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Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

danluu.com

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Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#3
post #2

This is incredibly similar (but not verbatim) to another blog post on the front page right now. Did one of these bloggers drastically improve their blogging velocity by rewriting a post?

My first thought was that people were linking related stuff. But the two posts were written within a day of each other. Perhaps one was inspired by the other or perhaps the authors know each other.

Dan Luu is a pretty prolific blogger / tweeter about engineering and this one is the later blogpost. I find it unlikely it was a "repurpose".

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#4
post #2

This is incredibly similar (but not verbatim) to another blog post on the front page right now. Did one of these bloggers drastically improve their blogging velocity by rewriting a post?

(The post, for anyone curious: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28879240)

Yeah, it's very similar in a lot of ways.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#5
post #2

This is incredibly similar (but not verbatim) to another blog post on the front page right now. Did one of these bloggers drastically improve their blogging velocity by rewriting a post?

My first thought was that people were linking related stuff. But the two posts were written within a day of each other. Perhaps one was inspired by the other or perhaps the authors know each other. Dan Luu is a pretty prolific blogger / tweeter about engineering and this one is the later blogpost. I find it unlikely it was a "repurpose".

Both bloggers know each other (this is pretty obvious if you read some of their online stuff), so Dan Luu probably reviewed the other post early and thought it interesting enough to add his own take.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#6
post #2

This is incredibly similar (but not verbatim) to another blog post on the front page right now. Did one of these bloggers drastically improve their blogging velocity by rewriting a post?

At the bottom of this post, Dan thanks Jamie (the author of the other post). Dan’s been posting about the topic on Twitter as well. So basically they talked about it and both wrote up their takes.

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#8
The problem I have with discussions about “productivity” (including 10x engineer chest-beating) is that no one ever defines what they mean by the word. Is it lots of lines of code? Is it clean design and architecture that’s easy to maintain and extend? Responding quickly to business needs? Making a lot of money in a short time?

Too often, people arbitrarily choose what they’re good at, or what someone else they admire is good at, call that “productivity,” and then come up with a post-hoc rationalization of why that’s good.

Note: I only skimmed the article, so consider this a comment on productivity discussions in general rather than the specific article.

(Oh, and a pet peeve: the agile concept of “velocity” originally introduced by Extreme Programming is absolutely not a measure of productivity. It’s a way of predicting your capacity for the next iteration. I’ve taken to calling it “capacity” instead of velocity for that reason.)

Re: Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity

#10

If you want to go fast and call that being productive, go fast and be productive. But don't gate-keep and turn personal preferences into "should" and "ought". There's a lot of world out there and not everyone wants to organize their lives around work.

The entire point of TFA is that the ability to go fast is a force multiplier for being productive in the first place.
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