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12 articlesHow to Build a Scalable Web Service?
How to build a scalable web service? One word: Split. The AKF Scale Cube tells us the three dimensions of "splitting": horizontal scaling; business splitting; data partitioning.
Why Career Mentors Cannot Help You Get Promoted?
Research shows that women have more career mentors than men, yet they get promoted less. Career mentors cannot help you get promoted, but career sponsors can. A sponsor should be your: career investor and beneficiary; direct influencer of promotions; resource sharer; amplifier.
What are the use cases for key-value caching?
The essence of Key Value Cache is to reduce data access latency. Common strategies for cache design include read-through/write-through and cache aside. The specific strategy should be chosen based on your business needs.
Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action? The Golden Circle
People don't care about what you do; they care about why you do it. Simon Sinek introduced a Golden Circle that starts from the inside out: Why? How? What? Unfortunately, mediocre leaders typically think from the outside in.
Bullshit Detector
Compared to deliberate deception, the cost of being exposed after bullshit is lower. The bullshit detector is a hypothetical psychological anti-deception mechanism. The key to countering bullshit lies in recognizing the asymmetry of risk; if the other party has no stakes but advocates for something, they profit when successful, but only you suffer losses when it fails, then they are bullshitting you.
Managerial Leverage
The introduction of managerial leverage is aimed at high output. Leverage should be applied in management activities such as gathering information, providing information, decision-making, nudging, and leading by example. In summary, improve time management skills, reduce interruptions; focus on activities that create positive leverage to increase leverage ratios.
Nigel Marsh: How to Make Work-Life Balance Work
Work often fundamentally conflicts with family life. If you don't set limits and design your life, companies and governments will drain you. Balance should occasionally be within your reach. Life is diverse; seizing the right moment can yield significant returns from small investments.
Energy-level Playbook
There are four levels of energy: zombie, robot, human and rock star. Zombies had better not work or do little chore work. Robots do preset work. Humans do exploratory work. Rock stars can do anything and the best job for them is creative jobs.
Energy Level Playbook
Energy levels can be divided into four categories: Zombie, Robot, Mortal, and Transcendent. What can you do in each of these states? Zombie: Don't work or do mindless tasks; Robot: Do preset tasks; Mortal: Engage in exploratory work; Transcendent: Innovate.
Scarcity: How We Fall into Poverty and Busyness
How to break free from the trap of being busy and poor: drive yourself to do important things; conserve cognitive bandwidth; start acting when resources and bandwidth are abundant, applying cognitive bandwidth to what truly matters; transform fragmented but necessary reminders into one-time actions; maintain slack to handle unforeseen events; plan tasks reasonably and proceed in stages.
Chen Zhiwu: The Three Dimensions of Wealth Creation Ability
Depth: The things that can be produced in a unit of time; Breadth: The expansion or innovation of the market's geographical scope across regions and countries, creating new industries such as consumer goods, industrial varieties, and spatial expansion; Length: Time dimension - financial securities.
What are the basic competitive strategies?
There are three types of competitive strategies: Cost Leadership Strategy - having lower costs than competitors; Differentiation Strategy - highlighting the differences between your products and those of competitors; Focus Strategy - providing specific services to a particular group of customers.
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.
