How It Actually Works #145
By: Trevor Mckendrick
Tags: Complexity, Going Viral, Clojure, Twitter, Mormonism

The Best in Technology

Why Software Ends up Complex (article)

Something I’ve always believed and have philosophically doubled down on the last few years is the importance of any group effort having a clear and top-down vision.

If not you end up with problems like this:

“Every feature request has a constituency — some group who wants it implemented, because they benefit from it. Simplicity does not have a constituency in the same way, it’s what economists call a non-excludable good — everyone benefits from it. This means that supporters can always point to concrete benefits to their specific use cases, while detractors claim far more abstract drawbacks.”

You can’t win these types of arguments with abstractions. This is one reason why governments grow and don’t get smaller. This is why more rules exist every year in almost any type of organization — because you can point to the bad things the rule eliminates, but you can’t point to the positive things the rule prevents from existing.

Updating Stripe’s Payment API (article)

An inside look of what the best technology firms are capable of. An extremely large, technical, and high stakes change to the core of their fundamental product.

A theme I’m seeing more often is that simple is not the same as “small in number”.

E.g. having more abstractions that are clearer is better than fewer abstractions that are more difficult to grok.

An example from the physical world: the concepts of a spoon, fork, and knife are simpler than the concept of a spork. Yes there are more pieces that need to be understood — but at first glance you’d more quickly understand the purpose of a spoon/fork/knife than you would a spork.

See also the talk I linked to last week about the difference between simple and easy from the creator of the programming language Clojure.

Domain Name Investing is still a thing (article)

I feel like domain names have peaked but I could be wrong? Adam Doppelt’s 3 week project turned into a $1m portfolio.

OnlyFans is a huge business (article)

A perhaps unsurprising example of a business that’s flourished because of Covid.

The Best in Religion

The Most American Religion (article)

The Atlantic’s Mormon writer talking about Mormonism. Linking here because I agree with the title — everything good about America is also present in some way in Mormonism.

Self reliance, entrepreneurship, the journey from outsider to “made it”, etc.

I was raised as Mormon one could be and thos It’s something that kept me in even when I no longer really believed.

O Jerusalem! (book)

One of my favorite reads this year — gives the history of how Israel came to be.

I learned that Israel was created basically out of a capture the flag moment — the British had occupied the area for a long time, and then one day they just decided to leave.

Whoever could bunker down and keep the area got it.

Civilians had to flee. This about a woman who left her home because of the fighting, expecting to return shortly resonated deeply with me because of Covid:

“She left the next morning, persuaded, as so many others would be, that her departure was temporary. She was wrong. Katy would enter that house only once again in her life…. Its roof would be riddled with shell holes, its doors and windows gone, the parquet floor on which her guests had danced charred with cooking fires and covered with bloodstains and human excrement. She would sit on a crate and weep.”

The Best in Tweets

List of companies that grew primarily through SEO by Lenny Raichitsky

His lis was Pinterest, Thumbtack, Expedia, Wayfair, GrubHub, NerdWallet, Trulia — see the replies for a bunch of others.

The Best in Storytelling

Hunter-Gatherers Value Storytelling Over Hunting Skills (article)

They studied a hunter-gatherer community in the Philippines and found that the residents valued amazing storytellers even more than good food foragers.

It’s stories & narrative all the way folks — if you want to do anything that’s bigger than yourself, other humans have to be personally bought in & on the same page. And the way to do that is using stories & narrative to create a compelling vision of the future.

The Journalist and the Pharma Bro (article)

The story of how the journalist who was covering Martin Shkreli ended up becoming his life partner.

Interesting on a few levels, not least of which I’ll pose to you as a question: why is Martin Shkreli in prison?

And Finally…

You can share this edition of the newsletter using any of these links for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, or via email.

I’ve been publishing this newsletter for 3 years — I try to make it one of the best things in your weekly inbox. If you want to support How It Actually Works you can do that here.

See you next week!

Trevor

PS — If you’d like to sponsor the newsletter please reply to this email for info