Have you seen a shooting star before? I went on a trip and saw two shooting stars over the weekend. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my wish in time. That made me realize this: it’s impossible to think of a wish in the blink of an eye unless you are constantly thinking about the wish. If you are already obsessed with the wish, you are already much closer to realizing it than you would be. So a shooting star is a test, not a wish maker.

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Software Engineering ⚙️

Gardening Platforms

This lengthy presentation is about adding compounding investments to the platform by aligning the ecosystem to the north star and reacting timely to the demands. I liked the visualization of how to rationalize a platform gradually (from slide #123 to #141) and the pull and push analogy between a platform and its customer (from #94 to #112).

Deprecation Notice: GraphQL for Packages

This notice surprised me. The value of GraphQL API is connectedness. When an API loses a core primitive, the value doesn’t decrease from n to n-1; it instead goes from n*n to (n-1)*(n-1). Is it signaling a shift away from GraphQL at Github?

People ❤️

The state of startup compensation, H1 2022

This report from Carta is a bit dated. But it still has good information on how location, company stage, and other factors affect an employee’s compensation.

Don’t Focus on Your Job at the Expense of Your Career

The article applies to me not just as an employee but also as a manager. How can I provide the time for my reports to do speculative or developmental activities? Better yet, how can I build that into the team’s standard work process?

Business 💰

The AI Art Apocalypse

I am not sure if you noticed, but I updated the logo for this newsletter with an image I created with DALL-E 2. The tool was sometimes frustrating, but I got what I wanted within 30 min. So when the author worries about the livelihood of some designers, I can understand that.

Interesting Finds 💡

Hackers Used Deepfake of Binance CCO to Perform Exchange Listing Scams

I suspect that the hackers chose to fake the Chief Communication Officer since they would be the most publicly visible, thus making deepfake most effortless. But as AI advances, it would be possible to use just a single image to fake a person. I worry that we won’t be able to trust a phone call from our spouses in the near future.

Mobile Usability for Cats: Essential Design Principles for Felines

This article is clearly an April Fool’s Day joke, but I had a good laugh while reading it. And you’d be surprised what some researchers are studying: Forming the Dog Internet.