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12 articlesMark Sellers: Technology Is Not an Economic Moat
An economic moat refers to a company's ability to maintain a competitive advantage over its rivals, protecting long-term profits and market share. Elements that do not constitute an economic moat include: technology; extensive reading; master's degrees or other degrees from top universities; experience. Elements that constitute an economic moat include: economies of scale and scope; network effects; intellectual property; high customer switching costs.
Past Work Experience Interview
A guide to past work experience interviews: how to describe projects compellingly, highlight challenges, and demonstrate learning and leadership.
What is Apache Kafka?
Apache Kafka is a distributed streaming platform. Its features include a distributed publish-subscribe (pub-sub) messaging system that simplifies N ^ 2 relationships into N, allowing publishers and subscribers to operate at their own rates; ultra-fast zero-copy technology; and support for fault-tolerant data persistence.
US Navy Pre-Flight School: How to fall asleep in 120 seconds?
In the battle ground, if you don’t sleep, you’ll burn out pretty quickly and make bad decisions. The principle for falling asleep within 120 seconds is to relax the whole body one part by another and not to think.
U.S. Navy Method: How to Fall Asleep in 120 Seconds?
On the battlefield, if you don't sleep, you will quickly feel exhausted, make wrong decisions, feel burdened by your mission, and become a liability. You can fall asleep quickly by: gradually relaxing your entire body, avoiding thoughts; stretching your body; relaxing your facial muscles, slowing everything down; relaxing your upper body; relaxing your legs; thinking of nothing at all.
The Characteristics of a Good Manager
What characteristics do good managers possess? Morality, benevolence, righteousness, propriety: The Dao represents truth, the laws governing the development of the world and humanity; virtue is about serving the people and creating products and services that the public enjoys efficiently; benevolence is empathy; righteousness is fairness and justice, rewarding good deeds and punishing wrongdoings; propriety involves adhering to rules and behaving in accordance with the needs of the community.
China Academy of Information and Communications Technology Blockchain Research Report
Blockchain is a highly secure and tamper-resistant accounting technology maintained by multiple parties, also known as distributed ledger technology. Based on whether the system has a node admission mechanism, blockchains can be classified as: permissioned chains; consortium chains; private chains; and permissionless/public chains. Applicable scenarios include new types of databases, multiple business entities, mutual distrust, and strong business interrelations.
How Does Facebook Store a Large-Scale Social Graph? TAO
The efficiency of updating the edge list of the social graph in Memcached is too low, the logic for managing the cache on the client side is complex, and it is difficult to maintain consistency in database reads after writes. How to solve these three problems: accelerate read operations, efficiently handle large-scale reads; complete write operations in a timely manner; improve the availability of read operations.
Why Startups Need to Innovate?
All successful companies are different: each successful company gains a monopoly in a field by solving a specific problem. All failed companies are the same: they did not escape market competition. If a startup merely imitates the products and services of industry leaders without innovation and targets the same market, people will not buy into it.
What is the Market?
The definition of a high-tech market: existing and potential users; who have a demand for a certain type of product or service; and these individuals reference each other when deciding on the products to purchase. Mutual referencing is the key to market success.
What is the Chasm in the Technology Adoption Lifecycle?
High-tech companies often introduce disruptive innovations. The user growth of these products follows an S-curve. Developing a high-tech market means smoothly transitioning this cycle from left to right, breaking through one user group at a time. Leveraging the momentum of the left-side user group makes it easier to market products to the right-side user group. Observing the technology adoption lifecycle reveals two chasms and one gap.
How to Design Robust and Predictable APIs with Idempotency?
Why are APIs unreliable? Networks can fail, and servers can fail. Three principles to solve this problem: the client uses "retry" to ensure state consistency; the retry requests must include an idempotent unique ID; retries must be responsible, such as following an exponential backoff algorithm, because we do not want a large number of clients to retry simultaneously.
About Tian Pan
I'm Tian Pan, an engineer-founder focused on agentic engineering — building autonomous AI systems and scaling engineering teams. I write practical guides on system design, technical leadership, and shipping with AI agents. Previously an early engineer at Uber, Brex, and IoTeX.
