Sebastian Bensusan
This page has the posts organized by category. The best ones are:
Management
Default blind. In a software business, it is hard to even know what is going on.
Lieutenants are the limiting reagent. Why don't software companies ship more products? Why do they move more slowly as they grow? What do we mean when we say "this company lacks focus"?
Everybody is the main character. People are motivated and engaged with the work only if they feel in charge of their own destiny. Make it clear to them that they are!
Team-oriented, outcome-oriented. Some people care about helping their team. Others care about achieving outcomes. It is important to know who is who.
Math intuitions on variance. This is a supplement to High Variance Management, where I build some intuition on the different probability distributions involved.
High Variance Management. How should you manage a team that is trying to achieve results out of the ordinary?
Software
When coordination pays off. Stories about Stripe Link where we have to do a lot of upfront coordination but it was worth it.
We need visual programming. No, not like that.. Why do we keep building visual programming environments? Why do we never use them? What should we do instead?
Industrial macros. Most industry codebases use macros, aka code-generation to solve practical problems like talking to the database.
Hiring from Big Tech. Some brief notes about the subject
Designing for support teams. Support agents spend their entire lives using the same software. Their needs are very different from consumer software. Here are some things to keep in mind.
Enterprise sales meets product development. What I’ve learned from selling enterprises while developing a new product. This is less of a guide and more of a cautionary tale.
Pricing APIs. Lessons from AWS S3 and others on how to price APIs.
Notes on UX and LLM integrations. I analyze 8 apps (ChatGPT, Notion, Perplexity, etc.) that use or integrate LLM and try to break down when and why they work well, or poorly.
How to: friction logs. Friction logs are a technique to improve your own products and understand others. You use the produdct the way a real user would and write down every single moment you experience some form of negative emotion.
Interfaces for logical migrations. This post explains how you can use interfaces to make data model and database migrations easier.
Breaking changes in JSON APIs. A collection of common breaking changes to JSON APIs for you to keep in mind as you design.
How to avoid breaking APIs. The main trick is to design them with extension in mind so that you won't have to break them later.
APIs as ladders. APIs are hard to learn. If you think about the learning curve of your API, you can design one that works for beginners, novices, and experts.
Misc
Creative kernels. Artists can often trace entire pieces around one idea that drives everything else.
The battlefield where arguments fight. A lot of speech is about convincing others of what type of arguments have merit
The birth of a (pseudo) currency. A dozen pseudo-currencies were issued in Argentina in 2002. How did that work? And why are they coming back in 2024?
Payments vs Transfers. Transfer means to move money but payment means "exchanging goods or services". A payment system has a lot more requirements than a transfer system and I rarely see the crypto ecosystem acknowledge these when building "payment" products.
Notes
Risk-takers decide faster. Unsurprising connection between risk and speed.
There Is No Antimemetics Division. Notes on the book.
The Perfectionists (book). A great book that covers the ideas and people behind modern industry.
The Market for Takes. Solving for the Twitter equilibrium
But I want to turn people into dinosaurs. Beware of what you actually want.
Vibes are music, arguments are lyrics. Losing My Religion is not about religion and Arguments are not about arguments
Incentives as selection effects. When you apply a new incentive, you select for a new population that prefers the incentive.
Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union. Notes from reading the book by Zubok
Twitter's Sith and Jedi. In Star Wars, hate gives the Sith power from the dark side of the Force beyond what the Jedi can reach. But when they lean into hate, they lose their soul to it. Twitter offers the same bargain as the Force.
Semantic gaps. Swedish has a specific word for each of the four grandparents: mormor, morfar, farmor, farfar. English doesn’t. So when you mention your 'grandma' to a Swede, they are left wondering 'which grandma?' even if it is not relevant to the story. That is a semantic gap.
The secondary market in gift cards. This post by patio11 covers a few things that I learned working with gift cards over the years.