2020-11-01

Weekly Review

  • Hidden Suburban Subsidiaries [[2020-10-26]]
    • Looking to read the next post in this series
    • My favorite part of this post is how it challenges my assumptions. I would have confidently told you some made up answer about why suburbs became so popular here, and I would have been dead wrong. My suspicion is a lot of people would be dead wrong. Where else is this happening? How can I use this example to find other high level influences that explain so much of our culture and lives.
  • Python Parallel Computing: Should Databricks be worried about Ray and Dask? [[2020-10-27]]
  • Are books the software packages of life? How can we use that to better apply their insights? [[2020-10-29]]
  • [[Vertical Farming]] [[2020-10-29]]
    • Interested in setting up my own vert farm at home. Google "vertical farming at home" and there's plenty of options
    • This thing is pretty cool
  • [[codesandbox]] goes [[opensource]] Reducing friction in the web development environment
    • This idea is great because environment management for web development can be a huge time suck. Codesandbox looks to fix this by just handling the environment for everyone
    • I had the thought "what if they put all of their effort into making actual environment management easier itself, instead of just handling it for customers?"
      • However, because they are handling all of their customers environments, it's in their best interest to help make improvements on this as well
      • So, an external result of codesandbox could be that web environment management in general gets easier for everyone.
  • [[2020-10-30]] Dug into Products and Platforms after reading [[Stevey's Google Platforms Rant]] and listening to [[Alex Danco]] on [[The North Star]]
    • Really great takeaways from this reading, and gives a much better understanding of how companies operate and think about the products they are building
    • Found a new blog by [[Kislay Verma]], where he writes a lot about these ideas
    • [[Service Oriented Architecture]] [[aws]] has mastered this
    • [[Eat your own Dogfood]]
      • The golden rule of platforms, but just a great rule in general. The best way to improve your product is by forcing everyone, even those internal to project, to use it in the same way. If your internal teams feel like they need a backdoor to be productive, then so will your customers, so make the full product better.
  • [[2020-10-31]] [[substitutes and complements]]
    • A very useful micro-economic principle which illuminates why platforms can be so powerful. When done right, platforms catapult demand for complementing products, which can just so happen to be sold by the the same company building the platform.
    • [[aws]] has been so successful with this because every new team or product they built is externally programmable by design.


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