Blog
- 481Aug 14, 20181 minsystem
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.
Read more → - 482Aug 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 → - 483Aug 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 → - 484Aug 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 → - 485Aug 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 → - 486Aug 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 → - 487Aug 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 → - 488Aug 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 → - 489Jul 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 → - 490Jul 19, 20181 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 491Jul 18, 20181 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 492Jul 17, 20181 minstrategy
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.
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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.
