• Go
• Typescript
• Logic
• Tensorflow
• Various math concepts (thanks to project Euler)
• Neuroscience
• Automata theory
• Self-reproducing automata
• Cognitive science

Life doesn't have a meaning.
You define the meaning of your life.
What is a reasonable meaning to give to your life?
From an utilitarian perspective it should be about reducing pain or increasing pleasure for the largest population.
It's not clear which one is preferable.
If both are considered to be on the same axis, then it is a matter of identifying the changes that will lead to the largest relative increase.
Similarly to any optimization problem there are things that are easier than others to optimize and to improve, while others are neglectable in terms of improvement.
With this line of reasoning one would think the best they can do is to help those that have the least: food, shelter, education, happiness, freedom.
But is it worthwhile to improve the life of those people if they still die young or are unable to benefit from what you provided them?
Why should we care about most of the population?
Given our capitalistic environment, we want as many individuals as possible to accomplish work. The purpose of that work is meaningless, but in the grand scheme of things it is about survival.
We evolved from nothing, to atoms, then molecules, then in/organic compounds, then collections of molecules, proteins, RNA, DNA, cells, organs, humans.
At the electron, proton and neutron level we don't observe any specific goal other than reaching some level of stability within atoms through the different electronic shell levels.
Should we see structure as an indication of some type of implicit "design goal", i.e., structure implies intent?
Once we reach a certain complexity level we nowadays consider "life", we start using energy as a way to interact with the environment around us.
Eating is the foundation. Eating is how we acquire energy. We need to eat to have energy to accomplish anything.
Sleep is necessary as a mean to conserve energy.
We need energy for the sole purpose of looking for more energy. From this perspective we're engaged in a vicious useless cycle of finding energy, storing it, and using it to find more energy.
Energy used to achieve movement produces some heat due to friction with the environment.
As long as the environment we live in can self-sustain itself, that is, it can produce consumable sources of energy faster than they are consumed by those inhabiting it, we can live in that environment. When it ceases to be the case, the organisms that rely on this property being true are at risk of dying.
In our society, it's easy to have access to food and thus fulfill this need.

Procaryote cells separate themselves from their environment through a lipid bilayer. We can see this as being similar to a human being living in their own home.

Why did atoms turn into more complex molecules, which in turn, after many steps, turned into cells?
Why did this complexity arise instead of staying at very simple atomic levels?
In many cases different atoms aggregate together to form a molecule because this assembly is structurally more stable.
Why does the environment want more stable molecules over less stable ones?
Why are there atoms to begin with an not just soups of electrons, protons and neutrons?

In this article I define a 1-5 rating scale for books in order to be consistent across my evaluations. Given that rating books is somewhat subjective, introducing some amount of standardization on how I rate them should help with managing my reading.

Format of presentation:

Score (from 1 to 5) Representative emoji

• Satisfaction
• Words expressing the level of satisfaction
• Strength of recommendation

1 🤮

• unsatisfactory
• very bad, horrible, boring, repetitive, disagreeable to read, waste of time, can't force myself to read
• strongly not recommended

2 ☹️

• unsatisfactory
• bad
• not recommended

3 😐

• satisfactory
• neutral
• might want to read

4 ☺️

• satisfactory
• good
• recommended

5 😍

• satisfactory
• very good, great, amazing, exciting, intriguing, fascinating, full of new knowledge, can't stop reading
• strongly recommended

References

• https://readingbookslikeaboss.com/review-rating-scale/
• https://www.writoscope.com/reading/how-rate-book-rating-system/

In this article I want to explore different aspects of scaling a company that need to be taken into account if you're trying to grow exponentially. Generally when discussing about growth we consider revenue growth to be the metric we're measuring. One thing that is important, and that is considered throughout the article, is to be a profitable company. There's no point in growing exponentially if it is unsustainable or your expenses are always going to be superior to your profits.

In the best scenario, your business grows exponentially without requiring any additional human power. The second best case is that it grows sublinearly, meaning that as demand grows, the amount of people required to support the company grows slower than the demand itself. Past this point, growth either matches with how many people need to be hired, or worse, growth is slower as you hire more people. Here you may have exponential human power growth to get linear (or sublinear) revenue growth.

When hiring people, you need to be able to onboard them while having as little impact as possible on the existing employees. If existing employees need to spend time onboarding new employees, then nobody is working on product development or support during that period. Here again, you want the number of people responsible to onboard and train new employees to be smaller than the number of people being onboarded. In other words, you want the ratio of onboarded to onboarders to be higher than 1 to 1.

When a company grows exponentially, every time the company effectively double due to new hires, the culture is now at risk of instability. If for instance 100% of the existing employees were following the existing culture, and 100% of the new hires have a different culture, then there will be a culture clash with no specific half of the company being in control of culture. Unless culture continues to be managed through the process of onboarding, the initial group of people and their culture will rapidly become diluted.

We're not made to interact with dozen or hundreds of peers. As such, it is close to impossible for an individual to work with more than let say 10 direct peers. This means that teams or groups need to be created. This also means that interaction between teams needs to be managed somehow. Having multiple people from a team interact with another team leads to the implicit creation of a larger 20 people team, which does not work very effectively. On the other hand, having single points of contact between teams is a surefire way to have single points of failure. In this specific instance it is definitely necessary to have at least 1 or 2 redundancies.

It is also important to keep the people that have been at the company the longest. As the doubling period effectively divides by two the average duration an employee was with the company, losing those senior employees will speed up the drop in employee average tenure. This means that a lot of institutional knowledge will be lost along the way. This would also mean that you should possibly prefer to keep a senior employee at the cost of hiring a new employee, unless you believe that the amount of time necessary to onboard and be effective is lower than the average employee tenure.

The process of onboarding should be optimized as much as possible.

Anything that requires human power to scale linearly or superlinearly with itself needs to be optimized so that it grows sublinearly.

• Define and agree on the purpose of the one on one
• Define the topics to be discussed prior to meeting
• Track and update metrics that you care about every time you meet
  • e.g., Predictability, Ownership, Purpose, Progress, Belonging
• Discuss the status of those metrics if necessary
• Write in a shared document (between the two of you) what is discussed
• If any action items are defined during those meetings, use a task tracking system to keep each other accountable
  • Always define a deadline on tasks to indicate when the task should be revisited
• Avoid using one on one for status updates

References

• https://web.archive.org/web/20211112152135/https://www.impraise.com/blog/1-on-1s-for-engaged-employees-how-good-managers-run-them
• https://getlighthouse.com/blog/questions-ask-one-on-ones-manager/
• https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/leadership/1-1/