Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .
The seemingly earnest popularity of these videos, especially among younger users, is part of an untethering of video content from coherent meaning that seems to be happening on short-form video apps. It feels like the longer people make videos for an algorithm the more the videos start to degrade into just random visual stimuli, which is unnerving, but also kind of interesting.
The Doomscrolling Is the Point
Garbage Day
Good architecture is built incrementally, but **not** designed incrementally. The [active-active, sharded architecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8NWDHgWA28) that powers Shopify today was drawn on a whiteboard in 2014 (not designed incrementally), and it took ~6 years to fully materialize, with a major customer-facing milestone every year (built incrementally). We would’ve hit a local maxima if we had not intentionally spelled this out.
The Napkin Math Methodology for System Design
sirupsen.com
If whatever I was doing on the kitchen counter is now called “software engineering,” then ordering food at a restaurant should be called “cooking.” As much as I marvel in this new and (dare I say) magical way of manifesting products and services from thin air, I question whether it is truly a creative process anymore. Inasmuch as we pursue craftsmanship as a goal unto itself, what’s the point for us humans when the machines are going to be better, faster, and cheaper than all of us?
The Giddy Nothingness of Automatic Creation
Ben Sigelman
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
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