Sam Arbesman finds similarities between the oral storytelling of myth. With generation retellings and small, effective adaptations over time, ancient tales were made more Lindy:
Over time though, each ever-retold story was sanded into a gem of a tale that could last all those years, not necessarily because the written text was preserved—to be found in a clay pot in some desert cave millennia hence, or etched into a rock so it could not be forgotten—but because there was a community devoted to its recounting.
This paper describes an experiment to merge freeform document-style text and structured computations into a single interface.
We think a promising workflow is gradual enrichment from docs to apps: starting with regular text documents and incrementally evolving them into interactive software. In this essay, we present a research prototype called Potluck that supports this workflow. Users can create live searches that extract structured information from freeform text, write formulas that compute with that information, and then display the results as dynamic annotations in the original document.
The idea is to prioritize the open-endedness of documents with the benefits of some schema, to enable computations and...
Reading Ryan Singer’s Shape Up a few years ago was formative (or re-formative, or something) in my thinking on how product development can and should work. After that it was a rabbit hole on jobs-to-be-done, Bob Moesta’s Demand-Side Sales, demand thinking, and more.
Since he wrote the book in 2019, he talks about 2 new concepts that extend Shape Up a little further: the role of the “technical shaper”...
When working through problems, the most impressive creators to me aren’t those that divine an entire solution in their brain for an hour, then slam out a perfect result (spoiler: this doesn’t exist outside of the occasional savant). I love to watch people who are great at avoiding the temptation to overcomplicate. People who can break problems down into components. People who can simplify complex problems by isolating parts, and blocking and tackling.
I enjoyed this, from an interview with Ward Cunningham (programmer and inventor of the wiki):
It was a question: “Given what we’re trying...
Jason Lemkin with some interesting takeaways from Palantir’s performance over the recent years. A couple of highlights:
#2. Its Top 20 Customers pay an average a stunning $45m a year (!). And that’s 24% higher than a year ago!
#4. Yes, Palantir is Solidly a Software Company. Gross Margins remain well above 80%. It was perhaps fair to criticize Palantir as a services business in large part in the run up to the IPO — but no longer. With many quarters of 80%+ gross margins, that’s software.
The net retention they’ve demonstrated is bananas: 120%+ consistently since going...
App launchers have been around a long time. Way back when it was Quicksilver, then it was Launchbar. A quick keystroke would pull up a search box, and a few letters of typing would open what you wanted.
For many years the go-to has been Alfred, which added a whole category of other automations, customized searches, and an entire workflow engine for building your own. I still use it now for certain things, but lately I’ve been kicking the tires on a new entrant in the category called Raycast.
The...
Marc Andreessen was recently interviewed by Noah Smith in his newsletter. It’s a great post-pandemic update to Marc’s views on technology (spoiler: he’s still as optimistic as ever), following a year after his “Time to Build” essay.
When asked about the future of technology, he responds to the common criticism that tech is often gives us progress in the virtual, but not physical world:
Software is a lever on the real world.
Someone writes code, and all of...
Elad Gil describes the trend of continuing consumerization of enterprise software.
Part 2 in Eugene Wei’s series on TikTok. See part 1.
Venkatesh Rao’s Breaking Smart podcast is always a must-listen.
On the announcement of Airtable’s latest round and $2.5b valuation (!), founder Howie Liu puts out a great piece on the latest round of changes in pursuit of their vision.
No matter how much technology has shaped our lives, the skills it takes to build software are still only available to a tiny fraction of people. When most of us face a problem that software can answer, we have to work around someone else’s...
I didn’t realize until reading this piece that this movie was a commercial flop. $70m gross on a $76m budget. I remember seeing this several times in theaters, and many times after. This retrospective (from 2016) brought the film back to mind and makes me want to rewatch.
Brian Timoney:
Google Earth led us to...
I linked a few weeks ago to a new tool called Memex, a browser extension that touts itself as bookmarking for “power users of the web.” Its primary unique differentiator is how they approach the privacy angle.
I’m a couple of weeks into using it and it brings an interesting new approach to the world of bookmarking tools like Pinboard or Raindrop, both of which I’ve used a lot. Raindrop has been my tool of choice lately, but it’s heavy for what I really want,...
Software has multiple dimensions of elements and affordances, but the spatial dimension is underutilized most software outside of the gaming world.
Designer John Palmer wrote this piece on how different types of applications could harness spatial relationships to improve I’m thinking and interacting.
Messaging apps are stacks of bubbles. Video calls are faces inside static rectangles. There are only so many degrees of freedom for users inside of these apps, which makes them simple to use. But this simplicity also strips away so much of the freedom we have during in-person interactions. You can type any message, but typing...
I found and started testing out Raindrop.io for managing bookmarks. Pinboard has been my go-to for this for years, to which I’ve added the resurrected Instapaper for anything like articles (to support Readwise flow).
The lack of a good mobile app for Pinboard makes that process pretty weak; and I’d say I end up adding half my bookmarks and “read later” stuff from the iPhone.
I imported all the bookmarks I had in Pinboard over there, which worked perfectly smooth. Raindrop’s desktop macOS app is fantastic, as well.
Recommended so far. May write about it in more detail later once...
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers.
Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, computing moved from room-sized mainframes with teletype interfaces to connected panes of glass in our pockets. At breakneck speed, we went from the computer being a massively expensive, extremely specialized tool to a ubiquitous part of daily life.
During the 1950s — the days of Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and MIT’s Lincoln Lab — a “computer”...
I liked this newsletter post from Aron Korenblit on the no-code movement. The name overstates the problem as being with “code” in workflows, when the problem is really deeper than that:
How we feel about code —and why we want to avoid it— has in fact nothing to do it with code itself. Code is a language that helps us tell inanimate objects what to do so we don’t have to do it. Our real frustration lies with what usually comes with software projects: overblown budgets, long delays and expensive maintenance costs. That’s what we’re saying “no” to, not...
We’ve been doing some thinking on our team about how to systematically address (and repay) technical debt. With the web of interconnected dependencies and micro packages that exists now through tools like npm and yarn, no single person can track all the versions and relationships between modules. This post proposes a “Dependency Drift” metric to quantify how far out of date a codebase is on the latest updates to its dependencies:
- Create a numeric metric that incorporates...
I didn’t know this was out there, a funny-yet-astute-and-accurate observation from a software engineer at Google:
With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.
Even the tiniest, trivial behavior of your API is not only desirable by some user out there, it’s critical. We have a joke internally that goes something like:
...“Don’t change that
{API response | setting behavior | data storage format}, my entire business model depends on it!
An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the same document, in real time).
A fascinating paper. This research suggests the possibility that group-conforming versus individualistic cultures may have roots in diet and agricultural practices. From the abstract:
Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East...
I love this story about Access and how it’s still hanging on with a sizable user base after almost a decade of neglect by its parent. It goes to show you that there are still gaps in the market for software being filled by 10 year-stale applications. Getting users to unlearn behaviors is much harder than giving them an Airtable, Webflow, or Fulcrum — too much comfort and muscle memory to overcome.
Its long lifespan can be attributed to how it services the power user, as well as how simple it is to create a relational database with so few...
Any business that makes money from the same customer more than once can be said to have “recurring revenue.” But the term in the SaaS universe has a more specific flavor to it, thanks to the unique nature of the business model, value delivery, and the commitments between vendor and consumer. You may think “so what” when you hear that SaaS revenue is special or somehow better than other ways of making money; after all, the money’s still green, right? But there are a number of benefits that come with the “as-a-service” relationship between vendor and customer. Software companies fit...
I signed up for Readwise earlier this week after seeing it mentioned in Twitter somewhere. If you read a lot of ebooks on Kindle and make highlights, it’s a useful tool for recall and remembering what you read. Each day it sends you a brief digest with 5 highlighted passages from books you read in the past. I’m even getting reminders on highlights I made in books from 7 or 8 years ago. Already it’s made me consider going back and re-reading some things. It’s a neat service.
Jason turned me onto this Chrome extension for Strava data analysis called Elevate. It’s a pretty amazing tool that adds deep analytics on top of the already-rich data Strava provides natively as part of their Summit plan.
In addition to having its own metrics like this fitness/freshness curve, it overlays additional metrics into the individual activity pages on the Strava website. My favorite ones are this (which Strava has its own simpler version of) and the year-over-year comparison graph, which lets you see your progression in total mileage...
This group is building some interesting tools to expose and enable sharing and collaboration on academic papers.
We develop software to help illuminate academic papers. Just as Pierre de Fermat scribbled his famous last theorem in the margins, professional scientists, academics and citizen scientists can annotate equations, figures, ideas and write in the margins.
They have a tool called Margins, which allows researchers to upload, annotate, and share academic papers, and another neat one called Librarian, a Chrome extension for comments and annotations for arXiv papers.
Wireframing is a critical technique in product development. Most everyone in software does a good bit of it for communicating requirements to development teams and making iterative changes. For me, the process of wireframing is about figuring out what needs to be built as much as how. When we’re discussing new features or enhancements, rather than write specs or BDD stories or something like that, I go straight to a pen and paper or the iPad to sketch out options. You get a sense for how a UI needs to come together, and also for us visual thinkers, the new...
As pointed out in this piece from Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman, most indicators around product-market fit are lagging indicators. With his company he was looking for leading indicators so they could more accurately predict adoption and retention after launch. His approach is simple: polling your early users with a single question — “How would you feel if you could no longer use Superhuman?”
Too many example methods in the literature on product development orient around asking...
Marco Arment just shipped a new update to Overcast (the best iOS podcast app) with an awesome new feature that allows you to clip sections to share. Since its early days you’ve been able to share a podcast episode with an anchor link to a timestamp, but this new clip sharing ability is a major improvement that should make podcast content easier to point people to and recommend.
This doesn’t just allow you to create a clip to share, it even generates a nice embeddable video (landscape, square, or portrait) for posting through social...
We recently began a corporate sponsorship for the QGIS project, the canonical open source desktop GIS. I got back into doing some casual cartography work using QGIS back in December after a years-long hiatus of using it much (I don’t get to do much actual work with data these days). Bill wrote up a quick post about how we rely on it every day in our work:
As a Mac shop, the availability of a sophisticated, high-quality, powerful desktop GIS that runs natively on MacOS is important to us. QGIS fits that bill and more. With its...
This post from Hiten Shah tells the backstory of one of the more interesting startups these days, Airtable. Like the title states, the objective of Airtable is to build a no-code system for data management and application-building. At a billion-dollar valuation now, they’ve clearly knocked it out of the park with their product-led growth strategy.
Even in the face of the 5,000 pound gorilla of Excel, they’ve broken things open and are beginning to attract mass-market users.
Microsoft had been the undisputed king of productivity software for 20 years by the time Airtable went...
I was a big del.icio.us user back in the day, pre- and post-Yahoo. For anyone unfamiliar, it was one of the first tools (before Twitter) for sharing web links and making bookmarks social.
I signed up for Pinboard around the time it launched. Creator Maciej Cegłowski had an interesting concept for making his service paid, a tactic that could allow it to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining and avoid the acquisition & stagnation that del.icio.us suffered at the hands of Yahoo after they acquired it in 2005.
When it launched it cost around $3 to...
Since I got the Mavic last year, I haven’t had many opportunities to do mapping with it. I’ve put together a few experimental flights to play with DroneDeploy and our Fulcrum extension, but outside of that I’ve mostly done photography and video stuff.
OpenDroneMap came on a scene a couple years ago as a toolkit for processing drone imagery. I’ve been following it loosely through the Twittersphere since. Most of my image processing has been done with DroneDeploy, since we’d been working with them on some integration between...