Systems share poorly
Hi!
Confused why you’re getting this? Give this a read.
An initially practical attempt to untangle two projects became a longer reflection on how to communicate systems effectively, why we can’t communicate our own, and why we fail at adopting those of others.
I can’t say that I get to an answer, but I share some frames and my own attempt at systems communication.
Systems Decay When Shared - Writing and Works
Systems compression, communication, and adoption with a bit of a meta example from this blog
Meta
Writing the above hammered home the fact that I’m pretty dissatisfied with my blog structure, so I’m re-doing it (again). The next version of it will likely appear (in a very basic form) with the next issue. Basically, the idea is Obsidian vault → homespun NextJS app via this plugin.
My primary reference point for what “good” looks like here is Maggie Appleton’s blog/garden/essay collection. You should give her writing a look, it’s great. She shares her blog’s source as well which helped the thinking.
The other primary for me is Matt Webb’s Interconnected, which is brilliantly simple. He pushes out solid thinking consistently, and then bundles that thinking into more concrete units later through talks, references, etc. Appleton’s work is closer to what I have in my head in that she seems to cultivate and revisit ideas over time vs. pushing out new posts. But both have an eye for “sizing” the presentation of their thinking, and putting it in a longer term frame of reference..
Links
Speaking of Matt, he released this prototype/essay on using AI agents that I suspect will be pretty influential. Give the git repo a look as well. I haven’t done a lot of development with openAI’s API directly, and seeing how this project was structured was a bit of a lightbulb for me both in terms of what I might want to try, and how to potentially approach it.
This episode of Awkward Silence, a research podcast, was excellent. So good, I went out and got the equity analysis textbook she recommended, which I’m working through now.
I’m giving Steven Sinofsky’s "Hardcore Software” a go, which my kindle claims is a 1700+ page personal account of life as Microsoft became the giant that it both was and is. If anyone is interested in doing a reading death pact (book club?) around this, lemme know.
I have standing “office” hours for mutual sparring, tangential discussions, and fun. Some of you are making use of this already and I’m loving it. calendly.com/alb/social