Blog
- 349Aug 11, 20181 minarchitecture
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.
Read more → - 350Aug 10, 20182 minpsychology
Knowledge workers, how to take truly restful breaks?
People will burn out when having too much pressure. A truly restful break can help them to recover willpower and the power of attention. To take truly restful breaks, you need to fully switch off, take short breaks early and often and get out of the office.
Read more → - 351Aug 7, 20182 minweb
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.
Read more → - 352Aug 6, 20181 minweb
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.
Read more → - 353Aug 5, 20182 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 354Aug 1, 20183 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 355Aug 1, 20181 minideas
How to Quickly Build Reputation?
How to quickly build reputation? Solve the big problems that everyone wants to solve but cannot. In
Read more → - 356Aug 1, 20182 minweb
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.
Read more → - 357Jul 30, 20181 minproduct
MMRs, Neutralizers and Differentiators
There are three types of product features: MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. Customers often provide feedback on MMRs and neutralizers. The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator.
Read more → - 358Jul 26, 20181 minsystem design
ACID vs BASE
ACID and BASE indicate different designing philosophy. ACID focuses on consistency over availability. In ACID, the C means that a transaction pre-serves all the database rules. Meanwhile, BASE focuses more on availability indicating the system is guaranteed to be available.
Read more → - 359Jul 26, 20181 minsystem_design_and_architecturestory
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.
Read more → - 360Jul 24, 20182 minsystem design
Replica, Consistency, and CAP theorem
Any networked system has three desirable properties: consistency, availability and partition tolerance. Systems can have only two of those three. For example, RDBMS prefers consistency and partition tolerance and becomes an ACID system.
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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.
