Hey friends,
The last 8 days have been crazy (we’re a day late this week) - as it feels like we watched a mini-microcosm of the year condensed into a week: another police killing captured on video in Atlanta, a V-shape bounce in the stock market, and conflicting reports of COVID-19 recovering and getting worse.
In that backdrop, Nick and I have been thinking about fractals.
When it comes to building Feather, we see ourselves as part of a fractal: developers developing for other developers.
These types of products are great to start because the builder and the target audience are one and the same. In a sense, developer-first businesses are similar to open source software. But open source goes one further - the user and the builder are not just cut from the same cloth, but often the same person.
Meanwhile, with Summer of Shipping, we see the fractal pattern in other places. SoS is trying to replace some of the lost experience people would have gained from cancelled internships, but we’re stumbling upon a bigger need - universities just don’t prepare students for engineering.
See, universities are superb at doing one thing - to produce academics. Your professors are PhDs, and the system is designed to send the most promising students down the PhD pipeline. PhDs pipelining more PhDs.
This leaves a lot to be desired in terms of job readiness, and SoS is playing a small part.
Change Log
Small breakthrough for Feather yesterday:
And Summer of Shipping continues:
Miscellaneous
🐬 “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage” A fun little article about how methods used by trainers of exotic animals can be applied to family members. Hidden in this article is a little tidbit of something called “least reinforcing syndrome” (LRS) which is a method trainers use to stop bad behavior:
When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn’t respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.
But surely, LRS can occur in the reverse. Sometimes, we do something good, but becuase it garners no response, the good behavior also dies. So, tell people in your life all the little positive things that they do - don’t let good things fade away due to LRS!
Until next week,
Phil