Blog
- 553Aug 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 → - 554Aug 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 → - 555Aug 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 → - 556Jul 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 → - 557Jul 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 → - 558Jul 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 → - 559Jul 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.
Read more → - 560Jul 16, 20182 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 561Jul 14, 20183 minwebarchitecture
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.
Read more → - 562Jul 13, 20182 minstrategy
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.
Read more → - 563Jul 13, 20181 minwebsecurity
CORS vs CSP
CORS allows a site (data provider) to give permission to another site to read the data using the visitor’s browser and credentials. CSP allows a site to prevent itself (data consumer) from loading content from unexpected sources as a defense against XSS.
Read more → - 564Jul 12, 20181 minstrategy
The Advantages and Disadvantages Change with Perspective
Things themselves are neither good nor bad; it all depends on people's thoughts. Just like the legend of David and Goliath, the story of Walmart defeating Kmart, and Andy Marshall's strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War arms race, advantages and disadvantages can be transformed. When we discover our shortcomings, instead of feeling frustrated, we should change our perspective and approach.
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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.
