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mifeng | 5 years ago

This article seems like it was written in 2017, not 2020.

Filecoin raised over $200m and hasn't shipped anything that I'm aware of in 3 years. Maybe it will be revolutionary, but the crypto industry has long moved on from white whale projects that don't ship.

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hinkley|5 years ago

Going from zero to a positive velocity takes a certain kind of person who doesn't let doubts stop them.

But to build a team around a project? You can hack a lot of stuff together than only makes sense to you, crippling any of your would-be collaborators. Certain kinds of doubts should in fact stop you, or at least slow you down. It's a difficult thing to balance, and most of us struggle to pull it off.

I tried to help out with Freenet years ago. The code was in a language I had quite a lot of deep knowledge about, I should have been able to help quite a bit, but I ended up sticking to specs and architecture.

Bluntly, the code was not the output of an organized mind. Even though most of it was written by one person. It ping-ponged all over. The prototype was already full of esoteric optimizations that sacrificed clarity (and thus correctness) for a little more speed. Major rafts of functionality were still being designed, and it was already work-hardened.

When I see a team ramp up and get wedged, my first questions are about code quality, practices, and team dynamics. About cohesion. Too often the old guard can't delegate, even if they want to. With enough tribal knowledge, your coworkers just start to get interesting, and then they move on to a new job, and you replace them with another person who struggles to accomplish even simple things.

Or even worse, they made a promise that Information Theory says they can't keep, and they've been bargaining the entire time. It's a terrible place to be.