Join 📚 Josh Beckman's Highlights

A batch of the best highlights from what Josh's read, .

This scavenging in the SaaS landscape is how people express agency and control in a computing environment that limits who has access to programmatic power. Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.

Folk Interfaces

Maggie Appleton

RFCs are written and discussed, but there’s no mechanism by which they’re formally adopted or rejected. Organizations choose to implement them (or don’t); they become standards through widespread voluntary adoption. This means that, if engineering organizations naively adopt an RFC process without bolting on some sort of explicit decision-making step, the process quickly breaks down. Without some sort of process to move towards a decision, **the default outcome of an RFC is “no”**

RFC processes are a poor fit for most organizations

jacobian.org

While we believe API instability directly creates churn, we also believe that API stability directly retains customers by increasing the migration overhead even if they wanted to change providers. Without an API change forcing them to change their integration, we believe that hypergrowth customers are particularly unlikely to change payments API providers absent a concrete motivation like an API change or a payment plan change.

How Should Stripe Deprecate APIs?

lethain.com

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