micro

Excellent hot morning in progress. This July is delivering on its promise of being hot and sweltering. 6 months of this and 6 months of spring / fall are acceptable to me.

One advantage of so many trees on my property and surrounding is that nights such as tonight it’s a literal firefly festival. Just beautiful. Now if only my neighbors shut off their backyard and front yard lights!

Yeah threads is too much at this time for me. Gonna wait it out until it simmers and settles. This whole notion of feeding Facebook even more data than I already do is 🤮

I spend a decent amount of time thinking about *what makes a good product* (after all, I am a product manager!). The answer to this is obviously very subjective to the person, but my take is that a good product is not necessarily the most polished or feature rich product out there, but its the one that makes you achieve something quickly, and then gets out of the way. You dont think about it. You don’t need it. You don’t keep wondering if you missed something by not using it enough. But you know thats the product you use if you want to do something specific.

I dont claim to have launched products that are used by billions of people, and frankly at this point in career I am not sure I want to either. I dont find joy in solving for scale, which is very weird coming from me who works at a place where everything is in fact about *scale*. My problem with *scale* it biases everything. At a scale of 100s of millions of users you can make a good faith argument to build a feature just because, and you will find enough people to give you *data* to validate that decision. But just because you can, even with data backing it, doesn’t mean you *should* in fact build it.

Building truly great products is not about saying no all the time, but really deciding when is it *just enough* to *not* build any more. That simplicity of imagination is what let Jobs/Ive build the first unibody MacBook Pro. I do not think Apple has built a more perfect device in its history. Everything about that product/device was just perfect, inside and out. I’ve watched the intro video to its design countless times marveling at how it just got everything right all at once. Everything else that has followed that design has only made it either more complicated, less featurefull and everything in between, but nothing has come close to the perfection of that particular product. And then, just like everyone else, Apple fell victim to *scale*.

Anyhow, I am glad I am right now working on product that is not the most shiny object in town, but I know that when its out, it will be enough to get the people we are looking achieve the things we want them to achieve – it has no pretty Ux, no snazzy features, nothing to drive engagement – but it will work. And sooner or later in 3 years the product is going to be a feature ridden gunk anyway, so I am going to savor its release when it happens!

The kind of security checks we had to go through just to do the east wing tour of the White House just a few weeks back makes it all the more hilarious and interesting that a packet of cocaine made it through on the west side. And the person who left it may never be found it seems – that seems like a big load of BS to me. Sure they can, they don’t want to. They want to hurt it asap so it doesn’t come off like it was Hunter’s lol, which I have to say as a kid is such a fucking burden on his parents. I applaud Bidens for standing up for him repeatedly over and over again and they must love him a lot, but that kid is such a fucking liability.

The people I follow on Instagram are the same people I bitch about on micro.blog so now the fact that half the family wants to follow me on Instagram is already a debbie downer for me lol. I can see why they did that, but it just makes it feel like when Google+ launched and they forced the whole circle nonsense on us based on existing gmail contacts and refused to let the social network grow organically. Feels like threads gonna have that same fate already.

Its been almost a year since I left the startup and joined back the mothership. When I had joined the startup, they had just gotten a new round of big funding, became a tech unicorn in education space and showed immense promise. They were making good hires, setting up for scale and product growth. Except none of that happened. Thanks to a completely wayward egomanic CEO, everything fell apart so quickly within a year that a majority of executives quit. Luckily for me I had an opportunity to jump ship but boy has it fallen even further. I sometimes look at Glassdoor reviews for the company are they depict an entirely miserable workplace and I feel so bad because some of the most passionate people I worked with also worked there. There are still people working there I am in touch with and they paint an outlook thats even worse than Glassdoor suggests. My own personal experience at the startup has taken away all my interest and enthusiasm I had for startups after being in big enterprises for so long. Now I feel like working here is slow, but at least not chaotic!

Its incredible, in first 6 months of the year I read 4 books. This is a historic achievement for me – maybe just maybe I can go back to my reading days again! I like the signs. I have micro.blog to thank a lot for this honestly!

Men more often than women tend to show off their *practical* side because they feel that thats what let them make better decisions. I value rationality in anyone, but honestly think it makes people boring when they become *too* practical and I see more men belong to that club than women. Every decision is rational decision for them, and nothing is worth doing if its not practical enough. Even the low stakes decisions in life become rooted in practicality instead of you know…. just winging it and seeing how it goes. Its ok to make emotional decisions as well, and its ok to feel elated or dejected if that emotional decision pan out, but how much more boring is to make a decision thats so rooted in rationalism that there is nothing novel anymore to find out. We men could do better than just play that *rational* card all the time and learn to make *emotional* decisions that may or may not pan out. Its ok, its life not a math test.

Finished Silo last night and such a *LOST* feel to it. We enjoyed the series but are left with familiar feelings post mystery box reveal. The fact that its based on a completed book series gives me hope that they’ll not turn it into an extended drama and it will have a sensible end.