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References.

• Csaba Okrona, Demystifying Burnout.
• A Practical Guide to Executive Presence.
• Jakob Nielson, 10 Usability Heuristics for UI Design.
• Irina Stanescu, Growing Beyond Senior Levels in Engineer.
• Aria Beingessner, Mozilla’s Engineering Ladder.
• Suzan Bond, An Incomplete List of Org Smells.
• Eric Raymond, Basics of the Unix Philosophy.
• Yuval Yeret, 4 Metrics To Visualize and Accelerate Flow.
• Derek Comartin, Event-Driven Architecture Lost Its Way.
• Selena Simmons-Duffin, Your Appendix Is Not Useless.
• Maxwell Zeff, There’s More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless.
• Eirini Kalliamvakou, Good DevEx Increases Productivity.
• Johnathan & Melissa Nightingale, Director Means Something.
• Jeff Haden, The Best Employees Focus on Content, Not Process.
• Sara Tortoli, Jobs-To-Be-Done.
• Sam Davies, The Six Principles of Effective Writing.
• Remy Porter, The Therac-25 Incident.
• Henrique Vicente, You Don’t Need UUID.
• Neil Madden, Moving Away from UUIDs.
• Connect2id, Human-Friendly Identifiers.
• Rob Conery, A Better ID Generator For PostgreSQL.
• Vsauce, Do Chairs Exist?
• Addy Osmani, Managing Complex Change.
• Henrik Kniberg, The Resource Utilization Trap.
• Kurzgesagt, The Star That Shouldn’t Exist.
• Jade Rubick, A History of Mini-Ms.
• Jade Rubick, Variations for Mini-M Management Support Groups.
• Jade Rubick, How to Implement Mini-M Support Groups.
• Jade Rubick, Uplevel Your Managers with Mini-M Support Groups.
• Jason Sachs, Why Amdahl’s Law is Misleading.
• Eric Schwitzgebel, If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious.
• KK Ottsen, They Are Preparing for War.
• Jade Rubick, Everyone Lies to Leaders.
• Michael McIntyre, Goodhart’s Law.
• Basel Al-Sheikh Hussein, The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Today.
• Evan Andrews, Sword of Damocles.
• Nancy Friedman, Cunningham’s Law.
• Robert Lucas, Econometric Policy Evaluation.
• Benoit Mandelbrot, How Long is the Cost of Britain?
• Lieberherr and Holland, Assuring Good Style for Object-Oriented Programs.
• Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach.
• Doc Norton, Escape Velocity.
• Aaron Gustafson, Understanding Progressive Enhancement.
• Seth Godin, Three Kinds of Forever.
• Will Larson, Staff Engineer.
• Shin Takahashi, The Manga Guide to Statistics.
• Jasper Polak, McKinsey Presentations.
• Healthline, Yerkes-Dodson Law.
• Will Larson, An Elegant Puzzle.
• Robert Keidel, Seeing Organizational Patterns.
• Caleb Kruse, Seeing Blue.
• “I Have Dubbed It The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon”
• Larry Wall and Randal Schwartz, Programming Perl.
• Russell Ackoff, From Data to Wisdom.
• Russell Ackoff, Continuous Improvement.
• Will Larson, To Lead, You Have to Follow.
• Northcote Parkinson, Parkinson’s Law.
• Susanne and Andreas Bartel, The Official Guide to the Kanban Method.
• Lyn Bond, Synthesizing.
• Abigail Bassett, The Art of Kakeibo.
• Arnold Zwicky, Why Are We so Illuded?
• Will Storr, The Status Game.
• Juvoni Beckford, Using Books to Navigate Life.
• Allen Wilson, Playing the Zettelkasten RPG Through Arbitrary Constraints.
• How, Exactly, Is Structure Supposed to Emerge?
• Jakub Neander, How To Export PostgreSQL Query Output as CSV.
• AoM #756 with Will Storr, How the Desire for Status Explains (Pretty Much) Everything.
• AoM #734 with Brandon Warmke, How Moral Grandstanding Is Ruining Our Public Discourse.
• Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems.
• Society of GK Chesterton, “Taking a Fence Down”.
• AoM #762 with Michael Hyatt, Prepare Now to Have Your Best New Year Ever.
• David Gray, Liminal Thinking.
• Ron Jeffries, Story Points Revisited.
• Camille Fournier, The Manager’s Path.
• Kurzgesagt, The Origin of Consciousness.
• Sarah Drasner, Mistakes I’ve Made as an Engineering Manager.
• David Allen, Getting Things Done.
• Christopher Sirk, The History of Kaizen.
• Sarah Drasner, The Importance of Career Laddering.
• Mile Oliver, Better Short Term Goals for New Engineering Hires.
• Elizabeth Saunders, 6 Causes of Burnout.
• Martin Fowler, What do you mean by ”event-driven”?
• Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning.
• Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life.
• Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland, The Scrum Guide.
• Doanh Do, What Is Continuous Improvement (Kaizen)?
• Jeff Sutherland, Scrum.
• Simon Sinek, Most Leaders Don’t Even Know the Game They’re In.
• Dan Pink, The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us.
• Nir Eyal, Hooked.
• Robert Burton, Where Science and Story Meet.
• Jeremiah Lee, Spotify’s Failed #SquadGoals.
• Nick deWilde, The Learning Loop of Knowledge Work.
• Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain Podcast.
• David Rock, Your Brain at Work.
• Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage.
• Dustin Gorski, When to Use Scrum?
• Brené Brown, Dare to Lead.
• Gary Neilson et al., 10 Principles of Organization Design.
• Karla Segura Chavarría, Will Betelgeuse Go Hypernova?
• What it’s like inside of a black hole.
• Watts & Hertvik, Technical Debt: The Ultimate Guide.
• Steven Rogelberg, The Surprising Science of Meetings.
• Scaled Agile Framework, WSJF.
• Greg McKeown, Essentialism.
• Sönke Ahrens, How to Take Smart Notes.
• Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets.

Blog.

• A year as an engineering director: 2023 in review.
• A template for founding ops and platform teams.
• Squidtree is now serving RSS!
• Reducing bias with a hiring bar.
• Humanizing ChatGPT is unnecessary.
• Slack doesn’t have to be a maelstrom.
• The triadic lens: a tool for designing organizations for people.
• Operation failed successfully: writing with a Zettelkasten.
• Glory to the short and weighty.
• Welcome to Squidtree.

Notes.

• Index.
  • Indices.
    • Index of models.
    • List of laws, principles, razors, etc.
      • Anna Karenina principle.
• Applied science.
  • Engineering and technology.
    • Engineering management.
      • Managers pay attention to the implementation to find problems and gain intuition.
        • Coding as a manager.
          • Managers should delegate primary implementation responsibilities.
          • Managers can help clear the way for the team by taking smaller tangential tasks.
      • The purpose of management.
      • What do engineering managers create together?
      • Tactical responsibilities of engineering managers.
      • Engineering directors.
        • Managing managers.
          • Sizing line manager teams.
          • Creating engineering manager support groups.
            • Rationale for forming engineering manager support groups.
            • Implementing engineering manager support groups.
        • Defining engineering directors.
          • Signs that an engineering director is struggling.
    • Software engineering.
      • Code review.
      • Software engineering framework.
      • Tech leads lead technical projects.
        • Tech leads produce code, but figure out how to get others coding first.
        • Tech leads invest in their people skills.
          • Technical managers or individual contributors can inhabit the tech lead role.
        • Tech leads’ highest priority is to keep their projects moving forward.
        • Force multipliers invest their work so that others can create value.
      • Sofware engineering artifacts.
        • Charters for communication structures establish the goals and constraints of the organizational structure.
          • Process, meetings, teams, and relationships are all communication structures.
      • Software engineering events.
        • Short-term work planning ensures the team is working on what is currently most valuable.
        • Recurring informal activities in software engineering.
      • Software engineering roles.
        • Senior engineer.
          • Senior software engineer level description.
        • Staff engineer.
          • The Solver archetype.
          • The right hand archetype.
          • Staff engineer level description.
        • Software architect.
        • Quality Assurance.
        • Roles are different than titles.
        • Engineering levels.
          • Software engineer 1 (junior engineer).
          • Software engineer 2 (mid-level engineer).
          • Senior staff software engineer.
          • Principal engineer.
          • Distinguished engineer.
          • Fellow.
      • Traits of engineers.
      • Automated testing.
        • Unit test.
          • Unit tests add value by constraining software design.
        • Integration tests.
        • Contract tests.
        • Controller tests.
        • UI automated tests.
        • Data testing.
        • Load testing.
        • Testing practices to avoid.
        • Test-driven development.
      • Web development.
        • Graceful degradation.
        • Progressive enhancement.
      • Security.
        • How long to guess a hash?
        • Risk assessments.
      • Developer experience.
        • The returns on DevEx investment.
    • Quality.
      • Tech debt/sustaining engineering.
        • Business value of tech debt.
        • Planning for tech debt.
          • Assessing tech debt urgency.
          • WSJF helps assess tech debt priority.
          • Allocate 20% of time for sustaining engineering efforts.
            • 20% tech debt model is naïve and can be replaced with better planning.
        • Code decays over time.
          • Written code is a liability.
            • Sunset features that don’t provide proportionate value.
      • Technical quality.
        • Working software is a critical aspect of its quality.
        • Software that meets the user’s needs is a quality expectation.
      • Defect management.
        • Stability and complexity problems have very different causes.
        • Defect cause analysis.
          • Putting out a fire is different than clearing the kindling for future fires.
          • Root causes to problems is largely a myth.
        • Preventing quality issues.
          • Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
        • Addressing quality issues.
          • Mistakes take less time to correct immediately versus handling later.
      • Quality engineering.
      • Non-functional requirements.
        • Non-functional requirement attributes.
    • System qualities.
      • Stability.
      • Observability.
      • Concurrency versus parallelism.
    • Software architecture.
      • Inner-platform effect.
      • Event-driven systems have a variety of patterns and tradeoffs to choose from.
        • Event notification pattern communicates that an event ocurred and little else.
          • First-in-first-out (FIFO) queues support progressive state iteration.
        • Event-carried state transfer pattern communicates an event with some coupling and networking tradeoffs.
        • Event sourcing uses a log of events as its source of truth about the system state.
        • Command/Query Responsibility Separation (CQRS) helps differentiate questions from changes.
        • Event queues deliver events in various ways to support the goals of the eventing style.
      • Software architecture tools.
        • Gartner TIME model measures application quality, value, and size for planning architecture strategy.
      • Domain-Driven Design.
        • Business-centric interfaces encapsulate abstraction better than data-centric interfaces.
      • Software architecture philosophies.
        • The UNIX philosophy.
          • Rules of the UNIX philosophy.
          • Rules of the UNIX Philosophy, continued.
    • Systems science.
      • Systems thinking.
        • Systems are an organization of elements pursuing a goal.
          • Examples of systems.
        • Systems are composed of a few classes of concepts.
          • Feedback loops react to change to adjust flows.
            • Balancing feedback loops try to maintain a stock within given parameters.
            • Reinforcing feedback loops accelerate in a direction.
            • Systems contain delays with a few main types.
              • Long delays in systems necessitate investment in foresight.
          • Stocks are the stuff which a system concerns itself with.
            • Stocks can either be renewable or non-renewable.
              • Renewable resources behave in specific ways determined by how their use and subsystems interact.
        • Diagrams of systems reveal different views of their behavior.
        • The properties of a high-functioning system.
          • Resilience is the ability to remain unchanged or restore oneself after distortion.
            • Resilience is lost during optimization without a holistic view.
            • Resilience in practice.
              • Technical competency mapping can create resilience in organization operations.
          • Self-organization is the ability of a system to grow complexity.
          • Hierarchy is an arrangement of stable subsystems.
            • The nature of hierarchy suggests a few unique problems.
        • Systems are difficult for people to accurately interpret.
          • ”Bounded rationality” means decisions are made well locally, but not globally.
        • Archetypes of systems traps and their opportunities.
          • Policy resistance comes from actors adjusting their actions against system corrections.
          • Tragedy of the commons sees many “helpless” users depleting a shared resource.
          • Eroding goals moves the goal down against pessimistic views.
          • Escalation happens to actors who set their goals relative to one another.
          • Success to the successful helps those in the lead get further ahead.
          • Dependence, addiction, shifting the burden to the intervenor all trade power for help.
          • Rule beating circumvents the intent of the rules.
          • Seeking the wrong goal happens where metrics aren’t reality.
        • System leverage points are places to intervene for change.
          • Transcend paradigms to reimagine a system’s possibility.
          • Change paradigms to sieze different opportunities.
          • Change system goals to change its trajector.
          • Augment self-organization to change how it evolves.
          • Adjust rules to change behavior.
          • Improve information flow to adjust component behaviors.
            • Humans desire to not be held accountable.
          • Adjust reinforcing feedback loops to change its impact.
          • Add or strengthen balancing feedback loops to address barriers.
          • Adjust delays, especially to address oscillations.
          • Redesign stock and flow structures to fix poorly designed systems.
          • Add or resize buffers to add stability to a system.
          • Individual components are usually poor leverage points.
    • Software development methodology.
      • Scrum.
        • Events in scrum.
          • Sprints are the container for scrum events.
            • Sprints balance quick delivery and pivoting with planning for focus.
              • Plans should pivot as new information suggests a better course.
              • Projects should be broken into regularly deliverable slices.
              • In progress work is a liability which could have been an asset.
          • Sprint planning defines a sprint backlog.
          • Daily scrum allows a team to plan the day’s progress toward the sprint goal.
          • Sprint review inspects outcomes of the sprint.
        • Artifacts in scrum.
          • Product backlog is the ordered list of intended product improvements.
          • Sprint backlog defines the what, why, and how of what product value will be delivered in a period.
          • Increment is the next step toward the product goal.
        • Roles in scrum.
          • Product owner defines product goal and projects to increase product value.
          • Scrum master helps the team move forward, especially with scrum practices.
          • Developer role in scrum is anyone producing change toward the increment.
        • Scrum teams.
          • Multiple scrum teams can own the same backlog.
        • Implementing scrum in an organization.
          • Scrum framework leaves gaps for the team to find its own way through intentionally.
          • Teams that assume they know how to implement scrum fail to achieve its goals.
        • Tools, processes, and philosophies that supplement scrum.
        • Scrum commitments.
          • Product goal is the long term objective of a team.
          • Sprint goal is the stakeholder commitment for a sprint.
          • Definition of Done defines when an increment has met the necessary quality to be completed.
      • Agile methodologies seek to establish a culture that is adept at reacting to changing business needs.
      • Kanban.
        • Kanban principles.
        • Kanban practices.
          • Resource utilization must be less than full to allow flow.
        • Kicking off a new kanban process.
        • Metrics in kanban.
        • Ceremonies in kanban.
      • The Spotify Model attempts to optimize an org for team autonomy.
        • The Spotify Model failed at Spotify for making the wrong tradeoffs.
        • Spotify Model design and rationale.
        • Tradeoffs in the Spotify Model.
          • Tradeoffs in the Spotify Model, continued.
        • (Potentially) better tradeoffs than Spotify Model.
      • Product development methodologies each optimize for different factors and outcomes.
        • Scrum is well-suited for teams building things for stakeholders with evolving needs.
          • Scrum does not apply to all situations and will show friction points when ill-applied.
        • Waterfall is well-suited to predictable work.
        • Kanban is well-suited for teams triaging work across focus areas.
  • Business.
    • People management.
      • Organizations must prevent heroes to prevent single points of failure and favoritism.
      • One-on-ones facilitate quick syncing and relationship building.
        • 1:1s should be stored in a historical shared record.
      • Delegation is lending one’s authority to another to perform an action and be accountable for the result.
        • Deciding what to delegate is a matter of frequency and complexity.
      • Career pathing.
        • Becoming an engineering manager.
          • Management is a track change and requires interest in developing a new skillset.
          • Promoting technical experts to management can be a good move.
        • 30/60/90 day plans add some intentionality and drive to career pathing.
          • New team members need a short term plan to learn how to navigate their responsibilities.
          • Short term growth plans further assess new hires’ fit for their role.
        • Some roles help grow leadership and management skills without committing to a management path.
        • Senior engineers need to assess their career options to choose their advanced path.
          • Staying on the high-level individual contributor track trades creative expertise against control.
          • Management track switch trades contribution for control.
        • Employees should drive their career path conversations.
        • Structuring IC worloads to grow their skills.
          • Managers should identify what skills are needed for reports to succeed without them.
        • Becoming a staff engineer.
          • Senior engineers need new skills to advance.
      • Performance management.
        • Firing is necessary to reinforce the necessary behaviors of an organization.
          • When terminating an employee, it’s generous to let them set the tone.
        • Performance reviews.
        • Performance improvement plans (PIPs) set goals for performance improvement for underperformers.
        • Factors influencing performance.
        • Adjusting performance.
        • There are three modes of employee performance, and corresponding manager action.
        • Engineer individual contributor engagement metrics.
        • Distribution of employee impact.
          • High performers have a fundamental appreciation of the company’s purpose.
      • Burnout.
        • Burnout comes from people not getting what they need out of their jobs.
        • How burnout manifests.
          • Burnout is not merely excessive stress.
        • What organizations can do about burnout.
        • What individauls can do about burnout.
      • Managing relationships.
        • Things that managers should know about their relationship with employees.
          • Thinking about the 5 year career horizon may provide insight on direction.
    • Team management.
      • Teams.
        • Defining teams.
          • Working groups independently create shared results.
        • “First team” or “team number one” is the team you report into.
      • Team process.
        • Teams need to celebrate their wins.
        • Minimum viable process.
      • Retrospective reviews opportunities to be more effective and increase quality.
      • Standups.
        • Standups reduce disruption by creating dedicated space for resolution.
        • Standups are useful for team members assessing their opportunities to collaborate.
        • Using standup to deliver status updates corrupts its core purpose.
        • Standups are not just for teams of individual contributors.
      • Measuring success of a team.
        • Great teams deliver what matters while improving.
          • Great teams work to understand what matters.
          • Delivery.
          • Great teams improve.
        • Signals indicating a team’s health.
        • Team velocity is closely related to its purpose.
          • Velocity as a success metric requires high quality and good prioritization.
          • Velocity differs from speed in that it has a specific direction.
        • Qualities that impact team performance.
          • Teams should practice vulnerability to foster collaboration, effectiveness.
          • A team moves fastest when all of its parts can contribute to all of its properties.
      • Team dysfunctions.
        • Dysfunctional teams exhibit pathologies that harm themselves, their purpose, or the organization.
      • Working with external stakeholders.
        • Stakeholders lose trust when their expectations are not managed.
        • Marketing should regularly check in with product and engineering to validate that their outcomes will be supported.
        • Setting unrealistic expectations undermines respect by overstimating ability
      • Sustainability on a team.
      • Composition and team size.
        • Smaller teams maximize speed with a sweet spot of several people.
          • Communication channels and cognitive load increases with number of team members.
          • Brooke’s Law says that more people make projects later.
        • Engineering managers should have 6–8 ICs or accept other tradeoffs.
    • Hiring and onboarding.
    • Project management.
      • Project management streamlines execution by analyzing and arranging project components.
      • Planning.
        • People are bad at planning and estimation.
          • Students are unable to produce correct estimates on paper writing time.
          • Time-based estimates are particularly prone to poor estimates.
            • Multiple time-based estimates by 3 to get a closer result.
          • Hofstadter’s Law.
            • The coastline paradox says coastlines increase in length as measurements get more precise.
        • Planning tools and methodologies.
        • Technical project planning.
          • Project plans typically include multiple artifacts.
            • Engineers augment project plans with lower-level tasks.
          • Plans need to communicate to the team and stakeholders its progress.
            • Seeing incremental progress strongly encourages further progress.
          • A ”premortem” establishes a plan for deployment.
        • Tactics can be applied to reduce risks to timelines.
          • Questions to help buffer in project planning.
          • Buffer.
        • Planning is more important than a plan.
        • The lifecycle of planning.
          • Role involvements across the planning lifecycle.
            • QA needs to be involved early in a project.
      • Weighted shortest job first (WSJF).
        • Cost of delay (CoD) estimates the downside of not doing something.
        • WSJF prioritization needs to continuously be updated to assess contextual relevance..
        • Job duration.
        • WSJF supports decentralized decisions.
      • Roadmapping.
        • Roadmaps should support decisions across perspectives.
      • Estimation.
        • Estimation informs plan sanity and timelines.
        • Approaches to estimation.
          • Story points can be based on relative size compared to the smallest task.
            • People are better at estimating relative size than the time needed for a task.
            • Story points abstract work estimates away from units of time.
          • Story points were originally a euphamism for ”ideal days”.
          • Poker planning reduces bias while estimating.
      • Status reporting.
        • Avoid asking for status when it can be figured out.
      • Expectation management.
      • Project management tools.
    • Product development.
      • Product experimentation.
        • Drywell experimentation tests user behavior without investing in a solution.
        • Fail fast/fall forward asks a team to experiment to quickly find what works best.
      • Product ideation.
      • Comparing product management-adjacent roles.
      • Jobs to be done framework.
    • Organization.
      • Organization design.
        • Building blocks of a company.
          • Index of formal building blocks.
          • Index of informal building blocks.
        • Which company building blocks to adjust.
        • Survey constraints and scarcities in the org.
        • Decision rights.
          • Decision rights owner decides how ownership manifests among teams.
        • Tradeoffs in reporting structure shape.
        • Tradeoffs in macro organization designs.
          • An organization’s function corresponds to a suitable solution space.
        • Failures of organization design come from the wrong balance.
          • Results of one-variable organization designs (overdoing top priority).
          • Results of two-variable organization designs (underdoing bottom priority).
          • Undifferentiated designs avoid making tradeoffs.
        • Triadic profile of organizational design.
        • Analyzing organization design.
      • Business strategy.
        • Strategic playbook addresses an organization’s why, what, who, and how.
          • Answering “why do we exist?”.
          • Answering “how do we behave?”.
          • Answering “what do we do?”.
          • Answering “how will we succeed?”.
            • Identify strategic anchors by dumping all org context and finding themes.
            • Strategy is a collection of differentiating decisions.
          • Answering “what is most important right now?”.
            • Unclear prioritization fosters mediocrity and failure.
            • A “future retrospective” helps assess ideas about what is important.
          • Answering “who must do what?”.
          • Answering “what is the character of the organization?”.
          • Answering “who is the business for?”.
          • Answering “how does the business compete?”.
        • People processes are great tools for reinforcing strategic clarity.
          • Enforce org values through the hiring process.
          • Enforce strategy through the onboarding process.
          • Enforce org values and strategy with performance management.
          • Separating from employees who do not reflect the org’s values is key to health.
        • Business strategies answer questions about identity, behavior, and focus.
        • Defining strategy.
      • Organizational values.
        • Types of org values.
        • Analysis approachs for identifying an org’s current or needed values.
          • Identifying org values from most and least valued employees’ behavioral traits.
      • Creating a healthy organization is a business’ most critical advantage.
        • Creating a knowledgeable organization is a fundamental practice.
        • Signs of an unhealthy organization.
      • Organizational growth.
        • Parkinson’s Law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
        • Parkinson’s law concludes that public administration automatically grows 5.75% year-over-year regardless of circumstances.
        • Factors involved in maintaining system integrity during scale.
      • Organization structure.
      • Organization systems.
        • Tradeoffs of reward systems.
        • Tradeoffs in meeting systems.
        • Tradeoffs of decision systems.
    • Business qualities.
      • Ownership.
        • A sense of ownership stimulates primary work motivators.
        • Well-aligned self-direction is unlikely without establishing ownership first.
        • Tactics to increase ownership.
          • Defining tasks together increases ownership.
      • Autonomy.
        • Ownership requires autonomy.
          • People invest themselves into what they sense control over.
          • Predictability is a prerequisite to autonomy.
      • Micromanagement.
        • Effects of micromanagement.
          • Micromanagement neutralizes creativity.
        • Causes of micromanagement.
          • Management contributing at the wrong level harms contributors at that level.
            • Understanding how to contribute at the right level has many dependencies.
            • Micromanagement and not leaving space for others to step up are closely related.
          • Micromanagement creates conditions where more micromanagement is necessary.
      • Accountability and responsibility.
        • Accountability works best as a self-reinforcing system.
          • Escalations about behavior or performance stem from a lack of visible accountability.
          • Behavior determines results.
        • Leaving space for others to step in to take responsibility is critical for growing employees.
        • Anatomy of accountability.
          • Accountability requires expectation setting.
          • Accountability requires the accountable to acknowledge their commitments and the requestor keep track.
          • Accountability entails some form of followup.
        • TASC asks if someone has what they need to be accountable and successful.
          • Unmet expectations may stem from inability to meet the expectation.
        • RASCI asks what the relative responsibilities a project needs from individuals and groups.
      • Clarity must be created throughout an org via intentional practices.
        • Explicitly cascading communication ensures information flows quickly, accurately, and consistently.
        • People integrate information most effectively when they are exposed to it in different ways and contexts.
        • Clarity comes from active caring while lack of clarity comes from lack of external focus.
      • Collaboration.
        • Creating robust collaboration between business subunits.
          • Sharing opportunities observed from one vantage point can help drive connections between independent groups.
      • Effectiveness is the pursuit of an objective with respect to value.
        • Efficiency is the quality of pursuit of an objective.
          • Amdahl’s Law computes how much an improvement will speed up a system.
          • Gustafson’s Law claims that efficiency improvements will be used to do harder jobs.
        • Effectiveness is a superset of efficiency.
    • Time management/productivity.
      • Groups perform optimally under a little bit of pressure.
      • Getting Things Done overview.
        • Starting the Getting Things Done process.
        • Getting Things Done seeks to reduce latent stress and increase productivity through focus and organization.
        • Getting Things Done methodology has 5 steps.
          • Capture all outstanding tasks to reclaim headspace.
            • Any internal desire to change something constitutes and open loop which remains indefinitely open.
            • Open loops create stress and distraction regardless of circumstances.
            • ”Mind like water” is a tranquil state where action and reactions receive full focus.
          • Clarify ideas into actions.
            • Asking what the next action is is the most impactful way to work toward a known objective.
            • Clarify todo items to turn them to something doable.
            • Action-driven cultures foster positivity, clarity, movement, and ownership toward outcomes.
              • Complaints can be reframed into action.
              • Action orientation offers a sense of empowerment.
              • Collaborative cultures often obfuscate accountability.
          • Organize tasks to facilitate their doing when able.
            • Getting Things Done artifacts/systems for organizing action.
            • Next actions should be organized by physical context to make it easy to do things when appropriate.
            • We control 3 fundamental resources.
            • Hidden projects warrant analysis and identification so they can be tended.
          • Reflect often on task notes to ensure everything is captured and triaged.
            • Time must be spent priodically focusing on important, but not urgent, topics.
          • Engage the task management system to find the most effective use of time.
            • 4 criteria model for choosing what to do.
            • 3-fold model for identifying daily work.
            • 6-level model for reviewing one’s own work.
              • Using the 6-level model as an organizing tool.
        • Natural planning model outlines everything from purpose to tactics.
          • Unnatural planning model tries to make existing ideas work.
      • Focus.
        • Productivity requires effective planning.
          • Mental capacity changes throughout the day.
          • Schedule tasks with mental capacity in mind.
            • Do the hardest task of the day first.
            • Schedule tasks according to focus type and availability.
        • Simplify ideas to wield them more effectively.
          • Visual representations ease decision making.
          • Personification makes logic problems easier to understand.
          • Long term memory helps with focus.
          • Other parts of the brain can help with simplified information.
        • There can only be 1 active focus at a time.
          • Pending decisions steal resources and attention.
        • Distractions harm focus in a way that compounds.
          • Stopping/preventing (inhibition) distraction is difficult.
    • Meetings.
      • Meeting agendas and general structure.
      • Alternatives to meetings.
        • Silent brainstorming is more effective than verbal brainstorming.
        • Temporary messaging groups can be more effective than synchronous meetings.
      • Fostering meeting engagement.
        • Set expectations with meeting participants early.
      • Types of meetings.
        • Decision making meetings.
          • Decision making meeting tactics.
            • Ensure decision makers understand context.
        • Information sharing meetings.
      • Action items are the commitments or requests that come up in discussions.
    • Continuous improvement.
      • Continuous improvement is a commitment to reviewing the way something is done to find ways to do it better.
    • Kaizen is a process for continuous improvement.
      • Kaizen originated in the United States before further development in post-WWII Japan.
    • Shuhari describes the stages of learning to mastery.
    • Improvements must consider the overarching system to be effective.
    • Business management.
      • Policy docs.
      • Remote work.
    • Metrics and measurements.
      • Goodhart’s law suggests that metrics change what’s measured.
  • Education.
    • Learning.
      • Cunningham’s Law.
      • Reading tactics.
        • BAGEL method to reading.
        • THIEVES reading technique.
      • Organizations can foster learning, actively.
    • Mentorship.
      • Mentorship is an obligation for experienced engineers.
      • Managerial mentorships are defined by the working relationship.
        • Engineering managers may technically mentor their individual contributors but it benefits from delineation.
      • Technical mentorship trains up hard skills.
        • Proactive technical mentorship enriches engineers in ways they may otherwise not experience.
      • New hire mentors help new employees orient quickly.
        • New hires provide insight into how the organization operates.
      • Mentorship relationship.
        • Expectations about the nature of a mentorship relationship need to be set early.
    • Teaching.
      • Sharing information with others furthers one’s own understanding.
      • Expert blindness is the inability to see how one’s knowledge would be understood by others.
  • Knowledge work.
    • Zettelkasten.
      • My Zettelkasten practices.
        • My internal linking practices.
          • Linking practices continued.
        • My Zettelkasten ID structure.
        • Notes can carry on from others.
        • IDs have two major components.
        • The second half of an ID is where the real effort happens.
      • The practical uses of a Zettelkasten.
    • Journaling.
      • Journaling can be made more sustainable.
      • Journals provide active value when used well.
      • Journals work best with intentional categories of captured information.
        • Track failures to find learning opportunities.
    • Constraints.
      • Constraints optimize for what’s valued.
      • Constraints add value in knowledge work by defining areas of focus.
    • Diagrams and charts.
      • Cumulative flow diagram.
    • Knowledge management.
      • Inventory of knowledge components.
      • Benefits of capturing information.
        • Iceboxing ideas is an effective way to reduce resistance to improving focus in a body of work.
        • Capturing anxious thoughts reduces their effects.
        • Developing complex thought requires externalization.
      • Benefits of hand writing information.
      • Management information systems.
        • Misassumptions made by management information systems.
    • Writing.
      • Academic writing.
        • Synthesis in writing/reading is the process of breaking down and recombining points made by several sources.
      • Writing tips.
        • Constraints in writing practices promote progress through focus and enforced stopping points for activities.
        • Writing constraints that can help with different parts of the process.
        • Write with the readers’ context in mind to increase effectiveness.
      • Presentations.
        • McKinsey presentation framework.
    • Knowledge hierarchy.
      • DIKW model: data, information, knowledge, and wisdom.
      • Creating knowledge.
        • A data point only becomes knowledge once integrated.
  • Library and museums.
    • Noguchi is a ”most recently used” filing system.
  • Design.
    • User experience.
      • Mobile-first design.
        • Mobile devices have many constraints to address.
      • Usability heuristics.
• Social science.
  • Psychology.
    • Mental phenomenae and biases.
      • Learned helplessness is the belief that one has no control over their experience.
      • Generalizing effect leads to accidental connections between ideas.
      • Dunning-Kruger effect.
      • Mere-exposure effect.
      • Imposter syndrome is the feeling of poor suitability in a role.
      • Anchoring biases orient one disproportionately toward the first things they learn about something.
        • Bandwagon effect influences opinions based on that of the larger group.
        • Halo effect lets one perceive another as more correct because they have other qualities.
      • Confirmation bias.
        • The brain wants to match patterns and move on.
          • The brain revises, lies, and glosses over to reinforce its existing models and theories.
      • Feature Positive effect.
      • Fundamental attribution error.
      • Terminal uniqueness is the belief that one is somehow different than others.
      • Zeigarnik effect.
      • Sunk cost bias.
      • Endowment effect.
      • Status quo bias.
      • Fear of missing out.
      • Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as frequency illusion.
        • Selective attention.
        • Sensitization is the intentional act of priming someone to notice something.
      • Planning fallacy.
    • Motivation and behavior.
      • ARIA model can help create insight and action.
      • SCARF model describes the threats and rewards of social situations.
      • Fogg Behavior Model describes the factors of behavior.
        • 6 elements of simplicity in action.
        • Fundamental motivators drive all behaviors.
      • Pink’s intrinsic motivation model.
        • Autonomy is a primary motivator.
        • Mastery is a primary motivator.
        • Purpose is a primary motivator.
      • Increased status is a primary reward for people.
        • Status is the feeling of having value to a social group.
          • Morality can be used to attain status through prestige or dominance.
        • People and groups will do whatever they can to increase status.
        • Failures of status result in dominance behaviors.
          • Moral granstanding is an unfaithful pursuit of status.
        • Sustainable status accrual helps avoid toxic behavior.
        • Social media is a problematic way to seek status.
          • Social media readily encourages grandstanding.
        • Positive pursuit of status helps oneself and one’s ability to help the group.
        • Ego is the shadow side of status pursuit.
          • Ego defends beliefs from threats.
      • Poor motivators.
        • Compensation is a hygienic motivator only.
        • Requests without reciprocal value tend to be poor motivators.
          • Data collection depends on reciprocation.
      • Motivation is largely social in nature.
        • People are primarily motivated by how they feel about their jobs.
        • Increased connection is a primary reward for people.
      • Fairness.
        • Perception of inequity creates abnormally strong negative reactions.
    • Business psychology.
      • Paradox of success.
      • Brainstorming.
      • Decision making.
        • Establishing context and problems is the first step to choice.
          • Punt decisions and tasks when they aren’t urgent.
        • Gather options before committing to a solution to maximize potential.
          • Exploration is necessary to find the best options.
            • Pareto principle.
          • Create space for exploration.
        • Options must be weighed before committing to a decision.
          • Tradeoffs align with core purpose.
          • Make choices in context of other opportunities.
        • Narrow options until a choice can be made.
          • Too many choices is effectively the same as none.
          • Tactics for reducing options toward a decision.
          • Tactics for making very hard decisions.
          • Decline nonessential opportunities.
            • Saying no can be done in a way that helps the other party.
        • Decisions require commitment to enter into reality.
          • Consensus is not a valuable decision making target.
          • Disagree and commit.
          • Commitment is active.
          • Decision making discussions must end with confirmations about understanding and commitments.
        • Decisions may benefit from followup to assess results.
          • The quality of a decision is in the process of making it, not in the outcome.
            • A good process for making decisions is much more important than most specific decisions.
        • Decision making tools.
          • Template for decision making and analysis.
        • List of decision making pitfalls.
          • Indecision is a pitfall.
            • Decisions are necessarily made with imperfect knowledge.
        • Make decisions with the right representation.
          • Inclusive decision making is best served by representatives of diverse viewpoints.
        • Analysis.
          • SWOT analysis.
          • PESTEL analysis.
          • Porter’s Five Forces.
          • Fishbone diagrams show cause and effect.
          • Five Whys is a cause analysis technique.
      • Cut losses on bad investments.
        • Forcing things to work.
      • Cargo culting a solution is a sloppy approach to problem solving.
      • Finite game versus infinite game are vantage points that shape one’s focus areas.
    • Vulnerability.
      • Vulnerability is necessary to lead teams that have clarity and trust.
        • Vulnerability is nothing more than the feeling experienced during emotional risk.
      • Defending against vulnerability prevents growth.
      • Tangible business needs requiring vulnerability.
      • Ego pursues self-worth through social recognition at the expense of authenticity.
        • Learning how to more authentically be ourselves is one of life’s noble pursuits.
        • Negative behaviors created by defensive ego.
          • Perfectionism attempts to avoid the pain of disappointing others.
          • Turning joy into foreboding to avoid a future feeling of loss.
          • Numbing pain suppresses every other experience.
          • Needing to be right is defensiveness.
          • Cynicism and sarcasm seek to avoid emotional contribution.
          • Ego goes into overdrive when a sense of value is missing.
          • Measuring self-worth with productivity.
          • Judgment offers catharsis to mask our anxieties.
          • Violating trust creates counterfeit relatability.
        • Anxiety tends to cause negative reactions from ego.
      • Shame.
        • Shame is the fear of disconnection stemming from feeling unworthy.
        • Traits that show an organization has become tainted with shame.
        • Shame compounds when left untreated.
        • Shame creates outward and inward damage.
        • Connection is the antidote to shame.
      • Trust.
        • Trust grows slowly through small reciprocal moments.
          • Leaders are best able to trust those that ask them for help.
        • Trust builds cohesive and productive organizations.
        • The 7 attributes of trust.
      • Psychological safety.
        • Psychological safety is disrupted by trust-harming behaviors.
          • Achetypes that harm team psychological safety.
            • Address archetypes that harm psychological safety.
        • Psychological safety is fostered through trust enforcing behaviors.
        • Psychological safety is the ability of people to feel safe taking risks together.
        • Investing in social connectedness increases productivity.
        • Problems related to psychological safety.
          • Lack of psychological safety produces ego-defensive behaviors.
          • Lack of psychological safety creates anxiety.
      • Empathy.
        • Empathy is about connecting to underlying feelings.
        • Barriers to empathy.
    • Life design.
      • Life design is an empirical approach to fostering better life outcomes.
      • Framework for more intentional living.
        • Personal maintained artifacts.
          • Strategic personal artifacts.
          • Tactical personal artifacts.
        • Personal recurring events.
        • Recurring personal activities (informal).
        • Personal event triggers
      • Miracle Morning Life SAVERS lays out a morning routine.
        • Affirmations are commitments and inspiration to create the future one wants.
          • Creating affirmations involves assessing intent and commitments.
          • Some actions can make internalizing affirmations more effective.
        • Strategies for reliably waking up.
        • Visualization improves goal pursuit.
      • Goals.
        • SMARTER goals model makes engaging goals.
          • Actionable goals orients to doability.
          • Risky goals command attention better.
          • Exciting goals are intrinsically motivating.
        • SMART goals model makes practical goals.
          • Specific goals illuminate the path to success.
          • Measurable goals offer progress feedback and finish lines.
            • Positive goals are more successful because they emphasize outcomes.
          • Achievable goals keep focus on the realm of possibility.
          • Goals need to be relevant to each other and in life.
          • Time-bound goals emphasize urgency and routine.
        • Goal setting happens best in a liminal mindset.
          • Reframe limiting beliefs into liberating truths.
          • Perform an after-action review to learn from the past.
          • Learn through a year-in-review.
        • Goals absolutely must be written down and reviewed.
        • Well-designed goals cover all bases of the behavior model.
        • Personal yearly goals should be planned ambitiously and in the areas in need of improvement.
        • Start working on goals—don’t overplan.
        • Activation triggers keep habits and goals integrated into one’s life.
        • Objectives and key results (OKRs) are an approach for goal setting in organizations.
      • Designing your life methodology.
        • Surveying the state of one’s life suggests specific focus areas for improvement.
          • Gravity problems are problems with no practical solution.
        • Work and life ethos statements orient one to purpose or fundamental understanding.
          • A personal compass provides insight through comparison.
          • “Work” is anything we are committed to make happen.
        • Tracking one’s relationship with daily activities will show what one values.
        • Mindmapping off of things that bring joy allows one to visualize different future lives.
        • An Odyssey Plan is a 5 year plan for a theoretically desired life that answers questions about the option.
        • Life decision options can be prototyped for validation and learning.
        • Life design artifacts roll experiential information into experimental analyses.
    • Consciousness and metaconsciousness.
      • Liminal thinking is an approach to sidestepping the biggest hindrance to change: belief.
        • Liminal comes from the Latin word for threshold.
        • Beliefs prevent change—but change happens at those boundaries.
        • Liminal thinking exercises.
          • Liminal thinking exercises continued.
          • Liminal thinking exercises continued.
          • Liminal thinking exercises continued.
        • Theory of beliefs assess origin and meaning of beliefs.
          • Beliefs are models of reality.
          • Beliefs are constructed.
            • People are compelled to form like-minded social groups.
            • The pyramid of belief shows the construction process of a belief.
          • Beliefs create a shared world.
            • A learning loop evolves reaction to needs as results are assessed.
            • Doom loops are a mutually negative feedback loops between learning loops.
            • Story webs are a self-evident reality produced by its participants.
          • Beliefs create blindspots—limiting beliefs.
          • Beliefs defend themselves.
            • Self-sealing logic causes a self-consistent narrative that aids quick action.
            • Self-sealing logic forms a bubble of reality which distorts information to fit.
            • New information is tested internally and maybe externally.
          • Beleifs are tied to identity.
            • Governing beliefs are the core of a belief system, discussing identity and self-worth.
            • Self-worth is the foundation of belief, so threats to beliefs are interpreted as threats to self.
            • Governing beliefs are at the center of group cohesion.
            • Conspiracy theories originate in groups that have a shared identity related to lack of control over life.
              • Conspiracy theories offer explanations for why certain needs, especially control, are unmet.
        • Reality distortion can be mitigated and change fostered with practice.
          • Assume onself is not objective to find blind spots.
            • The Johari Window is an aid to understand oneself.
          • A beginner’s mind is needed to get away from bad assumptions about a problem.
            • Good probing questions ask more about experience specifics than open-ended qualitative views.
          • People work more effectively when their emotional needs are respected.
            • Emotions are a manifestation of needs.
            • Needs are concealed when psychological safety is lacking.
            • Domains of social behavior express different positive aspects of effectiveness.
          • Validate theories directly, or through contrast with other viewpoints.
            • Models/theories that are good at predicting are not necessarily true.
            • Incomprehensible behaviors are the result of ideas/inputs that are not readily apparent.
            • Comparing/contrasting different viewpoints is the best way to learn reality.
          • Ask questions and make connections.
          • Disrupt routines to unseat negative feedback loops.
          • Act out different realities/beliefs to find new opportunities.
            • Double loop learning is a process for testing new approaches.
            • Chesterton’s Fence refers to the idea that one must understand past rationale before reform.
          • Beliefs are transmitted to others through story.
          • Take risks to get new experiences.
      • Consciousness.
        • Consciousness likely originated to improve the pursuit of food.
        • Properties of consciousness.
          • Properties not necessary to consciousness.
      • Minfulness and meditation.
        • Understanding how the brain works allows one to wield it more effectively.
      • Emotions.
        • Emotions are a simplified heuristic for navigating a complex world.
          • Org decisions and emotions both use values as a heuristic to navigate uncertainty.
        • Index of feelings to watch for and associated actions.
          • Resentment indicates that communication has not adequately occurred.
          • Managing anxiety.
          • Stress creates or harms performance.
            • Stress can be reduced by focusing on other activities.
            • The Yerkes-Dodson Law says that performance follows a bell curve of stress.
        • Once an emotion has come up, the main options are to express it or change viewpoints.
          • Labeling internal states gives control over them.
          • Reappraising a situation allows one to apply a new perspective to choose a better approach.
        • Over-arousal of the limbic system causes many cognitive downsides.
      • Subconscious.
        • Action potential is the signal the brain sends when it intends to do something.
    • Positive psychology.
      • Life skills.
        • The most important life skills for success are reappraisal and mindfulness.
      • Happiness.
        • People perform better when they are happy.
    • Cognition and perception.
      • Cognition is the processing of information.
        • Cognition is largely concerned with predicting events.
          • The brain rewards problem solving/pattern finding.
      • Cognition differs from consciousness in awareness.
      • Intelligence is an entity’s ability to acquire knowledge on its own.
      • Kinds of “forever,” or, perception of permanent states.
      • Problem solving.
        • Insight comes from attention to the way a problem is being thought about.
          • Focus on the details of a problem can stand in the way of solving it.
        • Effectively helping others solve problems.
          • Giving people solutions is an ineffective way of creating desired outcomes.
        • Outcome-oriented thinking creates insight by focusing on things related to the outcome.
      • Cognition can be manipulated.
        • Visualizations create similar cognitive reactions as real events.
      • Cognitive tools.
        • Triadic thinking contrasts three things.
  • Sociology.
    • Leadership.
      • Defining leadership.
        • Leaders follow other leaders in the same mission.
        • Leaders have vision toward a different world.
        • Leaders lead change initiatives.
          • The Lippitt-Knoster model for managing complex change.
      • Management antipatterns.
      • Leadership traits.
        • Restraint is a fundamental leadership quality.
          • It can be better to wait for something to unfold rather than immediately reacting.
        • Leaders thrive in ambiguity.
        • Listening and empathy are foundational leadership traits.
      • Pitfalls for leaders.
      • Tactics for effective leadership.
      • Executive presence.
        • Ways of speaking to improve executive presence.
        • Focuses during communication to improve executive presence.
          • Themes in executive presence-focused communication.
        • Other things to do to improve executive presence.
    • Social behavior.
      • Giving feedback.
        • Giving feedback more frequently creates defensiveness than change.
          • People generally want more feedback to help them be more effective.
          • Better performance outcomes come from facilitating positive change instead of feedback.
            • Is it better to provide direct feedback, or indirectly facilitate positive change?
        • Healthy conflict is a necessary form of feedback.
          • Tactics to help conflict be productive.
            • All participants in a breakdown could have influenced the outcome more positively.
        • Ensure you’re ready to provide feedback before starting.
        • Hiding feedback ensures further problems.
        • Regular feedback, especially positive, builds the trust needed for harder discussions.
        • Engineering managers must understand how their employees want feedback and praise.
      • Conflict.
        • Managing conflict is a mix of prevention and facilitation.
        • Teams must engage conflict to make progress.
          • Conflict is valuable for driving commitment and better decisions.
          • Conflict requires being comfortable with vulnerability.
          • Groups may need help engaging conflict if there’s a preference for artificial harmony.
          • Tactics for engaging conflict constructively.
        • Recovering from mistakes of empathetic leadership.
          • Box breathing creates a space to foster perspective about an emotion.
          • In all conflicts, lack of information leads all parties into imaginary narratives that fill in the gaps.
            • Questions to ask to get past automatic internal narrative.
        • Gaslighting.
          • Dragging conflict through demands about minutiae is gaslighting.
      • Receiving feedback.
        • Improve performance by requesting feedback.
        • Receive feedback with a mind to use it.
      • Expectations.
        • Expectations directly determine how we experience the world.
        • Sharing expectations creates a path to satisfaction.
        • Unshared expectations create disconnects.
    • Society.
      • Requirements for the development of social systems.
    • Social relations.
      • Human interactions fall into three categories.
    • Group dynamics.
      • Strong emotions spread automatically through groups.
  • Political science.
    • Peace and conflict studies.
      • Internal conflict.
        • Precursors to civil war.
        • Stages of insurgency.
  • Economics.
    • The network effect, or, demand-side economies of scale.
    • Microeconomics.
      • Opportunity cost.
    • Macroeconomics.
    • Finance.
      • Personal finance.
        • Kakeibo is the art of mindful budgeting.
          • Budgeting has the highest chance of success with clear goals and review.
          • Mindful curiosity helps improve purchase decisions.
        • Budgeting is necessary because society is incentivized to separate people from their money without noticing.
• Formal science.
  • Computer science.
    • Languages.
      • Elixir.
        • OTP.
          • Elixir processes often store state and offer an API for other processes to work with it.
      • Golang.
        • Pointers in golang.
    • Databases.
      • Postgres.
        • Exporting CSV from psql.
        • Listing tables in schemas.
      • Database IDs.
        • ID representations.
          • base32.
          • z-base-32.
          • Crockford base32.
          • UUID.
            • UUID is inadequate for high security.
        • Generate IDs outside DB for high scale.
    • Computer science design principles.
      • Law of Demeter.
    • Webservers.
      • Webserver sessions.
  • Mathematics.
    • Infinity.
      • There are multiple types of infinity.
  • Statistics.
    • Data types in statistics.
    • Distrubutions.
      • Frequency.
      • Describing distributions.
        • Mean.
        • Median.
        • Standard deviation.
• Humanities.
  • Creativity.
    • Defining creativity.
  • Philosophy.
    • Ontology: the study of what exists.
      • Basic concepts of ontology.
      • Ontological stances or viewpoints.
    • Mereology is the philosophy of parts and wholes.
    • Purpose.
      • Identifying core intent aids self-aligned decision making.
        • A statement of core intent distills one’s motivations and purpose.
        • Methods for identifying core intent.
          • Current and desired roles and responsibilities are key identifiers of core intent.
      • Personal values.
        • Sharing personal values with others allows them to interpret us more correctly.
        • Identifying personal values allows them to be more deeply integrated.
        • Values must be turned into action for them to be meaningful.
      • Use a joy and meaning list to define success.
      • Deciding what you want.
  • Visual arts.
    • Photography.
      • Holga.
        • Holga click guide.
  • Language.
    • Linguistics.
      • Linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
      • Grammar and parts of speech.
        • Order of abjectives in English.
  • History.
  • Mythology and folklore.
    • Sword of Damocles.
• Natural science.
  • The scientific method.
  • Space science.
    • Black holes.
      • The event horizon is all-encompassing.
    • Supernovae.
      • Pair instability supernova are the highest energy events, culminating in a hypernova.
    • Stars.
      • Black hole stars could explain otherwise impossibly large black holes.
  • Physics.
    • Physics of motion.
      • Speed and velocity.
      • Acceleration.
      • Momentum.
      • Force.
    • Color.
      • The Maxwell Color Triangle represents all possible hues using three variables.
      • Chromatic aberration occurs when a lens bends different colors at different rates.
    • Light.
      • Snell’s Law states that light changes direction when changing speed.
  • Biology.
    • Eyes.
      • Human eyes don’t see most wavelengths in focus.
    • Brains.
      • Important systems in the brain.
        • Prefrontal cortex.
          • Prefrontal cortex is inefficient with energy.
        • Limbic system tracks emotional relationship with the world and memory forming.
        • There are two distinct ways of interacting with the world.
          • Default network.
          • Direct experience network focuses on processing sensory information.
      • Brain chemicals.
        • Dopamine drives interest.
          • Dopamine levels can be preserved or encouraged.
        • Norepinephrine and adrenaline drive alertness.
        • Oxytocin reflects our emotional and goal entanglements with others.
      • Mental limitations.
        • People possess limited mental resources.
          • How big is short term attention?
        • Ego depletion is the reduction of volition caused by the exercise of volition.
          • Decision making is extremely tiring.
          • Limited mental resources require potent and effective decision making.
    • Digestive system.
      • The appendix.