Zack Kanter Profile picture
Jan 6, 2019 4 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Perhaps the best description I’ve seen of why learning is important for anyone building something, physical or virtual: the quality of your decisions is governed by the mental patterns available to you at the time of decision-making.

(book is ‘The Timeless Way of Building’) Image
“Your creative power is entirely given by the power of these patterns...the only way of acting fast is to rely on the various rules of thumb which [you] have accumulated in [your] mind.” Image
(seems like something @farnamstreet would like)
And now, the best answer I’ve seen to the question: “if the rules of building something great are so simple to express, what is there that makes a builder great?” Image

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More from @zackkanter

Apr 5, 2025
While this is accurate, the tariffs are unfortunately/unintentionally an extinction-level event for US-based Amazon sellers and a huge boost for China-based sellers. 🧵
Amazon has a program that allows Chinese manufacturers to sell on Amazon and fulfill their orders from Amazon’s US warehouses. Amazon handles the importing end to end to make it as easy as possible for them to sell on the platform. Image
The Chinese sellers list the cost of the goods drastically undervalue actual value to save on tariffs. They occasionally get caught and are shut down, but there’s no recourse and they just spin up a new entity overnight (US sellers risk federal prison if they play this game).
Read 5 tweets
Mar 6, 2024
Change Healthcare – the nation's largest clearinghouse for insurance claims and payments – has been down for 13 days and counting due to a cyberattack. It's an absolute crisis – doctors, hospitals, and other providers can't get paid. What is a clearinghouse? What is going on? 🧵
Everyone knows HIPAA as a privacy act – forms to fill out at a doctor’s office. What people don’t know is the *Portability* part of ‘The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act’, which directed the department of HHS to establish standards for electronic transactions.
Before HIPAA, insurance companies (aka ‘payers’) and providers all used different formats for insurance claims, payments, eligibility checks, benefits enrollments, and more. It was functionally impossible for all of the parties to do business together without manual intervention.
Read 15 tweets
May 27, 2022
'If "fear is the mind killer," toil is the soul-killer.'

A few of my favorite, well, excerpts from 'Excerpts from the annual letter'. stedi.com/blog/excerpts-… Image
I think about this in terms of preferences vs principles: many companies have a preference for operational excellence – but when push comes to shove, principles are defined by what you're willing to sacrifice for them. Image
On Amazon and on-call (with a caveat). ImageImage
Read 14 tweets
Apr 1, 2022
A while back, @martin_casado asked me: "do you really think there are *no* circumstances under which it makes sense for a company to go on-prem / bare metal?" In all seriousness, I do think there are several cases where doing so might be necessary. (1/n)
1. You cannot afford to offer your product otherwise. I don't mean "you could do it cheaper yourself" – I mean *your unit economics would be negative* if you used public cloud infra. This is the case in certain rare circumstances. (2/n)
2. It is impossible to deliver your product / product experience using public cloud infra. I don't mean "you can make it better/faster if you build your infra from scratch" – I mean *your product has _requirements_ that preclude the possibility* of using public cloud. (3/n)
Read 6 tweets
Dec 2, 2021
(1/n) The entire world of commerce – supply chain, logistics, retail, financial transactions, healthcare, and much, much more – is driven by an arcane technology called EDI. The world around you is powered by transactions that look like they came off a dot matrix printer in 1985:
(2/n) Trillions and trillions of dollars flow through these legacy systems, locked away beyond the reach of modern developers. @Stedi is a collection of composable, API-driven building blocks that make these systems more legible and approachable: edi.stedi.com/inspector?valu…
(3/n) Our EDI Core APIs are now Generally Available. EDI Core translates legacy files like X12 into our modern JEDI (JSON EDI) format. Used in conjunction with our Mappings product, EDI files can be ingested into (or created from) virtually any modern system.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 2, 2021
I'm extremely excited to announce that Mappings – @Stedi's first broadly-applicable, developer-focused product – is now Generally Available. Mappings provides a powerful UI for defining JSON transformations, which can then be invoked via API for data mapping at scale. 1/n
Mappings is particularly useful for building integrations – say, transforming Stripe payloads to some custom format – but can be used for any JSON-to-JSON transformation. Just upload a source & target file, then use simple functions to transform fields as necessary. 2/n
The pricing is (of course) 100% usage-based: no minimum fees or upfront costs. Check out the docs, give it a try (with our free tier), and let us know what you think. And if you like it now, just wait til you see how fast it gets better :) 3/n stedi.com/docs/mappings
Read 5 tweets

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