Oversimplified: Volume 125

Hobbies, building a jump rope app, and comments at Figma

Conor Dewey

Feb 1, 2022

Hey there 👋

Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome! You can subscribe with the big blue button below:

✍️ Notes on Four Thousand Weeks

Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals is yet another book on productivity and time management. But it’s not just that, it frames things quite differently and has 100% changed how I think about my output for the better. Strong recommend if you’re stressed out about fitting a million things into a day.

✍️ Notes on The Making of Prince of Persia

I enjoy reading books about video games, particularly about how they are made. The Making of Prince of Persia was no exception. Super entertaining and fun read. I actually made my way through this in one sitting during a recent flight — Something I don’t think I’ve ever done before.

📚 What a Hobby Feels Like

The framing in this post makes a ton of sense to me: “Training doesn’t take an entire day, but it takes a big chunk of one. It is a way of standardizing un-negotiable personal leisure segments the same way that buying a season ticket pass to the Seahawks or the Sounders does.”

📚 Building a Jump Rope App With the Modern Data Stack

This post from Claire Carroll is a neat one. She talks through the process of building an iPhone app to pull in gyroscope and accelerometer data and then upload it to BigQuery for further analysis. The modern data stack strikes again!

📚 From Experiment to Launch: How Data Shaped a New Comments Experience

I enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at how Figma rolled out a new comments experience over the past few months. From hypotheses to rollout schedule, there’s a good bit of detail here.

🔗 Coordination Headwind

If you work for a startup, then you probably have noticed that the typical “top-down vs. bottom-up” way of thinking about org structure isn’t a great descriptor. This slide deck argues that “slime molds” are a better fit — I found myself nodding along vigorously to most of this.

Food for Thought

"An infinite player does not begin working for the purpose of filling up a period of time with work, but for the purpose of filling work with time." — James Carse

I’ve gotten along without knowing too much Docker, but the time has come to change that. Progress! Also, always happy to share that I’ve found a new go-to coffee place.

Until next time

As always, if you're enjoying Oversimplified, I'd love it if you shared it with a friend or two. If anything stood out, whether good or bad, I would love to hear about it. Reply to this email or tweet at me and let’s chat.

Until next time,

Conor