Thinking in Systems – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Thinking in Systems, by Donella H. Meadows. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Author: wilselby
Product: Starting from Scratch
In 2020, I was given the opportunity to lead the Product team at Ouster. This post details the process and framework I used to define the core functions of the team and figure out where to start. Ouster’s core business is the design and manufacture of high-resolution lidar sensors supporting a wide variety of robotics […]
Cloud Infrastructure Expenses – A Tragedy of the Commons
I was reading the section in the book, “Thinking in Systems” about the tragedy of the commons and thought some of the recommendations might apply to software teams trying to manage their cloud infrastructure spending. When companies are young, they may optimize for development speed and flexibility and not focus on financial efficiency, This prioritization […]
The Sovereign Individual – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, The Sovereign Individual by James Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
The Beginning of Infinity – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
AWS RoboMaker – Simulating an RC Car
In November of 2018, Amazon announced the launch of RoboMaker, a cloud robotics service that makes it easy to develop, simulate, and deploy robotics applications at scale. RoboMaker provides a robotics development environment for application development, a robotics simulation service to accelerate application testing, and a robotics fleet management service for remote application deployment, update, and […]
Text Manipulation: Extracting, Translating, and Converting to Audio
A friend of mine was asking me about the technical complexity of a children’s picture book reading robot, the Luka. The robot is used to read children’s books in both English and Chinese. It looks at the pages and then reads the book aloud in English or Chinese. This product has three primary requirements: Extracting […]
The Practicing Stoic – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual by Ward Farnsworth. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.
Turning Uncertainty Into A Competitive Advantage
The planning fallacy, first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, describes a bias that causes people to underestimate how long something will take and overestimate its impact. As a Product Manager, this is disheartening to read, but also not surprising. Features take longer to release than anticipated and they rarely deliver the […]
Making Things Happen – Summary and Insights
Below are some of my key takeaways from reading the book, Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun. If you are interested in more detailed notes from this book, they are available here.