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12 articlesCognitive biases
Cognitive bias codex refers to procedures of the brain such as what should be remembered from memories. For things without enough information, brains imagine things to fill in characteristics. When there is too much information, we are drawn to notice something has changed.
Web App Delivery Optimization
There are two golden rules for web app delivery optimization. One is to minimize latency and the other is to minimize payload. We also have some advice for applying protocol-specific optimizations.
How Does the Economic Machine Work?
In the economic growth curve, productivity rises steadily, and moderate "credit" helps improve productivity. Under the control of the central bank, the short-term debt cycle generally lasts 5-8 years, but when people borrow without repaying, it leads to long-term debt accelerating beyond income, forming a long-term debt cycle. When the debt burden becomes too heavy and reaches the peak of long-term debt, the economy enters a deleveraging period.
What kind of things are worth doing?
To keep up with the times, we need to cultivate our own good habits and effective "systems." Good habits lead to skills; while skills can be replicated, a good "system" is hard to develop. How can we cultivate a good system? By building a worldview that serves the people; utilizing various effective methodologies; and creating our own reuse and positive feedback systems.
Thinking Software Architecture as Physical Buildings
Architecture is the shape of the software system. It helps us to focus more on the structure of the system than on its features and functions. The ultimate goal of architecture is to save human resources costs per feature.
How to Get Lucky?
How to get lucky? Participate in new activities and experience new things; trust your intuition and interests; be optimistic, when playing soccer, take a few more shots, and you'll eventually score; be good at finding the silver lining in bad situations. The essence of good luck is creating opportunities, discovering opportunities, and having the courage to act.
Debounce, 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.
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.
