"You bolt awake in the mountains of Carthage. You are not online. It is 217 BC. You are the general Hannibal, and you have changed your mind. The future cannot come to pass. Rome must burn."
h/t @netcapgirl
I have ADHD. Yesterday I ran a 90-minute meeting, made three people laugh, and closed the thing nobody thought would close. It is 6am and I have been awake for an hour, unable to make myself stand up and start the coffee.
one of my closest friends has ADHD and when i tell you i never hear from them but when i got a problem they are locked in with 400 solutions, they are focused, they’re solving it right away and then they disappear again. i love them so much.
I did not come up with this, I stole it from the internet but it doesn’t make it any less true.
ADHD is only motivated by 5 things:
- urgency
- challenge
- novelty and play
- interest
- being a contrarian little bitch
The amount of things that I do strictly out of spite should be studied 😅
Enterprise API available from day one so you can build custom storefronts without having to rely on WooCommerce / Shopify:
- delivery options; fisco-managed or self-managed.
- payment options; Fisco-managed or self-managed
- webhooks out of the box.
- support through the process
Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart’s law and why he doesn’t like KPIs or OKRs
“Goodhart’s law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it’s no longer a useful metric… No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex business. There’s a million different tensions in a company, and you can’t keep all of them in harmony by optimizing for one thing.”
For this reason, Shopify doesn’t use KPIs or OKRs. But as Tobi explains, this doesn’t mean they don’t value data and metrics.
“We are extremely data informed. We have invested enormous amounts of money and time into systems that give us basically everything at our fingertips… But what Shopify attempts to do is just not over-fit for what’s quantifiable.”
People love optimizing for highly-quantifiable things because there’s immediate gratification that comes from seeing a number go up. But Tobi thinks that the most important aspects of a product are rarely quantifiable:
“The overlap of the most valuable things you can do with a product and the things that happen to be fully quantifiable are like maybe 20%. Which leaves 80% of a value space unaddressable by the people who only look at quantifiable things.”
He continues:
“Shopify is comfortable with unquantifiable things like taste, quality, passion, love, hate… The sort of deep satisfaction that a craftsperson feels when they’ve done a job well is actually a better proxy if you allow it to be.”
They then have robust analytics systems that tell the company if something’s wrong or a new rollout breaks something.
“We think about it as a cockpit for a pilot. The decisions are still made by pilots, and we think this leads to better results… I think there needs to be more acceptance in business of unquantifiable things… And then metrics take a support function.”
Source: @lennysan (Feb 2025)
What I hate about ADHD:
- Forgetting birthdays
- Not calling my mom for 6 weeks
- 47 ideas/day, finishing none
- 11pm shame spiral
- Reading the same paragraph 5 times
- Tired by 4pm having done nothing
- Being told "just try harder"
We don't have it easy.
It’s 2018 and your coworker just sent you a 400 line pull request.
You get a cup of coffee and sit down to review it.
It’s beautiful. Elegant micro-refactors. Crispy method names.
You catch a few things, but that’s ok. It’s part of the dance. They didn’t consider extensibility on part of their API. Here’s a comment buddy.
They respond in an hour saying they think we should do one piece differently than your comment. Hey let’s jump into a room and figure it out. We can’t just agree to disagree, this code is too important.
The PR merges and goes to prod. You feel a shared sense of ownership and accomplishment.
That night you go to sleep and dream of that code. You can still see the shapes of it on the backs of your eyelids, your IDE syntax highlighting sparking neurons in your reptile brain.
You go to work the next day ready to go. You understand the system. N is your foundation. Time to build n+1.
got sub-contracted to build said platform using papss some time in 2024/25. can't even remember what made us stop building. i remember that sorting out import and export regulations/documentation was hectic.
This Tinubu’s session in Kigali is all the proof you need that these African leaders are controlled by their western puppeteers down to what they say.
He (Tinubu, President of Nigeria) raises an issue bothering on intra-continental trade.
“Africa needs a trading platform for member states to trade with each other”
Moderator: “why don’t you start one?”
Tinubu: *Confused, and at a loss for words*
He went off script. The follow up question made him realize he had said something his masters didn’t prep him to say. There’s no other way to explain it.