Isaac Su

…part of the power of the social media business model is that it introduces a type of attention collectivism, where I’ll promise to pretend to care what you have to say (by clicking “like” or leaving a quick comment), if you do the same for me. This is incredibly seductive, though ultimately hollow.

— Cal Newport

This is harrowingly pertinent now that I’ve shared my very first blog post on LinkedIn. It’s hard to tell how well the post is received on my actual site, but I’m glued to the 👍 Like count on LinkedIn. 😩

I’ve been thinking on how we rationalise different kinds of development tasks that engineering teams get up to.

For example, critical bugs absolutely need to be fixed now. Product features and improvements satisfy our customers who pay the bills that keep the lights on. We’ve even made strides in substantial classes of Tech Debt in terms of an on-going operational “tax” of sorts.

Continue reading “The :grimace: Epic”

acquire your own damn digital land on which you can do whatever you want without anyone else trying to exploit you or influence your behavior.

— Beyond #DeleteFacebook: More Thoughts on Embracing the Social Internet Over Social Media

I chanced upon an old-school blog. The sort that was organised by months and years along the sidebar. It brought back memories of how I used to have a set of blogs that would be mass-loaded into tabs, and I would consume them one at a time.

It wasn’t so much about the content as much as it was about checking if the person had actually written anything new. It was a little daring, a little unsanctioned. There was no curation, no algorithm prioritising what you should read next. It was about the person. It had to be about the person, because there was nothing else to fall back on.

Also, so much more thought would’ve been put into crafting those posts, which made them worthwhile.

Paying attention to everyone else’s self-interest is in fact a precondition for one’s own ultimate well-being.

but…

There is something about the seductions of power that makes one lose sight of ethics and other people’s interests.

So much more to unpack here, but at very least, one should be able to appreciate the unceasing tension between the experience of wielding power and being an effective leader.