Justin Merrell

@AgentflareAI | Evolving from community workshops to autonomous agents. Founder of a makerspace | Startup survivor | Designing human-AI collaborative systems.

[Justin Merrell @merrellio]

@TheOrville ahead of it's time

[Justin Merrell @merrellio]

The same creative passion that goes into making movies and shows that invoke feelings should be applied to generation of software.

[Jake @JustJake]

Absence begets innovation

Blank canvas pulls out creation

Less is more

[Grant Lee @thisisgrantlee]

Every founder eventually learns this.

Conviction isn't a feeling you have at the start and keep forever. It drains. Weekly. Sometimes daily. The founders who last are the ones who found a way to refill it.

Phil Knight ran Nike for years while his father told him he was wasting his time. His bank called his loans. His supplier dropped him. He was personally guaranteeing debt on a company that had, at one point, no confirmed future. He wrote about this in Shoe Dog. He described it not as passion but as a compulsion. He couldn't stop. The problem felt too real.

That's a different thing from motivation. Motivation responds to external signals. Conviction doesn't wait for any external thing. It’s something inside.

Howard Schultz was rejected by 217 investors before he raised the money to buy Starbucks. 217!!. Most people treat 2-3 rejections as data about the quality of the idea. Schultz treated it as a filter for who was worth having around the table.

He said in his memoir, "In times of adversity and change, we really discover who we are and what we're made of."

The pattern in all of these is the same. The market was not ready. The feedback was negative. The external environment was not supportive. And the founder kept going anyway, because their conviction about the problem was stronger than their need for validation.

The article below gets into this in detail. What Year 2 actually feels like. The role of the ego. How conviction and stubbornness are different things and why that distinction matters.

The founders who survive long enough to be right almost always had conviction before the market gave them any reason to have it:

[Akash @kaaaash____]

Be honest,

Why is every software engineer’s backup plan always farming?

[Ivan Burazin @ivanburazin]

We built everything enterprise-ready into @daytonaio from day one.

On-prem, multicloud, observability, audit logs, and the whole stack.

We didn't even want enterprise customers at the time. But we had learned from the pre-pivot product that adding those things later is brutal.

We knew we'd need them eventually, so we built them in right at the very beginning.

[PostHog @posthog]

https://t.co/EG3I21fZ4e

[Tom Alder @tomaldertweets]

Airbnb stuck their entire customer journey up on their office walls.

Drawn by a Pixar animator, pinned where everyone walks past them daily.

30 frames.
15 for hosts.
15 for guests.

They call it "Snow White."

Chesky stole the idea from a Walt Disney biography in 2011.

Every new product idea has to answer:
→ "Which frame does this serve?"

If it fits a frame, that determines the owner, who prioritises it against their KPIs.

If it doesn’t fit a frame, it doesn’t serve the customer, and doesn’t get shipped.

[Allen Holub. https://linkedIn.com/in/allenholub @allenholub]

Programming has nothing much to do with math. It is primarily about communication. It's about us communicating with customers and us communicating with the machine. Programming is a language skill, not a mathematical one.

Consequently, I get tired of people claiming that programming has anything to do with math. Beyond a little set theory and statistics, I've never used any real math in my decades of programming work. Logic is a subdiscipline of rhetoric, not mathematics. Analytical thinking (and problem solving) is part of almost every human activity, from carpentry to oil painting. Math and programming both use those skills, but so do a million other disciplines.

Some programs implement problems in mathematical domains, but in those cases, the math is part of the domain, not the programming process. Some programs involve dating profiles, but that doesn't mean that dating profiles are an integral part of the programming process.

I think this false equivalence dates back to the very early days of computing, when computers were used almost entirely to solve mathematical problems. In the present, mathematical problems are only a tiny fraction of the problems we solve.

Of course, computer science, which is that branch of mathematics concerned with the analysis of computer programs and algorithms, uses some math. (Though I never used the required 1.5 years of calculus and differential equations in a single CS class.) I'm talking about programming, not computer science, however.

So, returning to my original claim, if you want to be a good programmer, focus on developing communication skills. Math is irrelevant to the vast majority of us.

[Justin Merrell @merrellio]

Discover and create, or support those who do.

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

True

[60 Minutes @60Minutes]

Director Christopher Nolan brought 60 Minutes to Fotokem in Burbank, California, to watch their artists assemble and color correct final release prints of “The Odyssey.” It's the only motion picture film lab in the world that still produces 70 millimeter prints.

Nolan told Scott Pelley, “It’s a really marvelous thing to see… in this age of digitization, AI, all the rest, this is a human process. An analog process.”

[Jake @JustJake]

To know peace, one must first know chaos
To know less, one must first know more
To know elegance, one must first know complexity

Gotta go through the cycles to see the beauty

[james hawkins @james406]

it costs $0 to prove you're a wartime CEO by randomly scheduling Slack messages on the weekend

[Yegor Bugayenko @yegor256]

Speed without structure doesn’t scale. I mean, what works for a team of five breaks at fifty without clear ownership and boundaries, and fast decisions turn into inconsistent ones. The challenge is building systems that remain coherent as you grow.

[Jake @JustJake]

All disagreements are disagreements of timing

Why argue instead of figure out who drives which first?

[S.🎧 @1ssve]

Corporate culture really said:
“What if we just made everything urgent and nothing clear?”

[Jake @JustJake]

4 roles of a founder:

- Vision
- Alignment
- Culture
- Urgency

[Steve Huynh @ALEngineered]

Most problems fall into one of four categories:

 - unclear goal
 - unclear owner
 - unclear constraints
 - unclear tradeoffs

Once you’ve determined which one it is, simply recurse.

[Kyle Mistele 🏴‍☠️ @0xblacklight]

Code quality matters more now not less

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

but most importantly, just start.