Love, networks, and engineered writing

Hi nerds -

I salute you from Panama City, where curfew was finally removed on Monday.

As I dive into my second week of funeployement, I’m taking both Write of Passage and Web3 Kernel cohort-based courses at the same time. I’ll admit I feel a bit overwhelmed at the moment, but all this learning also feels incredibly rewarding.

Highlights of the week include meeting Ethereum creator, Vitalik Buterin, and the mastermind behind Stripe Press, Brie Wolfson.

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3 brain farts

👾 From skeptic to adopter: Advancing disruptive products into the mainstream requires moving users from skeptics to adopters.

Traditionally, this has been done through the implementation of strategies around pricing, user experience, or virality. But as these products become overly complex and technical, effective pedagogy becomes crucial to close the chasm. This is usually done following 3 steps:

• Identifying entry points: map out people’s current understanding and empathize with their biggest resistance points.
• Provide new intel: share new information to fuel a people's curiosity on the subject.
• Get skin in the game: hands-on experience with the product ultimately turns users when the product has the right pricing, user experience, or virality.

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🕸 Network-centric era: We are moving towards a network-centric era as we globalize and digitize most industries.

​Benjamin Button products, products whose value increases due to their network effect (think Twitter, YouTube, Waze), are becoming the basis for our interactions and human connections. And at a huge profit.

Tools enabling networks of people to collaborate effectively are also reaching new heights. Zoom, Notion, Jira, Figma, among others have become staple of collaboration among the most complex of organizations.

And add to the equation the rise of cryptocurrencies and we have a network-based money technology enabling verifiability and trust between strangers to transact without the need of intermediaries.

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👩🏻‍💻 Engineer writing: The lifecycle of writing a good article is very similar to the lifecycle of writing good software.

1. Architecture: The codebase's boilerplate is the archetype of an article. Is it a “how to” piece, a “persuasion” article or a short snappy “newsletter”?
2. Features: The features a product has defines how it’s built, just like the topics selected map the scope of a well-written piece. You can imagine this as the outline, the list of items we want to address.
3. Writing: It may look a bit scrambled at first, with comments and streams of ideas. Whether it’s code or literature, this is the crux of the process.
4. Refactor: Following best practices makes our editing spark:
   1. Naming variables: the more explicit the word-selection, the stronger our arguments will be.
   2. DRY (don’t repeat yourself): duplication is the evil of all code. Anything that’s repeated, should be deleted.
   3. Error handling: specially in persuasion pieces, it’s critical to address the counter arguments so our piece convinces even the most skeptical readers.
   4. Intuitive writing: our codebase should be easy-to-read by any new developer, just like our articles should feel easy to digest by the modern reader. Bullets, headers, underlines, and bolds help soothe the content for skimmers.
5. Reviews: Feedback and code reviews are the only ways to improve in our craft.
6. Deploy: Publishing and deploying to production is the most important part of the process.

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2 intellectual goodies

"The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humour, sexual understanding and selective resignation."

~ School of Life, by Alain de Botton

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"We cannot be sure what the effect of our actions will be, we can only cultivate an acute observational awareness which will guide us toward making the right trade-offs."

~ The Play of Pattern, Kernel

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1 funky audio

A gentle reminder that things are gonna get easier always comes in handy. This song is an acoustic version of the classic “Ooh child” song by The Five Stairsteps.

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Thanks for reading.

As always, feel free to connect by hitting reply and sharing a juicy thought 💡.

We all help the curious community grow.

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Best,

Jules 🤸🏻‍♂️