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The hard truth is this; your Figma docs should be treated like a sketch on the back of a napkin. It should be somewhat accurate but it’s a tool that reflects the front-end, but: it ain’t your design system.

I want to talk about another kind of career ending mistake, one that affects more than just the unlucky few. Indeed, it's a mistake we're probably all making right now. And that's not planning the end of our careers.

The red bead experiment is deceptively simple because it provides a powerful message that is difficult for many to grasp. In summary, the misconception that workers can be meaningfully ranked is based on two faulty assumptions. The first assumption is that each worker can control his or her performance. Deming (1986, 315) estimated that 94 percent of the variation in any system is attributable to the system, not to the people working in the system. The second assumption is that any system variation will be equally distributed across workers. Deming (1986, 353) taught that there is no basis for this assumption in real life experiences.

In this post I aim to give you a framework for how to reason about [errors and warnings] systematically, with lessons learned from my recent years of work on programming language tooling for thousands of engineers at Google.

Conflict within a team is not always a bad thing. Happy teams are not necessarily the most productive. “If we're going to draw an arrow of causality, it's stronger to reword the statement as ‘a productive team is a happy team’,” says Leslie DeChurch, a psychologist at Northwestern University. “Nothing builds cohesion in a team like excellence.”

Avoiding conflict can discourage the creative friction that can generate new or better ideas. Conflict associated with tasks is different from that associated with personalities. Conflict over ideas can be helpful. But when conflicts get personal, things can get ugly.

Quadratic Voting is the mathematically optimal way to vote in a democratic community. Vote through collective decision-making, by allocating votes that express the degree of your preferences, not just direction.

In the conventional survey, people tended to gravitate to one end of the scale or the other. They expressed strong approval or disapproval, just as online reviewers tend to give five stars or none. In both cases, a strong statement costs nothing. In the quadratic poll, people faced a constraint. Expressing vehemence on one issue required them to weaken their stand on another. This constraint forced them to be more discerning about their passions.

More nuance to this than first realised.

The traditional populist view is that we should reform our social order through politics, things like mass education, elections, and civic engagement. That’s how Elizabeth Warren sees the world. She wants to strengthen the state so it can restore the social order, one that will tolerate less cheating and will involve the rule of law applied to the powerful.

The crypto response is different. The crypto response is to reject the social contract itself as irredeemably corrupt. Their goal is put pressure on the state itself by creating a money-like instrument outside of the public rule-setting capacity of the government. This is framed in the name of consumer choice, as in the state shouldn’t be able to boss you around and tell you what you can do with your money. After all, it’s yours. And anyone who doesn’t buy into this idea is inherently defending a set of collusive bailout-friendly institutions that we sometimes call liberal democracy.

Astro to me feels very much like a developer-facing tool. It helps me. It uses the Vite compiler and is super fast and pleasant to work with (Astro has rough edges, for sure, as it’s pre 1.0, but the DX is largely there). It scopes my styles. It lets me write SCSS. It lets me write components (in many different frameworks). But it also helps the user here. No more JavaScript bundle on the site at all.

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