mental models

Mental models as a mental model. The fact that we can recognize patterns, comprehend them and leverage that knowledge for our benefit.

Diminishing returns

Return on Investment

Search for explanations

Valley of death

Learn from cheap mistakes

Hedging (life insurance)

Technical debt (Debt in general but go through specific examples)

Compound interest

Debugging models (“Thanos it”)

Sharing is the root of all evil (or something such: concurrency)

Integration vs des-integration

• No permanent answers here.
• 2024-12-26: yesterday I spent practically the whole afternoon/evening trying to setup a single Windows machine. What a stark contract to iPhone upgrade I did just the night before. Integration/integration/integration has been Apple’s mantra and it has served them very well… with those who can afford it! :)
• Consider launching a new microservice. Pros are obvious - it’s independent! Everything else pretty much is cons (and I am going to ignore organizational issues): that independence also makes it more fragile because surges to traffic now independently hit it so it has to scale independently which means that it has to have a separate minimum pool. But if traffic surge is just on that service, then others can carry on, independently. So at the end it depends on your risk/cost assessment to figure out what is the best solution for now and foreseeable future.

Change one thing at a time

Very similar to ceteris paribus but coming from another direction.