Over-engineering is bad. Period. It's costly and introduces complexity that you and the customers don't want to deal with.

On the other end, just because you think you cannot predict the future 100% correct, it doesn't give you an excuse to put no effort to do it. You don't ship into the ocean without a map.

Any company would experience some growing pains if it succeeds. As architects, our job is to do our best to predict the future and design an blue print that meets that predicted needs :)

A coupe things to remember.

1. stocks is the ownership of the company. Buy those companies that are strong in sales. Demand is a verification of the company's strength in products & strategies.

2. always pay attention to the valuation but take growth into account. Lagging indicator helps you understand where we are only when we see the business through forward-thinking lens.

3. timing matters only when you understand valuation and forward-looking thinking.

Thanks for sharing your advice based on your life experience. Another way to make decision is use hurdle rate instead of strictly speaking discount rate. There you can try to quantify happiness in additional to purely financial return.

My feeling is that PC and its app ecosystem is outdated and doesn't have leadership on what the future gonna look like.

When Apple announced that the M1 chip Mac can run iOS apps, I think it's the Game Over call to PCs - TBH, for avg users, mobile apps are much easier to use than most website or their PC software counterparties.

The cost to own a Mac could still be the barrier, but owning its own chip is a way to cut the manufacturing cost. Or, in Apple's way, to maintain a fat gross margin :) we'll see.

This sounds familiar to the idea of 4-hr work week. btw, it's a good reading. Highly recommended.

It’s 2020.

Almost everyone has a phone (at least a family has one)

Wi-fi is free at malls and coffee shops.

What if we can vote on our phones?

It’s easy to check whether your vote gets accepted or not, and why.

It’s easy to do Photo ID check — just turn on the camera and yell cheese :)

It’s easy to count — c’mon, 150 million records in computer’s term is not a big deal. We generate 10x more junks in FB and Instagram, oh and even more on TikToc.

And if we disagree with the result, and have…

I just finished reading the book Clean Architecture by Robert Martin. It’s not quite the book that I was expecting, but it helped me to refresh some useful software design principles.

So, when talking about architecture, just imagine working on a high-rise project, like the AON center in Chicago. It’s complicated. Not just effort paid in the design initially, but it does require a lot of work — putting bricks, steels, and concrete together and lift them high in the air. What makes “architecture” mean differently in the software world? It’s rarely a repeat of building the same thing over…

What triggered me to write this post is a question I participated at Quora.com long time ago:

What do software developers of age 30 and over know now that wish they had known in their 20s?

I was just turning 30 when I saw this question, and believe me, life was quite intense at the time. Within a few minutes, I wrote my response on Quora. And to my surprise, it becomes one of my most viewed answers there. Feel great, absolutely.

After years, I think it’s time to review and write a few suggestions to new grad engineers, hoping…