Hey there 👋
Happy to be back in y’alls inbox after some time away. As a refresher: Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, alongside the humble inclusion of any new posts from me.
✍️ Learnings from 4 Years at Metabase
After 4 exciting years, I’m parting ways with Metabase. It’s been a fulfilling run, working with smart people to build a delightful BI tool, while watching the team grow from 25 → 100+ employees. What’s next? We’ll see!
✍️ 29 Principles for 29 Years
Another edition of my annual birthday post is here, summarizing a plethora of ideas I’ve learned and leaned on both, new and from previous years.
📚 Reflections on OpenAI
This week, month, and year have been insane in terms of the velocity that LLMs are changing the working world as we know it. This post from Calvin French-Owen peels back the curtain on what it’s like working at OpenAI.
📚 AI Market Clarity
More AI. What can I say, the topic has been occupying quite a bit of my headspace. Elad Gil offers his take here on what the current market looks like, and what it might look like in a few years, including emerging use cases in other markets.
📚 Say "but yes", not "yes but"
While a seemingly trivial difference, the impact that tone can make in a response changes things quite a bit. How different is “sounds good, but we’ll have to change it in a month” vs. “we’ll have to change it in a month, but sounds good?”
📚 When engineers say "that'll take months!"
When a project will take months to ship, it’s often a product of not defining a crisp enough problem to solve against. Instead of marching on and trying to cover everything: nail down exactly what’s needed, what’s possible, and trade horses until you find the biggest win on the table.
Food for Thought
"When someone is seeking, it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal... For in striving towards your goal, you do not see many things that are under your nose." — Hermann Hesse
Wrapping up
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. Just reply to this email and let’s chat.
Until next time,
Conor