Imaginable

It’s humbling to realise that there are just a handful of exceptional people breaking new ground, and the rest of us are simply catching up with derivative work—myself included.

Developing Taste

Overall, the main concern is that by facilitating this merger, the Swiss authorities have created an institution that is not just ‘too big to fail’, but ‘too big to save’.



how can engineers (or anyone) get better at design?

i get this question a lot. as someone who went from cs to design, here's a real path:

start with systems thinking
engs already get this. design is just systems for humans & our senses, instead of machines. read “thinking in

Nikita is a god at making viral iOS apps

His apps Tbh & Gas have both made and been sold for millions of dollars

Acquired by Facebook & Discord

Below are a list of hacks he uses in his new app Explode:

>70% of people are in permanent slight suffering because they are allergic to making ANY mentally tough decision when there is also an option to do nothing. rant:

Product designers should learn more about art direction

design tip: never settle for the first idea  

openpurpose’s work was remarkable because they were relentless experimenters  

the magic often lives in the 2nd, 3rd, or 10th iteration
keep pushing

ai will be proactive not reactive 

customers having to learn your product should disappear

you’ll be guided, prompted to click buttons, etc

@amritwt straight to managers, ceo, ppl with incentive for the company to go well

HR people play losers game, they just don't want to make mistakes. if you are bad but are from harvard they can just say "oh he was supposed to be good" and they have an excuse. so they'll dislike you

pretty much every cracked early stage founder i've met has either alr done @zfellows or is part of the next batch.  

seeing how impressive the ppl in the jan 2025 cohort with me were is a BIG reason why i grew the balls to do @InterviewCoder the way I did.

i'm surprised again and again how well timeblocking works. 

i just put todos in your calendar and then do them lol. 

pro tip: add 33-50% more time than you think

If the startup you work for doesn’t raise your salary immediately after a large fundraise, you should quit.

## **You’re Underestimating Your Market Value**

**Remote Startups Don’t Care About Degrees** – They care about *shipping*. Your portfolio proves you can deliver.

**Target Smaller Startups:** Early-stage startups (Seed/Series A) are desperate for builders. Apply to 20+ via AngelList, YC Workatastartup, and Designer News.

If I was a young web designer right now I would do the following:

1. Learn graphic design immediately. This is a must. Typography, grids, composition, spacing, colors, and things.

2. Create work you ENJOY. Always create the type of work you want to get. 

3. Study the best

Rian Doris shares actionable strategies to boost each of the five intrinsic motivators.

**Curiosity**

-   Reflect on how often you seek out learning related to your work outside formal hours. ​⁠
-   Leverage learning: Ensure the knowledge you gain has a positive, tangible impact on your work. ​⁠
-   Seek immediate feedback: Apply what you learn and observe real-time results to reinforce curiosity. ​⁠
-   If learning doesn’t lead to visible progress, change your work context so learning results in immediate feedback and impact. ​⁠

**Mastery**

-   Identify all skills and subskills that will advance your long-term goals at work. ​⁠
-   Practice those skills deliberately, like a professional athlete or musician—focus on the edge of your comfort zone and correct mistakes continuously. ​⁠
-   If you can’t improve at the skills required for your work, consider a career shift to something with unlimited mastery potential. ​⁠



**Autotelicity (Love of the Work)**

-   Assess how often you spontaneously dive into core activities of your work without obligation or deadlines. ​⁠
-   Ask yourself: What am I good at? Build your career around your strengths, as strengths are a trigger for flow and make work feel more like play. ​⁠
-   Trust that doing things you’re good at will help you develop love for those activities over time. ​⁠



**Purpose**

-   Do a gut check: Does your organization or work have an obvious purpose you can get behind? ​⁠
-   If not, consider switching careers. If there’s a glimmer of purpose, amplify it by articulating your life’s mission in a single sentence. ​⁠
-   Link each work task to your purpose daily to reinforce meaning and motivation. ​⁠



**Autonomy**

-   Reflect on how much control you have over the how, what, why, and when of your work. ​⁠
-   Increase autonomy perceptually: Reframe your current role as part of a broader life trajectory you’re designing. ​⁠
-   Increase autonomy literally: Build “FU” skills, network, and knowledge to create optionality and the ability to choose your path. ​⁠
-   Focus on the smallest part of your work life you can control, and outside work, spend time on something you fully own. ​⁠



**General Strategy**

-   Start with whichever intrinsic motivator is lowest and “juice it up”—raising one can give you energy to raise the rest. ​⁠
-   Aim to boost each motivator by five points per year on a scale of 1–10, until all five are maxed out.

Founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, on the importance of your network:

you’d be hotter if you logged out

If you don't shamelessly promote your work, every day for the next 10-20 years, you will get stuck doing someone else's work until you realize that nobody is going to pay you if they have no idea who you are.

if you’re still trying to squeeze into existing roles, think twice.

the only way to keep up with technology is to invent your own niche and commit to it. forget being a generic product designer, manager, or engineer – those titles can and will be replaced. what matters is your

how to hire a founding designer:

1. hire a right hand to the ceo that happens to design: good designers expand into product, great designers expand into business.

2. hire young, it allows for exceptionalism and controls for ego. find someone you’d invest in as ceo of their own

simplest piece of advice for new founders (and those that want to be):

1. charge from the get-go

2. don't postpone it until you shipped that one new feature 

3. you'll have new excuses afterwards

4. charge more than you think/are comfortable

5. it's easier to find 1 customer…

1. Product design is more about how things work and art direction is more about how they feel. 

2. Product design relies a lot of universal patterns and flows which can make experiences feel repetitive or soulless. With art direction baked into the process, you can craft a mood,

it's easy to forget that companies care about having skilled employees. for some it's a crazy thought, that companies would hire based of skills and not based of an arbitrary proxy everyone agreed on using

i've said it before and i'll say it again:

designers, you're uniquely positioned to become successful founders.

because as a designer, you engineer desire, and desire drives profit.

you shape what people want.
you turn ideas into emotions.

and that, at its core, is the fuel

the path to heaven feels like hell
as the path to hell feels like heaven

where you can 
take the harder path 
it will make you happier

frontier model still worse than text-davinci-001

who would have thought?

Sean is right! I gave up on MVVM with SwiftUI in 2022 and started to use the built-in architecture of SwiftUI. I have published a *lot* of material on it. If you are interested in learning here are few resources: 

1. doiOS Talk: 


2. Building Large Scale…

do u ever realize ur future self is probably talking shit about you

long overdue thread why i think university is useless for its only purpose, and why i dropped out of high school:

Think of the products you find delightful to use, or always go back to. What makes them special? Is it the attention to detail, the playful interactions, or the way they anticipate your needs? Those elements contribute to their appeal.
Always consider appeal, especially if you’re aiming for a product that stands out or creates an emotional bond with users. Tell a story with your software. Make something people love.
