Quality

As someone who flies business class on American a few times per year, I am zero percent surprised that [American Airlines CEO Robert Isom] doesn’t know or care about the experience flying American’s competitors.

...I think it comes down to the classic idea of a “businessperson”. That an executive can just have a knack for “business”. That an MBA trains a would-be executive to run any sort of company. That’s probably the sort of executives who run most companies in most industries. But I don’t think it’s how excellent companies are led. Excellent companies, in any industry, seem to be led by executives who live and breathe whatever it is their companies do, and they stay up at night and wake up in the morning thinking about how to lead their industries in quality.

If the CEO’s primary perspective on the company is via spreadsheets — if it’s all just P&L to them — that company is not going to excel at quality. Or if they do excel at quality, they won’t for long.

It comes down to this annoying, upsetting, stupid fact: the only way to build a great product is to use it every day, to stare at it, to hold it in your hands to feel its lumps. The data and customers will lie to you but the product never will. And most product orgs suck because they simply don’t use the products that they’re building; they ship incremental nothings without direction because they’re looking at spreadsheets all day long filled with junk data nothings.

Great software is like a volume knob on an old hi-fi music system that feels well-tempered, well-oiled, with a satisfying touch, providing precision, reliability, and control. These knobs were a real sensation to touch and operate. Did they work better than standard knobs? Not really. Did they make the music sound better than crappy volume knobs? Not at all.

Only people who love volume knobs will care about volume knobs. People who love music don’t really care about the volume knobs. And among people who love software, only a few of them will genuinely care about its refinements. As long as it works, as long as it helps people do things, good enough is already plenty. A good tool is one that can help you do something faster, better. The materials of that tool, as long as it works, will only matter to snobs like me.

...A few years ago, I remember my friend Nabil replying to one of my iPhone home screen screenshots, saying something like, “Wow, you only have expensive apps on your home screen, so fancy!” So I guess I’m fancy when it comes to apps and software. I know that a great text editor won’t make me a better writer. Just like a premium car won’t get me to my destination faster because of speed limits. But sometimes it’s not about the outcomes, it’s about how you feel while achieving them.

When I design a piece of software, I start out by doing the obvious thing: sitting down and making a list of features I think it should have.

But in my mind, great software is not defined by its feature list so much as its feature matrix.

Software starts to become really useful not just when it hits a certain number of features, but when there gets to be a dense web of connections between features, that is, when each feature complements other features in the program.

...A great piece of software will have a dense feature matrix; that is, most features will interact somehow with most other features, and you’ll see a lot of check marks in the matrix.

Every product has bugs. More than we can ever fix. Papercuts, usability issues, imperfections. We all have a long backlog of fixes and improvements we intend to get to someday.

Polishing season is about turning that “someday” into “today”. It’s about dedicating time to quality work. To replace flaws and friction with polish and delight.

For the rest of the year, polishing will be our sole focus.

The Revelation
Ninety percent of everything is crud.

Corollary 1
The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.

Corollary 2
The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.

A tweet (xeet?) on my timeline asked: “what does polish in an app mean? fancy animations? clear consistent design patterns? hierarchy and colour? all the above?” I thought about it for a moment and got a familiar itch in the back of my brain. It’s a feeling that I associate with a zen kōan that goes (paraphrased): "A monk asked a zen master, ‘Does a dog have Buddha-nature?’ The master answered ‘無’. 無 (pronounced ‘wú’ in Mandarin or ‘mu’ in Japanese) literally translates to ‘not,’ as in ‘i have not done my chores today.’ It’s a negation of something, and in the koan’s case, it’s the master’s way of saying — paradoxically — that there’s no point in answering the question.

...In the case of the tweet, my 無-sense was tingling as I wrote a response: polish is something only the person who creates it will notice. It’s a paradox; polishing something makes it invisible. Which also means that pointing out examples of polish almost defeats the purpose.

...The polish paradox is that the highest degrees of craft and quality are in the spaces we can’t see, the places we don’t necessarily look. Polish can’t be an afterthought. It must an integral part of the process, a commitment to excellence from the beginning. The unseen effort to perfect every hidden aspect elevates products from good to great.

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Users are accustomed to a minimum of quality, and they expect that of all new products.

If our product does not [meet basic expectations of quality], people will automatically believe that it is a bad product and they will not take it seriously. It is not what they expect.

Hence my suggestion that the MVP has died and the MAP: Minimum Awesome Product was born.

I’ll concede that maybe with a pair of once-in-a-generation talent, a perfect mixture of group workaholism, a breakneck cadence, all living in the same house, a convergence of new technologies, quality internal tools, the explosion of the home computer industry, an original and extremely violent IP that appealed to the Metallica generation, and over a hundred shots on goal… you too might be able to capture lightning in a bottle and create a smash hit like “the entire concept of 3D video games”…

… but for the rest of us there’s prototypes.

Today's Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is about iterating early to build the highest quality competitor to an existing idea, not validating a novel one. This journey involves refining early ideas to compete in an existing market, narrowing the target audience, strategically using a waitlist for feedback, and recognizing indicators of early product-market fit.

...Building something valuable is no longer about validating a novel idea as fast as possible. Instead, the modern MVP exercise is about building a version of an idea that is different from and better than what exists today. Most of us aren’t building for a net-new market. Rather, we’re finding opportunities to improve existing categories. We need an MVP concept that helps founders and product leaders iterate on their early ideas to compete in an existing market.

One of the most common mistakes I see people make when looking at data is incorrectly using an overly simplified model. A specific variant of this that has derailed the majority of work roadmaps I've looked at is treating people as interchangeable, as if it doesn't matter who is doing what, as if individuals don't matter.

Individuals matter.

There’s a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like ‘reset password’. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.

Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.

...and why the era of worker-centered work tools may be over.

All the annoying bumps, barriers, and inconsistencies that start accruing around each new feature, if left unsolved, can limit the amount of value users can extract from the product. And if you don’t effectively identify and remove these barriers in a deliberate and structured way, any additional functionality will simply add to the problem.

Given all of the downsides of asphalt, you might ask "why is asphalt so pervasive if there are better options out there?" A lot of it comes down to cashflow. Cashflow is one of the biggest challenges in real estate development, since – it's a business where you invest a lot of money upfront and then earn it back over time afterwards.

Developers are often motivated by short-term incentives when choosing materials for construction projects. They need to manage immediate expenses and ensure the project is completed within budget.

...We need to stop planning project primarily by spreadsheets, where the dominating inputs are costs you can measure easily. There are factors that are not reflected in those calculations that not only affect the quality of the place you're creating, but also the financial burden that the community will have to bear for decades down the line.

It’s easy to dismiss craft and beauty as mere aesthetics, says Katie Dill, Head of Design at Stripe. But that changes in a crowded market. “The quality and details become the differentiation,” she says. “We’re eager to prioritize craft and beauty not simply because we think the world is better when it’s more beautiful, but also because quality is important for growth.” In fact, it was this focus on quality and details in the Stripe Optimized Checkout Suite that helped businesses using it see 11.9% more revenue on average.

Earlier this month, at Stripe’s annual conference, Katie sat down with Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, and Yuhki Yamashita, Chief Product Officer at Figma, to explore why craft and beauty are essential to user experience, business growth, and getting ahead of the competition. You can watch the panel discussion here, or read on to see highlights from their conversation.

The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price is forgotten.

Years ago I named what I believe is the correct alternative to the MVP: Simple, Lovable and Complete (SLC). We pronounce it “Slick.” As in: “What’s the ‘Slick’ version of your idea?”

Another benefit of SLC becomes apparent when you consider the next version of the product.

A SLC product does not require ongoing development in order to add value. It’s possible that v1 should evolve for years into a v4, but you also have the option of not investing further in the product, yet it still adds value. An MVP that never gets additional investment is just a bad product. A SLC that never gets additional investment is a good, if modest product.

1. Good design is innovative.
2. Good design makes a product useful.
3. Good design is aesthetic.
4. Good design makes a product understandable.
5. Good design is honest.
6. Good design is unobtrusive.
7. Good design is long-lasting.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly.
10. Good design is as little design as possible.

Is there a market for Michelin-starred web designers? I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s shrinking.

So why animate that header or spend time building a papier-mâché miniature set to photograph for the footer that few will see?

The same thing that drives a Michelin-starred chef to spend 12 hours agonizing over a difficult preparation for a small cube of food that will be devoured in a 2-second bite. The same reason that got me started in this field in the first place.

For fun, and for the art.

The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and what that means is — and I don’t mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way — in the sense that they don’t think of original ideas, and they don’t bring much culture into their product. And you say “well why is that important?” Well, you know, proportionally spaced fonts come from typesetting and beautiful books, so that’s where one gets the idea. And if it weren’t for the Mac they would never have that in their products.

And so I guess I am saddened, not by Microsoft's success — I have no problem with their success. They have earned their success — I have a problem with the fact that they just make really third-rate products. Their products have no spirit to them, no spirit of enlightenment about them. They are very pedestrian. And the sad part is that most customers don’t have that spirit either. But the way that we’re going to ratchet up our species is to take the best and to spread it around to everybody so that everybody grows up with better things, and starts to understand the subtlety of these better things. And Microsoft is McDonald’s.

So that’s what saddens me — not that Microsoft has won, but that Microsoft’s products don’t display more insight and more creativity.

Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers confidence in their own products.

I’ll try to convince you of two things:

1. Creating quality is context specific. There are different techniques for solving essential domain complexity, scaling complexity, and accidental complexity.
2. Quality is created both within the development loop and across iterations of the development loop. Feedback within the loop, as opposed to across iterations, creates quality more quickly. Feedback across iterations tends to measure quality, which informs future quality, but does not necessarily create it.

A short clip from Gary Hustwit’s documentary "Rams".

Many companies say they care about quality, but don’t have specific efforts dedicated to it. Here are some that do:

• GitLab
• HubSpot
• Linear
• Shopify
• Stripe

And the rest is history. The “Tech Debt Friday” was born. Why Friday? I do not remember, but it had something to do with the fact that some people were off on Friday so in practice, tech debt would not “steal” 10% sharp. Still a victory!

I've been doing this for decades, so I've found tools that can't get any better. Tools by a good blacksmith cut well for the entire day, as well as the next; occasionally, even on the third day. I'll think, maybe I should sharpen soon, even though it's still cutting okay.

So that's what it's like — it's all about how good your tools are.

How could this come to be? Are there good reasons—like it is better to release something initially that is not so good but on the right track and then let a community of inhabitants repair it using piecemeal growth? Or maybe it’s that lower cost, otherwise less effective technologies eventually push out overpriced and over-engineered competitors? Or is it that quality is like Vietnamese poetry and thus rarely appreciated? Is it really the statement of the base nature of human taste?

"Artists need to be in there from the start, making the argument for quality. The key to this thing is, for example, if you give an engineer a set of criteria which does not include a quality quotient, as it were—that is, if this sense of the quality, the character of the place, is not a part of his original motivation—he will then basically put the road straight down the middle. He has no reason to curve it. But if I can convince him that quality is absolutely a worthwhile thing and we can work out a way in which the road can be efficient and also wander down by the river, then we essentially have both: he provides his sort of expertise in that the road works, I provide quality in that it passes by the river. In that way, art gets built into the criteria from the beginning rather than being added on afterward."

Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

Among people who write about software development, there’s a growing consensus that our apps are getting larger, slower, and more broken, in an age when hardware should enable us to write apps that are faster, smaller, and more robust than ever.

...Why don’t we?

Prokopov’s answer is “software engineers aren’t taking pride in their work.” There’s some truth to that. But I strongly believe it’s the natural human state to work hard and make excellent things, and we only fail to do so when something repeatedly stops us. So instead of relying on the myth of laziness to explain slow and buggy software, we should be asking “what widespread forces and incentives are creating an environment where it’s hard for software engineers to do their best work?”

It has become exceedingly clear to me that the average company is not a suitable environment for someone that cares about the craft of programming. To make things worse, once your standards are high for yourself, I'm guessing that only the top 1% of companies in terms of workplace culture is not a personal offense. The only options laid out before me are:

1. Have my own business be successful
2. Find a top 1% company in terms of engineering culture
3. Leave the technology space

...It's a given that the tech industry is large - very, very large. I can't even begin to guess at how many jobs there are available for people who can make computers do things for a living. But something that I'm starting to very sincerely believe, and I don't know how it could be otherwise, is that the number of jobs for serious people is probably very, very small.

Any time Miyamoto-san talks about “games” I map this to “websites” in my head. I’m endlessly inspired. These three short paragraphs contain multitudes.

• Find something you want to make that matches up with something the market currently needs.
• Polish and raise your idea to a sufficient level of quality.
• You need clear direction for your idea, even with a talented staff.
• The goal is for each staff member to contribute.
• It’s your job to hold the course and keep to the initial vision.
• Developers getting carried away ends up harming the end product

"Quality is only there," Irwin explained, "if you pursue it all the way to the last bolt." Consequently, how joints are finished must be specified in the contract. "And believe me," he added ruefully from experience, "there is a real discrepancy here. The difference [in] how we interpret the word finish or this word quality is really disparate."

"When you bring them in and get them to be part of it," he noted, "the workmen themselves start to take pride in it. And when they start taking that pride in this idea of quality, ...it starts becoming theirs, something important to them, that they in fact do know what we are talking about."

This association between predictability and badness is so strong that it is in fact a good heuristic to head in the directions with the poorest future visibility, if you want interesting things to happen. But that’s at best a near-sufficient condition. It is not the case that good directions are necessarily illegible and opaque.

The bottom line is certainly of concern, both to those seeking profit and to those seeking value, but neither of these can be measured solely by the amount of dollars spent on production or product. The nonquantitative word "quality" conveys countless ways in which a more expensive thing might be more profitable and yet a better buy as well. The advantages of thicker metal in an automobile body can clearly be argued from various points of view, including resistance to denting and even simple snob appeal. Whereas the manufacturer can use these as selling points and also as justification for a higher price tag, the buyer can easily justify spending more for a car that will keep its appearance longer and provide a status symbol.

There must be a permanent conflict between a project and its programmers: 1) the project must be configured to reject anything that lowers the quality of its artifacts and 2) programmers must be interested in making changes to those artifacts. The project cares about the quality, the programmers care about fast delivery of modifications.

...If we put these two interests in conflict, we will get a high-quality product, which is growing very fast. The project will enforce quality, programmers will push the code forward, making changes fast and frequently.

This idea is pretty simple, in principle: sometimes we miss a good-enough solution because a not-quite-good-enough solution is already out there and in use.

...Who of us hasn't hacked together a prototype that somehow became the code we released to production and has been doing a not-quite-good-enough job of serving clients since that fateful deadline? In my experience, these things often become absolute nightmares when it comes to maintenance (and security, and performance, and stability…), but they exist, so the urgency to replace them with a good version gets traded for the thousand papercuts of unexpected "well, I didn't think this would happen, so it's going to take me a few more hours than expected" or "oops; we didn't expect this kind of vulnerability…"

A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad.

A ‘pro tip’ for evaluating the quality of a piece of gear is to look at the small details, such as zippers and stitching. Cheap-minded manufacturers will skimp on those details because most people just don’t notice, and even a cheap component will often last past a basic warranty period, so it’s an easy way to increase profits without losing sales or returns.

If a designer does bother to invest in quality components, that’s a tried-and-true sign that the overall product is better than the competition.

Vintage models blended in, new ones stand out.

When photography pioneers used Leicas, the cameras weighed 200-300g—perfect for discreet shooting. Modern Leicas tip the scales at over 700g and cost around $10,000. Hardly inconspicuous under any aspect.

This reminds me of how Apple stopped making the iPhone mini and now sells bulkier, pricier models. Leica's rangefinder cameras have also forgotten their original goals.

...Leicas take beautiful photos, but a heavy status symbol seems at odds with the heritage of street shooting candid shots. Like you don't need a Pro phone to be a professional at anything except doomscrolling, or like Hemingway didn't write his novels with a Mont Blanc, you also don't need a Leica to take great pictures. Especially now, especially for street photography.

That's what many brands now do: they sell you a status symbol, but not the ability to have fun and get better at a craft.

To arouse the aspiration for quality and make good on it, the organization itself has to be well crafted in form. It needs, like Nokia, open information networks; it has to be willing to wait, as Apple is, to bring its products to market until they are really good.

"Don't put crap in the design system." — Josh Clark

...While crap is an unavoidable part of product design and development, it has no place in a design system. A design system is critical frontend infrastructure, therefore it needs to be sturdy, reliable, and dependable. Design systems contain boring, tried-and-true, vetted, high-quality solutions to common problems encountered at an organization. When consuming teams encounter crap when working with the design system, trust is broken and the integrity of the system erodes. Those experiences can very much impact the long-term success of the system. For those reasons, a design system needs to be protected from crap.

The McNamara fallacy, named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven.

The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam War—specifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables.

It’s counter-intuitive, but maintaining a smaller, high-quality team of developers is more efficient at scaling software than having many less skilled individuals. Every person introduces mistakes and complexity- some much more than others. Less experienced or less caring developers create more bugs and more complicated code. The best developers guard simplicity with every change. The best teams have these great developers supervise the learning of less experienced, but eager to learn ones.

"How can it be done correctly" is hard to answer in one email, but I like this idea from Kent Beck:

“First make the change easy, then make the easy change”.

The idea is to always make your next code change easy to make. This requires refactoring your code to maintain simplicity as you work. As you do this, you’ll find sometimes that you might over-abstract things or go down blind alleys. This is when growth happens. Each of these moments make you a better developer.

The Lindy effect is a statistical tendency for things with longer pasts behind them to have longer futures ahead. It has been experimentally confirmed to apply to some categories, but not others, raising questions about when it is applicable and why. I shed some light on these questions by examining the mathematical properties required for the effect and generating mechanisms that can produce them. While the Lindy effect is often thought to require a declining hazard rate, I show that it arises very naturally even in cases with constant (or increasing) hazard rates—so long as there is a probability distribution over the size of that rate. One implication is that even things which are becoming less robust over time can display the Lindy effect.

In racing, like other communities of competence, you’ll often hear the saying: Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. This is that, but for making software. Building for quality, building for readability, and sweating the details is a slow, smooth process. One that gets you to release quicker than the frantic thrashing you hear about from stereotypical crunch sessions.

So I’ve been sweating those details a lot with ONCE #1. Regularly reading through the entire 7,412 lines of code to polish spacing, pick slightly better model names, and correct cohesion issues. And every time I do, I usually also find other small quality issues that’ll lead to a better product which fewer people will have issues with.

The metaphor for this we’ve been using internally is taken from watch making. We want ONCE #1 to have Patek levels of finishing, because we’re shipping this product with an exhibition case back. Get that knurling right!

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.

Learn what excellence is, how to identify it...This is not a big reading assignment – excellence is scarce, lognormal, long-tailed. Acting on this knowledge is liberating, freeing oneself from vast piles of triviality, knock-offs, petty connoisseurship, over-publishing, and the short-sighted, trendy, greedy. Excellence is long-term knowledge, even forever knowledge.

Excellence, like good taste, is perhaps a universal quality. Analytical thinking is about the relationship between evidence and conclusions, and is fundamental to all empirical work, regardless of field, discipline, specialty. Thus it is possible at times to assess credibility of nonfiction work without being a content expert. Thinking eyes may well have an eye for excellence, regardless of field or discipline.

I couldn’t seem to convince my writers that I was genuinely ok working with a super rough first draft — i.e., that I’d harbor no hidden judgment about their intelligence, commitment, or excellence at their craft.

So I came up with a new word. “Just give me a v0.crap.” (Pronounced “version zero dot crap”.)

v.0.crap works because it’s attuned to the psychology of the situation. It’s punching through our innate desire not to “look bad”, plus years of corporate conditioning that tells us not to share less-than-polished work. It’s easier for people used to delivering exceptional work to feel they’ve exceeded the goal of “crap”; they can sit comfortably in “good enough for the current purpose.”

Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.

---

In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."

…in so many of the best product companies there is an additional dimension that goes beyond individual empowered product teams, and even goes beyond achieving business results.

It has to do with ensuring a level of what I’ll refer to here as “excellence” although that is clearly a very ambiguous term.

Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: “desirability,” “aha moments,” “wow factor,” “magic experiences,” or “customer delight,” to list just a few.

The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special.

Maybe it’s because we believe this is needed to achieve the necessary value. Maybe it’s because the company has built its brand on inspiring customers.

Often this dimension shows up most clearly in product design, where functional, usable but uninspiring designs can often achieve our business results, but great design can propel us into this realm of the inspiring.

Over the past five years, I've noticed an increasingly large number of people make the opposite claim, that only large companies can do decent moderation, spam filtering, fraud (and counterfeit) detection, etc. We looked at one example of this when we examined search results, where a Google engineer said

Somebody tried argue that if the search space were more competitive, with lots of little providers instead of like three big ones, then somehow it would be more resistant to ML-based SEO abuse.

And... look, if google can't currently keep up with it, how will Little Mr. 5% Market Share do it?

And a thought leader responded

like 95% of the time, when someone claims that some small, independent company can do something hard better than the market leader can, it’s just cope. economies of scale work pretty well!

But when we looked at the actual results, it turned out that, of the search engines we looked at, Mr 0.0001% Market Share was the most resistant to SEO abuse (and fairly good), Mr 0.001% was a bit resistant to SEO abuse, and Google and Bing were just flooded with SEO abuse, frequently funneling people directly to various kinds of scams.

In other cases, the limitations on material reduction have more to do with building form. Most buildings, for instance, are rectangles that contain a series of rectangular rooms, because of the many benefits of this sort of arrangement. A rectangular room is easy to use (since you can push furniture flush against the walls), easy to build, packs tightly together against other rectangular rooms, and so on. Technically circle or sphere-shaped buildings would be more materially efficient (requiring less material to enclose a given amount of space), but while in some cases you see this (such as with pressurized storage tanks or the brief fad of octagonal houses in the 19th century), in general the material savings is not worth the added construction complexity, cost, and loss of convenience.

With architectural elements, we see the same general phenomenon, where further material reductions come with performance tradeoffs. In general, thick, heavy materials feel better than lighter, flimsy materials, and all else being equal people prefer the former to the latter. This is one of the reasons that drywall substitutes like vinyl on gypsum have had limited appeal, and why people still want tiled bathrooms even though fiberglass or acrylic are probably superior from a pure performance perspective.

We are working to correct the course of the software industry. We are a community of low-level programmers with high-level goals. Originally inspired by Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero, we dig deep into our systems and learn how to do things from scratch. We're not satisfied by the latest popular language or the framework of the month. Instead we care about how computers actually work. Software quality is declining, and modern development practices are making it worse. We need to change course.

From the March 8, 2023 edition.

👟 John bought a pair of new Scarpa running shoes. I had never heard of these before, but they look pretty cool.
🪔 Thomas turned up his cozy vibe with his new desk lamp.
🏃 Adil also got some new running shoes! Unlike John, he went for the Hoka Speedgoat 4!
👃 Megan likes to make skincare products and she’s been loving the Guaiac Forest oil!
🌈 Tom ordered the Philips Hue Gradient Lightstrip for his office. I’ve actually been eyeing this for a while too!
📚 Roy finally received his Shift Happens books, and can’t wait to dig into them!
🇧🇷 And I was gifted a set of glasses from Brazil called "Copo Americano". Designed in 1947 and with over 6 billion units produced, they're an absolute icon. Thanks Bruno!

A capsule wardrobe is a thoughtfully curated collection of clothing that emphasises quality over quantity. It's about streamlining your wardrobe to a selection of versatile pieces that you truly enjoy and wear regularly. The idea isn’t to limit your options, but to create a more intentional and cohesive wardrobe that reflects your personal style and lifestyle needs. Each item in a capsule wardrobe is chosen for its functionality, comfort, and the ability to mix and match, making getting dressed not just simpler, but a genuine pleasure. It’s about breaking free from the endless cycle of fast and on-trend fashion and embracing a more sustainable, personalised approach to what we wear every day.

At a former job, some colleagues would actually go stalk my GitHub to learn from my reviews! That was because those reviews were not just “LGTM” or “Please do __ instead.” They came with explanations of why something was better, or questions about someone’s goals. I often outlined tradeoffs in approach. I would leave links to other relevant materials for them to read.

If that sounds like it would take far too long, well… no, because I have practiced writing quickly and clearly for literally decades now. I could review a non-trivial change and give it non-trivial feedback in 20 – 30 minutes, and use that to level up the whole org over time. I say “the whole org” because when there was something actually substantive or important in one of those reviews, I would sometimes share the review for other people to read. (Only after getting permission from the person whose code I was reviewing, though; that’s important!)

Takeaway — engineers, do yourself and all of your teammates a huge favor and learn how to write quickly and cogently. That means practicing it! But the dividends are huge.

Be guided by beauty. I really mean that. Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me. Now you might think ‘well, building a company that’s trading bonds, what’s so aesthetic about that?’ But, what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right […] it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.

Tools make a difference. A productive machine is capital, in the deep sense: leverage. Don’t be afraid to invest in a serious tool when the time is right.

A primary cause of complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want. Any incompatibility with the original system concept is either ignored or passes unrecognized, which renders the design more complicated and its use more cumbersome. When a system's power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality. Every new release must offer additional features, even if some don't add functionality.

Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence.

An ex-Apple designer who went on to startup success once told me, "I wish I could give a workshop for Apple alumni jumping into startups, to help them un-learn The Apple Way." As someone who strives to build products with the craft and quality of Apple, it pains me to admit that The Apple Way can destroy a lot of startups. Which brings us to Humane.

...Despite all its quirks, Humane might have worked out if it followed a traditional VC startup formula. Instead, they tried to follow The Apple Way, where 1.0 products need to be so insanely polished as to blow people away.

...Humane spent five years developing their product in a vacuum. They lacked a FitBit to prove their concept. They had little evidence people want to ditch their phones. They didn't know what form factors users would tolerate. They didn't have normal people telling them battery swaps are dumb.

My feeling is that the "natural", as in lowest energy and most straightforward state for institutions and products is that they don't work very well. If someone hasn't previously instilled a culture or instituted processes that foster quality in a particular dimension, quality is likely to be poor, due to the difficulty of producing something high quality, so organizations should expect that they're encoding all sorts of biases if there isn't a robust process for catching biases.

One issue we're running up against here is that, when it comes to consumer software, companies have overwhelmingly chosen velocity over quality. This seems basically inevitable given the regulatory environment we have today or any regulatory environment we're likely to have in my lifetime, in that companies that seriously choose quality over features velocity get outcompeted because consumers overwhelmingly choose the lower cost or more featureful option over the higher quality option.

We're discarding quality in pursuit of scale. I know this sounds like gatekeeping, like I preferred the past model and, well, it too was deeply flawed in many respects. There is still compelling writing, art, movies and music being made and the tools used to do so will evolve. We're putting ever more wait on producing and creating more with little thought given to quality. It's easy to play on nostalgia and churn out ever more sludge. Who's excited for the next super hero movie? Want one about your favorite video game? How about 12?

...I'm more and more concerned that we're heading to a place that will make it ever more difficult to find anything that's actually worth our time.

Craftsmanship is about thoughtfulness and care in the work we do. It means being deliberate about what we build and how possible it will be to maintain and extend in the future. A solution that will require revisiting in a month — because it’s not scaling, because it has a ton of bugs, because it doesn’t support all the use cases it needs to — is not useful to us and ultimately will generate pain for our users.

What we trade off by living this value is (sometimes) day-to-day speed. It’s easy to imagine an engineering team that emphasizes moving fast over keeping things stable and bug-free -- like a team building a product that isn’t responsible for important user data and doesn’t support anyone’s livelihood. But given the role the Figma product plays in the lives of our users, we feel it’s worth it to ensure we hold a high quality bar for them. And in the long run, being thoughtful about how we build often reduces the complexity of ongoing development and new features regardless.

We talk as though good material were found instead of being made. It is good only because workmanship has made it so. Good workmanship will produce something better our of pinchbeck than bad will out of gold. Corruptio optimi pessima! Some materials promise far more than others but only the workman can bring out what they promise.

Why do some companies seem capable of doing the work they need to do and keeping quality levels relatively high (not perfect, and not without ebbs and flows, but relatively high), while other companies believe that doing both is impossible and let things slip to the point where unwinding things is exceedingly difficult?

Same pressures. Different results.

1. Learned the hard way.
2. Long-view and patience.
3. Shared understanding.
4. Skills.
5. They make high quality "cheaper".
6. Leadership's core beliefs.

In all this focus on volume metrics, estimation, and churning work through the pipeline, the concept of what’s actually valuable or successful is easily lost. It’s often assumed that more work shipped out the door must be “value”, even if the experience of the product is actually suffering and users are not benefiting from the additional features.

Quality withers quickly when nobody sweats it. You have to take it personal, to some degree. It has to offend your sensibilities when things are not right, to some degree. Because you need that energy to halt the work and redo what isn't right when you find out. If you let it slide, if you don't sweat, eventually nobody else will.

There was once a time when the workmanship of certainty, in the form colloquially called 'mass-production', generally made things of worse quality than the best that could be done by the workmanship of risk—colloquially called 'hand-made'. That is far from true now. The workmanship of a standard bolt or not, or a glass or polyethylene bottle, a tobacco-tin or an electric light bulb, is as good as it could possibly be. The workmanship of risk has no exclusive prerogative of quality. What is has exclusively is an immensely various range of qualities, without which at its command the art of design becomes arid and impoverished.

Tea is a work of art and needs a master hand to bring out its noblest qualities. We have good and bad tea, as we have good and bad paintings—generally the latter. There is no single recipe for making the perfect tea...each preparation of the leaves has its individuality, its special affinity with water and heat, its own method of telling a story. The truly beautiful must always be in it. How much do we not suffer through the constant failure of society to recognize this simple and fundamental law of art and life.

A collector is anxious to acquire specimens to illustrate a period or a school, and forgets that a single masterpiece can teach us more than any number of the mediocre products of a given period or school. We classify too much and enjoy too little. The sacrifice of the aesthetic to the so-called scientific method of exhibition has been the bane of many museums.