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12 articlesDebounce, Throttle and RequestAnimationFrame
Debounce groups a sudden burst of events into a single one; throttle guarantees a constant flow of executions every X milliseconds; requestAnimationFrame is a throttle alternative. They are web techniques to optimize UI events handling and make transitions smoother.
Why It Is So Hard to Make a Good Decision
The spotlight effect: People only see what they see and want to see, making it hard to step outside of their own perspective. Therefore, it's important to frequently ask oneself, "Why do I think this way?" There are four major challenges in the decision-making process, along with the following solutions: broaden options; test assumptions with facts; view decisions from a distance; prepare for mistakes.
How to Predict Trends?
To make predictions, one needs to deeply understand the past and present, see beyond the surface to grasp the essence, and thus be able to extrapolate into the future. Unfortunately, most people can only see the present. There are two ways to gain a strategic high ground that is easy to defend and hard to attack: independent innovation and riding the wave of change. Common trends include skyrocketing fixed costs, deregulation, prediction biases, incumbent effects, and attractor states.
How to Quickly Build Reputation?
How to quickly build reputation? Solve the big problems that everyone wants to solve but cannot. In
PWA for Mobile Web
A progress web can be put to the home screen by Chrome and Safari, work offline with service workers, increase engagement with push notification and improve the conversation rate for new users across all browsers. That’s why more and more websites start to implement PWA.
Will Larson's Lessons from Digg v4 catastrophic launch
Launching v4 was the chance for Digg to return to their rightful place. They implemented write-through-cache Memcached through Cassandra bottleneck. However, MyNews page was still broken every 4 hours. To keep the site running, rewriting is needed.
Where Does the Energy of a Good Strategy Come From?
The key to an effective strategy lies in channeling limited energy into the points that can generate the most impact. Common sources include: leverage; proximate objectives; chain-link systems; design; focus strategy; growth; advantage; external change; inertia.
The Core of a Good Strategy: Coherent Actions
Coherent and complementary actions refer to actions that directly support each other to create synergy; strategic collaboration can be designed and is centrally imposed on the system; centralization has its pros and cons, as the interests of various sub-organizations differ; organizational collaboration is time-consuming and labor-intensive, aiming for maximum efficiency and just the right coordination as the outcome.
The Core of a Good Strategy
The three fundamental elements of a good strategy: Diagnosis - simplifying the problem and identifying challenges; Guiding Policies - how to respond to challenges; Coherent Actions - a series of actions that mutually reinforce each other under the guidance of principles.
Why Are There So Many Bad Strategies?
Three reasons for bad strategies: making choices is painful; people dislike thinking and prefer templates; people often believe that human will can overcome all, thinking that attitude determines everything.
Designing very large (JavaScript) applications
Very Large JS App = a lot of developers + large codebase. How to deal with a lot of developers? Empathy and good programming model. How to deal with a large codebase? Code Removability/Delete-ability. Be careful with abstractions.
A Bad Strategy is Superficial
A bad strategy is formalism, characterized by four fundamental traits: empty rhetoric, obfuscation, strategy should not be a mere accumulation of grandiose terms; failure to confront challenges, mistaking goals for strategy; sub-goals that are irrelevant or unrealistic.
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.
