Hi friends,
This is Congxing Cai. Greetings from Mountain View. It has been a super hot week in the west coast. 🔥🔥🔥 More than 6 months have passed since my last post. I have been writing, but too busy to post anything.
In a short summary, I left Snapchat, where I had an amazing 4+ years building a dozen of creative ideas on short videos from Search, Stories, Discover to Spotlight. It is a hard decision for me to leave such a great job. The company has been doing so well, and I really enjoyed all the challenges. What prompted me to make this decision was what was happening in the world. 2020 has changed lives for so many people. There are growing pains and problems in the daily life of normal people, but the technology is not quite there yet. I wanna take a shot at some of the big ideas i had.
I thought I was going to take a short break first. However, there was no breathing room since my last day – fundraising, team building, product design, alpha testing, and beta testing soon – the train is rolling. 🚂
There will be plenty of chances to talk about my new project. But, let’s get this weekly review restarted first.
Happening Now
🏘 Why Everywhere Looks The Same There are tons of constructions going on around the Bay Area, where I am living at. Each time I drove by a new construction, I was hoping to see some unique, or even controversial, architecture pop up some day. “Instead, we’ve copied and pasted our society from the most anodyne, the most boring, and the most bleh.” The essay points out two major issues, the rise of zoning and consolidation of development, that drives the economy behind those decisions. If you love to read more, I’d recommend one of my favorite book of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
💉 How Pfizer Makes Its Covid-19 Vaccine This is a wonderful piece with visuals on explaining the process to make Pfizer’s Covid Vaccine, the first kind of mRNA vaccines that may completely change our future of health. There are mainly three stages of production: the make of DNA, translate of DNA to mRNA, and final production of vials. Each of them requires a series of rigorous steps of reactions and verifications. The whole process takes 60 days and facilities across three states. I would expect this to be optimized and scaled in the next few years.
🎼 TikTok and the Vibes Revival I have always admired writers who can use a chain of magic phrases to convey the mood or an ambience. It is some kind of power only possessed by a few really talented individuals. But, that desire is universal. Camera gives everyone a chance to capture that sensation through a combination of audiovisual expressions. It not only advances the social definition of vibes, but also can be passed into each other through Internet. “To vibe is to shape time into pleasure,” as being quoted by the author.
In the social-media era, though, “vibe” has come to mean something more like a moment of audiovisual eloquence, a “sympathetic resonance” between a person and her environment, as Robin James, a professor of philosophy at U.N.C. Charlotte wrote in a recent newsletter.
Learnings of the Week
🛍 What is Amazon? I am obsessed with Amazon too. I have read numerous books about their founding stories, studied their management philosophies, and worked with several leaders coming from Amazon. It is still so hard for me to establish a consistent mental model to understand their practices. Maybe the right approach is instead of viewing it as a static subject, but to discover the pattern on how they make progresses. As the author put it,
And so, circa 2002, we start to see the emergence of a pattern: 1) Amazon had encountered a bottleneck to growth, 2) it had determined that some internal process or resource was the bottleneck, 3) it had realized that it could not possibly develop and deploy enough resources internally to remove that bottleneck, so 4) it instead removed the bottleneck by building an interface to allow the broader market to solve it en masse. This exact pattern was repeated with vendor selection (Amazon Marketplace), technology infrastructure (Amazon Web Services, or AWS), and merchandising (Amazon’s Catalog API).
🆘 How to Negotiate with Ransomware Hackers I still remember the time a friend who received a ransom note for her locked research laptop with years of scientific data a few years ago. It was a very frustrating and helpless situation. Once rare, it becomes quite often nowadays. It’s hard to understand the real suggestions for victims in this article: trust some experts but not others?? However, it is an interesting read on how this thing evolved over the years.
♻️ Don’t End The Week With Nothing There is a difference between wealth and money. When you are trying to pay for the food and bill, they are often the same. When you start to save, it’s important to realize that cash is not the only option of wealth, but often the least scalable option. The better options are those that can grow by themselves, such as your reputation, network, IP and knowledge, etc. This essay offers some of the great advices for software engineers to build up wealth over time. Highly recommend.
Quote
“What day is it?”
“It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favorite day,” said Pooh.
― A.A. Milne
Thanks for reading!
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