Will Larson's Blog, page 7

Numbers go up.

There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games, whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. The initial idea here was social commentary exposing the addictive core of many games, but like all good commentary it’s also inadvertently spawned the genre of gacha games that focus on extracting revenue from add...

When to write strategy, and how much?

Even if you believe that strategy is generally useful,it is difficult to decide that today’s the day to start writing engineering strategy.When you do start writing strategy, it’s easy write so much strategy thatyour organization is overwhelmed and ignores your strategy rather thaninvesting time into understanding it.

Fortunately, these are universal problems, and there are a handful ofuseful mental models to avoid both extremes.This chapter covers:

when to write strategy, in particular t...

Hey folks, I’m Will Larson!If you’re new to my writing, t...

Hey folks, I’m Will Larson!If you’re new to my writing, take a look at some of the popular stuff I’ve written,or my books: Staff Engineer, An Elegant Puzzle,andThe Engineering Executive’s Primer.You can hear from me a bit more frequently on my my weekly newsletter or via the RSS feed.You can also find me as @lethainon Twitter or Mastodon.

Developing domain expertise: get your hands dirty.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about developing domain expertise, and wanted to collect my thoughts here. Although I covered some parts of this in Your first 90 days as CTO (understanding product analytics, shadowing customer support, talking to customers, and talking with your internal experts), I missed the most important dimension of effective learning: getting your hands dirty.

At Carta, I’m increasingly spending time focused on our fund financials business, which requires a deep understanding...

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Physics and perception.

At one point in 2019, several parts of Stripe’s engineering organization were going through a polite civil war.The conflict was driven by one group’s belief that Java should replace Ruby.Java would, they posited, address the ongoing challenge of delivering a quality platform in the face of both a rapidly growing business and a rapidly growing engineering organization. The other group believed Stripe’s problems were driven by a product domain with high essential complexity and numerous, demandi...

Architecture