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Happy Friday!

I hope everyone had a cracker of a week. My publishing streak broke in just six weeks :( If any of you were looking out for this newsletter last Friday and couldn’t find it, I apologise - I was shifting houses and the boxing and unboxing didn’t leave any time for writing. But here we are this week, and here’s what happened on the blog and on the internet.

From the blog

This week I published some thoughts on unit testing. My feelings towards unit testing have changed a lot from “who-cares” to “this is awesome”, and not just because tests are good. Increasingly I find myself writing a test just to see if the code is as modular as I could make it. This post gives some code examples of doing this and talks about discovering the hidden boundaries in code using unit tests. Article Link

From the great interweb

1. I found this short but brutally incisive piece by Jan Bosch on how structure eats strategy in an organization. No matter your plans, if the organization isn’t designed for those plans, they will fail. Echoes of  James Clear (“We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our processes”).
2. Alvaro Videla presents a humane, design centric approach to API design.
3. I came across this superb guide to becoming a first -principles thinker. I’m generally cautious when approaching this kind of advice but this is a genuinely well written and structured approach towards drilling down to the heart of a concept.
4. How do you set the baseline when looking for a new house? Here’s a fun little twitter thread that resonated with me recently. Apparently you should devote 37% of your total budget (time/money/whatever) on finding the baseline - that’s how the mathematicians do it!

That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!

-Kislay