How have I found time for all this reading? I paused YouTube for 20 days. And thanks to severing my brain from the sticky tendrils of its video vortex, I’ve rediscovered the blessing that is my Kindle Paperwhite — especially in the black of night.

One of the immediate things I did after reading Atomic Habits on holiday was to switch to reading (paper or epaper) in the gaps I might watch a video. (Bus, bath, whatever). It's the One Weird Trick to read more books than usual this year.

What does it do to the people in the organization and the organization as a whole when the CEO jumps in and changes a decision in someone’s area of expertise? Even if the CEO is right, in the sense that the change increases the chances of survival?

Damage. Damage that needs to be repaired in order to restore an organization prepared to make good decisions next time.

A Kent Beck take on Founder Mode that I liked. Not partisan, but worried about the (very real) effect of learned helplessness caused by micro-management.

Micromanagement is bad. But getting into the details is great, even necessary. It only becomes micromanagement when you insist on dictating the details, especially over the objections of people with more context and domain knowledge.

Dave Feldman, a successful founder, on the straw-man arguments from the Founder Mode essay.

Aaron was, in a sense, my generation’s equivalent of Woz. It isn’t a perfect analogy. But as archtypes go, it fits well enough. They don’t even try to produce Aarons anymore. Everyone is trying to be Sam frickin’ Altman now.

Dave Karpf's take on Founder Mode -- that the hacker ethic has been relegated to the back and that it's now only the business people who get lauded in SV.

If you are hiring “professional fakers” that means you are a poor manager. One of the most important thing that leaders focus on is hiring the right people, and that takes experience, or training, or both. Founders tend to lack all of these things, so of course they don’t always hire great people. [...] As Allison Morrow puts it, founder mode is just another way of telling toxic bosses they are really great. And lord knows, that is not what Silicon Valley needs right now.

Ian Betteridge with not just an anti-pg post but a bit of sadness about how tech is not as exciting (unless you want to get rich) as it used to feel.

Maybe it’s ok to have multiple homes. I already knew before writing this that home isn’t defined by a location, or the time spent there. Home can mean different things to different people, and that’s perfectly okay.

I like it when an author goes to write one thing and ends up in a different place, but it's still coherent.

I used to rankle at the idea of Ireland as "home" -- that being such an ex-pat stereotype. I never had (and still never have) intentions of moving back there, so it felt silly to call it home. Even if it's where I grew up and have some family. I have family in England and Canada too, and I raised them in those places. Ottawa feels like home, for now.

But then I went back to Dublin last year and that felt like a kind of home, too. Although after my second trip it also felt like I was saying good bye to it.

We got to the first production version of IP, and have been trying for the past 20 years to switch to a second production version of IP with limited success. We got to HTTP version 1.1 in 1997, and have been stuck there until now. Likewise, SMTP, IRC, DNS, XMPP, are all similarly frozen in time circa the late 1990s. To answer his question, that’s how far the internet got. It got to the late 90s.

Welcome to the future. Sabotage it.

Understand your role, and with each update add to the body of evidence that you’re a good steward in that role. If people want your updates, they’ve entrusted you with something– a successful delivery of a product or feature, investment capital, company budget, their reputation, something. Convey that you value their trust and take stewardship seriously.

This is a short post full of truly excellent advice.

If there’ll be one future lesson from Slack, it’ll be that it’s not only possible to lose your lead from competitors advancing, but by regressing yourself.

I think this is both true and generally good to keep in mind when running a product which competes with others.

Sometimes you succeed by just being a viable alternative when an incumbent shuts down, declines or otherwise becomes unattractive. Workplace is shutting down and ceding its place to Zoom's competing product. When Yahoo! bought del.icio.us, people fleeing the popular service's new owners turned Pinboard into a much more successful business. Various bad press for Dropbox created opportunities for the small Dropbox competitor I once worked at, etc.