My honest advice to someone who wants to make a lot of money.
3 things nobody told you:
1. The only way to make a lot of money is to create a lot of value.
No one hands out money. No one is going to pay you just because they like you or think you're cool. That's not the way the world works.
Money earned is a direct byproduct of value created. Create value, receive value. If money is the goal, value has to be the focus.
This isn't just some vague idea: The only way to get rich is to create an enormous amount of value for others, and capture a small portion of that along the way.
It's not talking about the thing, it's not brainstorming about the thing, it's not asking about the thing, it's not thinking about the thing. The only way to create value is by doing the thing.
And if you don't know where to start, look around you. Customers, colleagues, bosses, shareholders, employees. Every single one of them has a problem. What problems can you solve for the people around you? Figure them out, solve them, scale that solution.
That's how you make money.
2. You have to demonstrate excellence in everything you do.
Your income scales proportional to the amount of excellence that you're able to demonstrate.
Strategic incompetence is a lie. You don't get to pick and choose when to show up, because the world will ignore your best and judge you for your worst. Everything matters. Every single thing.
Top performers show up with energy and enthusiasm for the little things just as much as they do for the big things.
If you're in the top-10% of performers, there's no ceiling for what you can do. But the self-awareness to identify where you currently stack up, and adapt to the honest feedback on it, is very rare.
If you're in the top-10%, you know it. If you're not, figure out why and fix it.
3. You don't need passion, you need energy.
I still have no idea what it means to follow your passion.
You don't have to be passionate about your professional pursuits, you just need to find energy in them. You just need to feel a pull towards them. You just need to feel that spark of curiosity in them.
Passion is usually a byproduct of energy.
When you have energy for something, you'll give it your deep attention to learn more. You’ll ask the right questions. You’ll figure it out. You’ll win.
***
And remember: Nobody is coming to save you. It’s just you. There’s a power in that.
Go do the thing.
just ran Claude Fable 5 over @37signals open source Rails code again
extracted all the key insights for writing @dhh-like vanilla Rails into reusable guides and skills
just drop it in your skills folder and your AI agent will automatically reference it
https://t.co/sHcPA1VbCE
Been too busy lately to tweet every nice Ruby perf PR as I spot them. So I went through my notes and dumped all the notable ones into a single roundup. Some of these are insane (like 800000x speedup) - enjoy! 🚀
https://t.co/5XIKqbuwrj
#ruby#performance
If you're looking for an order to try this in:
1. mise
2. hk (parallel git hooks will change your life)
3. aube (you are now immune to JS hacks)
4. pitchfork (a 'nicer' foreman)
5. fnox (higher up if your team is heavy into password managers and everyone uses diff ones)
One of the best new features in qmd 2.5 is that you can now qmd init in a fresh directory and get a local .qmd/index.yml that is automatically used. So you can easily make project local qmd index for your obsidian vault and commit the index if you want.
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 a nice addition to the Rails guides: an Accessibility one: https://t.co/nAcBRPOTN7
@brunoprietog Bruno Prieto is an expert in programming, the web, Rails, and accessibility. There couldn’t be a better author for this guide.
Claiming that "all my code is now written by an agent" is ambiguous. It includes:
1. Folks who know what they are doing and care about software design, who can now produce code much faster.
2. Vibe coders who treat the agent as a black box that generates a working system.
I validate daily that, with the current models, vibe coding is not suitable for building minimally maintainable systems. Agents introduce major internal quality issues quickly and spread them even faster because they echo existing patterns so well.
I see two challenges for programmers today:
First, learning how to do (1) properly: how to create the right context for agents, how to orchestrate them and manage their memory, how to remove toil, parallelize work, etc. In other words: maximize the value we can extract from this new sorcery.
Second, vibe coding is fantastic for non-programmers to create value by doing things they could not do before: quickly iterating on ideas, automating workflows, building ad-hoc tools, and so on. The key question is: where internal software quality starts to matter, and how to enforce it without diminishing this new source of value.
I am also increasingly convinced that many companies that blindly embrace vibe coding and chase futuristic PR headlines are about to discover the terrors of technical debt at scale.
If you're doing AI dev, you need to act like your system is rooted by North Korea. You cannot leave knives out in the kitchen, you cannot leave the passwords out on the counter. People are putting too much trust in alignment and not doing enough to "keep honest agents honest".