Permalink: 20240425125634

I’m writing a piece about how documentation can also be a source of friction. Documentation has its undeniable value, especially when it helps people use technical products. However, it also needs the attention of consumers. The more comprehensive and explanatory documentation is, the more attention it consumes.

I find this as an interesting paradox. While short, to-the-point documentation can lack detail, it also reduces the friction of using technical products.

Permalink: Thoughts About Immediacy

Immediacy in the present time is more about not postponing gratification and less about control. The amount of ever-present information makes it almost impossible to be attentive to what truly matters. Instead, we spend our time consuming whatever reaches us, always trusting the source.

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. — Herbert A. Simon

People feel addicted to consuming information because they fear what they don’t yet know. They want to always be in the know. They don’t want to look ignorant.

Unseen sunset. The unknown is probably the most powerful force there is to convince people into doing things. Not knowing something generates anxiety and you naturally want to fight it. It’s human nature to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible.

Being able to always know more—independently of how useful the information is—is a powerful pleasure device. We prefer to feel the immediate pleasure of knowing that we know than to feel we’re missing some important piece of news we don’t know about yet.

Why do we humans crave immediacy? I believe humans crave immediacy because it provides instant gratification and a sense of being part of the experience. The desire for instant gratification is often associated with difficulty coping with uncertainty, coming from a lack of future perspectives. — in The Illusion of Immediacy, Bruno Pedro, October 2020.

Permalink: 20240423112149

Found at “Changelog-Driven Releases” on 2024-04-23 11:21:49 +02:00.

Imagine a changelog that serves not just as a history, but also functions as a source of truth for releases.

Permalink: 20240409174917

Found at “The Ruler of API Governance - by Bruno Pedro” on 2024-04-09 17:49:17 +02:00.

(…) things like API versioning, authentication and authorization, monitoring, analytics, and compliance need to follow what governance dictates. Depending on your business objectives you’ll find some aspects are more worthy of being governed than others.

Permalink: 20240409174725

Found at “What is API Governance? | API Evangelist” on 2024-04-09 17:47:25 +02:00.

API governance will be where enterprises govern the change that occurs across the industries they operate in, and absorb or exacerbate the change and velocity of their factory floors and supply chains.

Permalink: 20240402110750

Found at “OpenInterpreteropen-interpreter: A natural language interface for computers” on 2024-04-02 11:07:50 +02:00.

Open Interpreter lets LLMs run code (Python, Javascript, Shell, and more) locally. You can chat with Open Interpreter through a ChatGPT-like interface in your terminal by running $ interpreter after installing.

Permalink: 20240402110505

Found at “qingyun-wuautogen-eval” on 2024-04-02 11:05:05 +02:00.

AutoGen: Enabling Next-Gen LLM Applications via Multi-Agent Conversation

Permalink: 20240402110422

Found at “ShishirPatilgorilla: Gorilla: An API store for LLMs” on 2024-04-02 11:04:22 +02:00.

Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs

Permalink: 20240324211106

Found at “flydelabsflyde:” on 2024-03-24 21:11:06 +01:00.

Flyde is an open-source visual programming language built to integrate with your existing codebase. It allows you to create and run visual programs and is designed to complement and enhance traditional textual coding, not to replace it.

Permalink: 20240319144219

I was watching a SXSW interview with Ray Kurzweil where he mentioned the singularity, the advancements in AI, and how humanity is changing at an incredible velocity.

The most interesting thing to me is not much where all the advancements are taking us. Instead, I’m fascinated by the exponential velocity of how technology has been advancing.

What takes a few months with today’s technology can probably be achieved in a few minutes 10 years from now.

Permalink: 20240313110355

Found at “Understanding API Complexity Through Schema Entropy - Stephen Mizell” on 2024-03-13 11:03:55 +01:00.

there are cases where API providers want to increase entropy as they evolve their APIs. One scenario is when they are evolving a request body schema.

Permalink: 20240313104629

Found at “Curation (vs the road to junk) | Seth’s Blog” on 2024-03-13 10:46:29 +01:00.

Economic pressure pushes for more, now. But more now might be stealing from we stand for something.

Permalink: Good Woowoo

Definition of good woowoo by Alan Kay. Good woowoo, according to Alan Kay, is the ability to translate hard rules into creativity.

Permalink: 20240304152322

On Saturday I attended—and presented at—the Product Weekend. I had never been to this kind of event and it felt refreshing, compared to the usual conferences. Here, the number of participants is limited, the conversations are meaningful, the presentations are super targeted and the whole experience doesn’t feel exhausting.

Presenting at the Product Weekend. This is me giving a talk about building API—and other technical—products. In the slide you can see the cover of my book “Building an API Product.” This talk happened on March 2, 2024 in Barcelona.

Two presentations were about Product Management leadership roles. The presenters were a Head of Product and a CPO. One thing I confirmed from those presentations and subsequent conversations was that most people end up being Product Managers by accident.

Yes, I was surprised to hear someone in a leadership position say it. I could even extrapolate that most people end up in management positions by accident. This includes Product Managers and also Engineering Managers.

Permalink: 20240303161051

Found at “The Beautiful Mess | John Cutler | Substack” on 2024-03-03 16:10:51 +01:00.

The thought process was not put in writing or communicated. The real strategy sits in people’s brains (continuous and unconscious) and is converted to a plan, pillars, or targets/goals.

Permalink: 20240301110138

Found at “Defcon: Preventing Overload with Graceful Feature Degradation” on 2024-03-01 11:01:38 +01:00.

To prevent overload from impacting its products, Meta developed a system called Defcon. Defcon provides a set of abstractions that allows incident responders to increase available capacity by turning off features, an idea called graceful feature degradation. By dividing product features into different levels of business criticality, Defcon also allows oncallers to take a variety actions depending on the severity of an ongoing incident.