Category: Contentions
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Quality control
When I started Wonder Shuttle, I was uncontrollably obsessive with quality control. I started out as a freelance writer, so the first thing I had to do was let go of control. Still, in my mind, every article had to run through me; I was the last line of defense, the buck stopped with me,…
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The classroom parable
At Twitter, entrepreneur Kevin Lee shares an anecdote about how a family business owner, which worked in electricity, turned extra space in its warehouse into a community-based classroom for immigrant workers to learn electrical engineering. That meant every Saturday, for four hours, immigrant workers could attend this free class to learn electrical engineering skills. Hundreds…
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I was wrong about audiobooks
In my 20s, I refused to listen to audiobooks. For starters, to me, it didn’t count as actual reading. I also loved, and still love, paper books. To experience an audiobook felt like a betrayal to this admiration. On top of all of that, I also thought it’d be incredibly slow, and I wouldn’t be…
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How to find a passed website with the Internet Archive
One special thing about the internet, for better or worse, is that few things ever really die. That’s largely not because websites don’t actually die—they do!—but because the Internet Archive does the really hard work of preserving them. I’ve written at length about digging up lost documents and how preserving them is like giving new…
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Why you should turn your conference talk into a blog post
If you’re a software engineer who has presented a conference talk, it’s definitely worth writing it up into a blog post and sharing it at a relevant Subreddit (like r/programming), DEV.to, and Hacker News. You’ll certainly get your ideas in front of more people—on the Internet, text still travels faster than podcasts or YouTube (on…
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Remembering the good stuff that your brain forgets
There’s a narrative floating around on Twitter (Exhibit 1, 2) that we’re meant to forget things that are unimportant to us. Forgetting is an incredibly useful feature of the brain. The brain does also have a knack to boomerang really valuable memories or ideas back—often in an exciting, relevant, way. We have a name for…
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Collecting to build and demonstrate expertise
I’m a big fan of services businesses (so much so that I’d started my own!). I’m an even bigger fan of those services businesses leveraging their teams to expand beyond client services, into building its own products. It’s tough—Metalab founder Andrew Wilkinson lost $10 million doing it!—but it’s not impossible. One great small bet can…
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The power of the rubber duck
There’s a lot of power in talking through a problem, sometimes even if no one is around to hear it. You may be thinking out loud. This is known as rubber duck problem solving, because people often talk to rubber ducks. You make progress by talking to an inanimate object, or yourself; you either solve…
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The cost of a free lunch
In front of the townhouse, there were two drawers, one stacked on top of the other, wrapped with bright, cartoon, decals. You couldn’t miss it. As if anticipating the question as you passed by, there was a piece of paper confirming, “Free.” When I was a child, I constantly heard the phrase, “There is no…
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Not actual gameplay
A significant part of the reason why marketing—and the people who work in it—gets a bad rap is it’s not very straightforward. It’s often very story-driven. Done well, the story is almost completely ignored; it’s presented, and often received, as evidence and facts. It’s entirely believable, not only because of charisma, but because the marketer…