Martin Amis said in a recent BBC documentary: “Literature was about gods then demigods then kings and queens. In 19c about men, 20c… ironic century, about people lower than us [writers].”
I see many parallels between this and the way internet developed from CERN labs where new particles are discovered to organizing world’s information via giving people the power to share.
Now every idea seems to be around Uber of X or Stripe of Y. Not long ago it was all about Facebook of Z. What’s next?
I created a couple of simple scripts in Node.js: Desk.com / Salesforce API call and store data in Azure SQL for further analysis with Power BI and credit bureau reports.
I default to VS Code IDE that I find clean and efficient. Code is simpler to use compared to full VS as it reduces clutter by making you add what you need rather than switching off / ignoring features that you don’t need.
NPM packages need to be used with caution as majority provide dead ends. My learning is to start solving the problem using baseline language features and only add packages when absolutely necessary.
Prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Most software engineers would vouch for the research showing that problems found early – during design or coding – can be fixed many times faster than when they’re found later in production. We found that initial discussions about how to solve a problem are very helpful to prevent issues downstream.
As once the special counsel Lanny Davis advised President Clinton on the subject of Monika Lewinsky: tell it early, tell it all, tell it yourself.
From the letter to Amazon shareholders:
There are some subtle traps that even high-performing large organizations can fall into as a matter of course, and we’ll have to learn as an institution how to guard against them. One common pitfall for large organizations – one that hurts speed and inventiveness – is “one-size-fits-all” decision making.
Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible – one-way doors – and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. We can call these Type 1 decisions. But most decisions aren’t like that – they are changeable, reversible – they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups.
As organizations get larger, there seems to be a tendency to use the heavy-weight Type 1 decision-making process on most decisions, including many Type 2 decisions. The end result of this is slowness, unthoughtful risk aversion, failure to experiment sufficiently, and consequently diminished invention.1 We’ll have to figure out how to fight that tendency.
Amazon Lending provided aggregate funding of over $1.5 billion to micro, small and medium businesses across the U.S., U.K. and Japan through short-term loans, with a total outstanding loan balance of about $400 million
Amazon Web Services is reaching $10 billion in annual sales
On outsized returns / risk taking: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time
On corporate culture: The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-selec
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm
As Sir Arthur Helps, a 19th century aphorist, said: “Almost all human affairs are tedious. Everything is too long. Visits, dinners, concerts, plays, speeches, pleadings, essays, sermons, are too long.”
My equivalent list for today’s managers would be: “Everthing is too long. Business plans, board presentations, management accounts, sales reports, project updates, standup checkins, system’s architecture, code.”
As Luke Johnson said: “As I get older I have less patience than ever for irrelevant stuff. My tolerance for wasting time has demonised – I want to use what I have productively.”
The best people I worked with understand the essentials in their business and posses a true sense of urgency.
The key is not to try to do too many things but concentrate on a small number of things that truly matter – and execute them well.
“Our lifes are frittered away by detail: simplify, simplify.” Henry David Thoreau.