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12 articlesWhy Side Projects Should Be Stupid
The design lead at Spotify, with decades of experience in side projects, believes that successful side projects must be "stupid" to explore boldly and interestingly. Don't let complex issues like scaling, funding, and competitive analysis slow you down. Doing things is more important than learning.
How to write solid code?
Empathy plays the most important role in writing solid code. Besides, you need to choose a sustainable architecture to decrease human resource costs in total as the project scales. Then, adopt patterns and best practices; avoid anti-patterns. Finally, refactor if necessary.
Metrics for Measuring a Product
There are many metrics to measure the quality of a product: the number of active users, profit, transaction volume, retention rate, and more. To ensure better product development, it is essential to focus on the following metrics: improve retention rate, as high retention means high valuation; assess weekly growth rate, maintaining its level will lead to exponential growth; prioritize iteration speed. When it comes to metrics, we must approach them correctly.
Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas
Four main reasons why smart people have bad ideas: bad ideas are products of intuition; bad ideas prioritize being impressive over making money; bad ideas yield to fear of competition; bad ideas are too superficial. Therefore, smart people must clearly understand user needs and conduct user research to unleash endless potential and truly do smart things.
Introduction to Beancount.io
If you want to manage money in a better way, what you need is more understanding of your financial status. Beancount.io is such a tool that assists you by recording your financial transactions in text files and visualizing them into financial statements.
The Company's Technology and Market Quadrant Diagram and Gravitational Directions
The quadrant diagram of market and technology determines the company's market position. With the inflation of technology, excellent technologies tend to become mediocre, and mediocre companies adopt excellent technologies; companies with a market will have a larger market, while those without a market will have a smaller one.
Stratechery: Why Did Amazon Acquire Whole Foods?
Amazon's ambition to gain a share of all economic activities led it to enter the grocery service market. However, based on an analysis of Amazon's existing strategy and the cost disadvantages in fresh produce, it does not currently have a first and best supplier in grocery. Acquiring Whole Foods allowed Amazon to not only buy a retailer but also gain a customer for its existing business.
Understanding decentralized identity (DID and DIF)
An introduction to decentralized identity (DID) and the Decentralized Identity Foundation (DIF): what they solve, how they work, and why they matter.
Representative Heuristics — Making Judgments Under Uncertainty
Representative heuristics are one of the methods people use to judge probabilities and valuations. During this process, people often mistakenly equate representativeness with probability. To better assist in probability judgments, the following factors should be considered: base rates, sample size, correct understanding of odds, predictability, caution against overconfidence leading to an illusion of validity in predictions, and regression to the mean.
9x Effect
Companies believe that innovation is effective only when they create new products, but they often overestimate new products by three times. Consumers, on the other hand, frequently underestimate new products by three times and often hold a skeptical attitude toward them. Therefore, a new product must be nine times better than existing alternatives to capture the market.
The Problem with Tech Unicorns
Over the past 25 years, the rise of cloud computing, smartphones, and social media has led to rapid growth for unicorn companies. However, those tech giants still struggle to find a path to high profits. Some well-known companies have demonstrated that wealth primarily comes from: large markets, high margins, and natural monopolies; limited physical assets and light regulation.
Introduction to Architecture
Architecture serves the entire lifecycle of software systems, making them easy to understand, develop, test, deploy, and operate, with the goal of minimizing the human resource costs for each business use case. O'Reilly's
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.
