits 100 employees??
Up created a tech tree representation of their product and roadmap. Genius.
Speculative maps of alternate historical timelines.
March 16, 2019 • #
This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam’s Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reading material here to study different modes of thinking. Like writer Shane Parrish puts it, this latticework helps you “think better”:
The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see reality. It turns out that when it comes to improving your ability to make decisions. Variety matters.
Most of us, however, are specialists. Instead of a latticework of mental models, we have a few from our discipline. Each specialist sees something different. By default, a typical Engineer will think in systems. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A biologist will think in terms of evolution. By putting these disciplines together in our head, we can walk around a problem in a three dimensional way. If we’re only looking at the problem one way, we’ve got a blind spot. And blind spots can kill you.
A neat tool for visually browsing git commit history. Scrolling through commits does a nice animation to show you graphically what’s changing from step to step. Here’s an example with browserify.
Over the last week I’ve been messing around with Notion, a productivity app that seemingly can do everything — a combination personal database, word processor, spreadsheet, notes app, and todo list. I’m trying it out for note taking and writing (mostly), but it’s got some potential to be a personal wiki, an idea which has always intrigued me but never felt worthwhile to try to set up and maintain. This site has a bunch of templates for Notion to help get started for different use cases. Just browsing it shows the diversity of things you can use it for.