A week hiatus

Alejandro Napoles
July 28, 2023

Hey folks, I’m going to take the next week off from the newsletter. As a bit of an update, I have a few interviews already in the last stages, so hopefully some of them pan out in August.

Today will be a super quick newsletter.

You can't stop the business, or why rewrites fail | Swizec Teller

Rewriting code isn't a magic fix-all. Consider the opportunity cost, complexity of the old system, and estimation challenges. Instead of stopping all to rewrite or building new while maintaining the old, try incremental improvements and new code adoption.

swizec.com/blog/you-can-t-stop-the-business-or-why-rewrites-fail

Every dev, sooner or later, will hear the phrase “let’s rewrite”. When a rewrite starts to permeate the minds of the team, it can indicate, among other things, that coding new functionality in the application at a good pace is getting close to impossible, what could be a simple change takes significantly more time.

I remember vividly the frustration of trying to add a button and a few other simple things to a page and taking almost a week on it.

In Defense of Strategy

Channeling Execution in the Right Direction

www.notboring.co/p/in-defense-of-strategy

Execution without strategy is wasteful and tragic. Just as “Companies that have the best products, most talented people, and fastest growth are precisely the ones for which moats are most important,” companies that are the best at execution are precisely the ones for which strategy is most important. They’re the only ones that have a shot.

Many startups and founders swear by the mantra of “execution is everything”, forgetting that knowing in which direction to go and to use all that execution juice is equally relevant. Probably if more startups thought about strategy a bit more and did more discovery (talking to users, assessing their problems, testing assumptions and business ideas…) they would have more probability of success and reduce burnout.

Building and operating a pretty big storage system called S3

Three distinct perspectives on scale that come along with building and operating a storage system the size of S3.

www.allthingsdistributed.com/2023/07/building-and-operating-a-pretty-big-storage-system.htm

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