What are social tokens? Social tokens are tokens issued by individual creators or communities that enable community members to collaborate and share ownership in the value created together. Social tok
It’s inevitable that your team will need things from other teams. This is especially common in product engineering. You can use the “Independent Executor Model” to avoid making this a problem. What pain do dependencies cause? It’s very common to get into a situation where you need something from…
My Software Estimation Technique Last time, I explained that, although estimating software project timelines is hard, you should do it anyway. With that background, I want to go into some detail and share the technique I use when I need to develop a project timeline. The critical characteristic:…
By Chris Dixon: general partner, a16z, and Packy McCormick: founder, Not Boring Capital Because of the success of bitcoin, the pioneering cryptocurrency launched in 2008, many people associate blockch
Professional athletes have come so far from the dark days when the public saw them as perpetually partying adolescents, mean-spirited bullies, and worse: dim-wits one step above tackling dummies on th
Dark Mode Toggle 2021 Oct 31 See all posts Crypto Cities Special thanks to Mr Silly and Tina Zhen for early feedback on the post, and to a big long list of people for discussion of the ideas. One inte
You have 1 article left to read this month before you need to register a free LeadDev.com account. Breaking down silos isn’t always easy. But bringing diverse perspectives together is essential if we want to build great products. Great software products fulfill a broad range of use cases, including…
Which Is Better, Rewards or Punishments? Neither Rewards and punishments are conditional, but our love and positive regard for our kids should be unconditional. Here’s how to change the conversation a
Pinterest Accused of Not Paying Female ‘Co-Creator’ In a lawsuit, a woman who said she had helped create Pinterest claimed the founders had agreed to compensate her but never did. Christine Martinez s
Did people treat me differently after I sold @Twitch? Absolutely. Here's what $970,000,000 taught me about life, fake friends, and making new ones: A common intuition about wealth and success is that
Contents The Short Answer A common question I hear in my technical leadership workshops is, “How many people can someone (e.g. a Tech Lead or Engineering Manager) lead?” What’s the magic number? My answer is generally 5-7 people for an experienced leader, but many factors affect the final number.…
The virtual office skeptic says, “we can’t go fully remote, because the serendipity of personal connection is too important.” The theory goes that watercooler conversations and elevator encounters add up to an emotional bond. Add to that the happy coincidence of overhearing a conversation where you…
I’m enjoying Marianne Bellotti’s book Kill It With Fire, which is a kind of guidebook for software modernization projects (think: migrating legacy systems). In Chapter Five, she talks about the importance of momentum for success, and how a crisis can be a valuable tool for creating a sense of…
Again and again, I run into situations in which change agents in organizations that I work with run into organizational boundaries that stop them from moving forward in a way that makes perfect sense
Steve Potash, the bearded and bespectacled president and C.E.O. of OverDrive, spent the second week of March, 2020, on a business trip to New York City. OverDrive distributes e-books and audiobooks—i.
Photo: Pavel Brodsky A huge thanks to Ellen Fishbein for collaborating for months on this essay with me. It would’ve been twenty thousand words long, instead of just a thousand, if not for her. The ov
Here at Intercom, we believe in shipping as quickly as possible. It breathes life into your engineering team, and teams across the company, as customer issues and requests are resolved quickly and eff
In our previous article, Using Display Modules to Enable Rapid Experimentation on DoorDash’s Homepage, we discussed the concept of Display Modules, and how we built them to speed up development and im
Culture Change and Conflict at Twitter Two years ago, the company brought in a blunt executive to make things move faster and to promote diversity. Then the problems began. Credit...Matt Rota By Aug.
Jason Yip 4 min read· May 31, 2021 -- By “high growth”, I mean in terms of employee count and roughly doubling or more every year. Even at slower growth rates, some of the phenomena I’ll describe may be relevant. Two reasons why building teams in high growth is difficult: can’t assume stable teams,…
The Ethicist How Much Must I Give Up for My Schizophrenic Brother? The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on weighing a sibling’s needs against your own — and more. Credit... Illustration by Tomi Um By Pub
Today, ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming released an internal letter announcing he will transition to a new role at the end of 2021, focusing on long-term strategy, corporate culture, and social responsi
Back in the early 2000s, it was exciting to blog and use social networks to create our own media and move away from the traditional media outlets. That was the pull that got me into blogging and got m
Apple Inc. injected a new level of intrigue in its bitter court fight with Epic Games Inc., suggesting the Fortnite maker was acting as a stalking horse for Microsoft Corp. and withholding evidence. T
4 min read· Apr 19, 2021 -- The open RSS standard has provided immense value to the growth of the podcasting ecosystem over the past few decades. By publishing audio to the RSS standard, creators can
I. The controversy that embroiled enterprise software maker Basecamp this week began more than a decade ago, with a simple list of customers. Around 2009, Basecamp customer service representatives beg
Culture Kat Tenbarge 2021-03-16T22:12:49Z Facebook Email Twitter LinkedIn Copy Link Read in app David Dobrik, left, and Dom Zeglaitis, center. The accuser is not pictured. Kevin Mazur/AMA2020/Getty Im
Credit... Levon Biss for The New York Times The Great Read Feature How Two British Orthodontists Became Celebrities to Incels The Mews, a father-son team of orthodontists, have an unusual theory about
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The best attempt I’ve seen at building the perfect consumer app Dispo: the invite-only camera app you might’ve seen your Twitter feed obsessing over this weekend. As someone who’s usually bearish on m
Turn site visitors into readers Casual visitors aren’t ready to subscribe yet; but they’re here and ready to pay. Let them Pay-Per-Read. Increase your market potential Only 8% of Americans have 2 or m
I promised one final piece on TikTok, focused primarily on the network effects of creativity. And this is that, in part. But it discusses a bunch of other topics, some only tangentially related to Tik
To what extent are new companies, particularly those in new spaces, pushed versus pulled into existence? Last week I wrote about how Tesla is a Meme Company: It turned out, though, that TSLA was itsel
From each of our two experiences starting out as introductory-level engineers at Box, to becoming first-time managers overseeing five-person teams, then directors overseeing 30-50, and ultimately VPs managing hundreds, we've experienced software engineering from every angle. At every step of the…
We knew this to be true: Computers could run fast and hot, or slow and cool. For laptops in particular, the best you could hope for is a middle ground: fast enough and cool enough. But if you wanted a
YouTube today announced it’s launching a new feature that will push commenters to reconsider their hateful and offensive remarks before posting. It will also begin testing a filter that allows creator
I. Andreessen Horowitz and the backdoor pilot Hey, did you hear Elon Musk went on Clubhouse? The media and venture capital worlds were abuzz this weekend in advance of, during, and after Musk’s appear
We embraced speaking directly to our audience — from the builders of the future to the tech-curious — right as the firm was started in 2009. It started out with blogging about why we invested in a fou
It’s the refunds that blow my mind. You may be surprised to know that, despite the fact I live in Taiwan, I have an Amazon Prime account. It turns out that Amazon ships to Taiwan, which is particularl
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