1/ Today @stripepress publishes one of my favorite books to date: Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by @stewartbrand, about the unglamorous yet civilizationally important work of maintenance and repair. 

press.stripe.com/maintenance-pa… x.com/stripepress/st… 2/ Sometimes the proximate cause of a civilization’s collapse is rapid and obvious. But sometimes civilizations unravel slowly because they fail to maintain themselves. Infrastructure decay, increasingly sclerotic institutions, technical debt, and, yes, declining birth rates, are all examples of this phenomenon.

TADSE goes viral on here every few months, but people sometimes struggle with it once they start.

They expect a linear book, but it's actually a set of lectures: part memoir, part philosophy, part technical aside. That unevenness is part of the charm, but can make it hard to approach.

Here’s how I recommend reading it: I often tell people not to read it straight through, but instead to start with the last 5 chapters, in which the book really pays off.

In these Hamming writes about vision, style, and judgment. Specifically, why some scientists and engineers go further than others, and how to cultivate the habits that make a career matter.

Recently I’ve gotten a lot of inbound from new grads asking for career advice, so I wrote down a list of things I wish I’d internalized sooner.

The key thing: being precocious has an expiration date. Threading the note in its entirety: 2/ I can’t stress this one enough: avoid chasing the red herrings of success.

I worry that in pushing everyone to “build in public” we’ve created a kind of announcement economy…one in which you can receive the same funding, attention, dopamine hits, by announcing an _intention_ to build something…as you can by simply shipping something excellent.

For LOST IN STAGNATION, the first of many @WorksInProgMag / @stripepress collaborations, I interviewed J. Storrs Hall, author of ‘Where is My Flying Car’ to talk about stagnation and the possibility of progress: worksinprogress.co/issue/intervie…

https://twitter.com/ns_whit/status/1580193319455379457

The proximate cause of stagnation (or, put a different way, of wtf happened in 1971)? In a word, energy.

1/ 2.5 yrs ago I visited @stripe’s library (TY, @pioneerdotapp!).

I walked away with more books than I could carry (TY, @sashadem!) and an instant love for @stripepress—so it’s a bit surreal to announce today that I’m switching gears @stripe to become its commissioning editor. 2/ Stripe Press’s mission was a core reason why I joined Stripe. *Ideas* are the seeds of great companies and great institutions, and excellent ones should be widely available—particularly to high-agency, fiercely curious individuals around the world.