Michelle Lim
@michlimlim
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Leads product and GTM at @warpdotdev . Formerly first engineer. Angel investor. Writes at .
NYC
Joined October 2016
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Note to self after my LA trip:
Sub-25-year-olds are getting rich on crypto, influencing, real estate, consulting for multiple startups, etc. These people are real. They are earning more than you think.
1/2:
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Shallow relationships matter. Small talk with folks in my gym and neighborhood is an instant mood-lifter. It reinforces that I’m part of a larger community and that the “tribe” has my back. I embrace small talk.
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There's an unprecedented wealth increase amongst the young. And they are investing it in startups and real estate.
Capital allocation is going to look very different from now on. Welcome to the age of the Gen Z LP.
2/2:
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Thinking about the time I presented my app to Mark Zuckerberg in 2016.
He asked me, "Isn't this the same as Venmo?"
I thought he was roasting me. But now that we know Zuck loves cloning apps...was that a compliment? 🧐
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A senior engineer got drunk and posted career lessons on Reddit. One of the most honest and insightful pieces on engineering.
My favorite quotes:
1/5:
“Good code can be understood by a junior eng. Great code can be understood by a CS freshman. Best code is no code.”
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Recently learned that there're people who build software with the intention of selling to Private Equity for $1-2mil.
Compared to starting a venture-scale company, there's little overhead in managing a team or board. You exit earlier, and pretty decently. Food for thought 🤔
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Trend alert: 5 out of 5 of my ex-APM intern friends have rejected their APM job offers. Instead, they've founded a startup/nonprofit, joined early-stage startups as engineers.
Fewer students are buying the "become a PM to learn to be a founder" narrative.
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Setting aside how condescending this was, telling your potential candidates that they're replaceable is simply ineffective in startup recruiting.
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To build the future, there are more ways than just the Founder mode, i.e. to start one company.
There is also the Tycoon mode (h/t:
@c3kel
) where you chase capital opportunities from multiple streams. You may then reinvest the capital in causes and assets you care about.
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Mini-thread on:
Why the "frontend" vs "backend" eng division doesn't map well to engineer psychology ("product vs infra" maps better!)
a) Job mismatch problems that result from using that division
b) Why I think new grads choose to be PMs because of this bad division.
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Life update: I just finished my first day as an engineer at a 3-person NYC startup! 🥳
If you're in NYC too, come say hi!
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PSA:
1) Be kind to others.
2) In startup hiring, employees are the buyers, and it's a buyers' market. Can you convince people to jump ship to work on your risky venture?
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I received this today. 😮 (And I don't even work at Robinhood. )
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If I HAD to take fall sem online, I’d simulate college. My plan: Rent a cheap lakehouse with 14 classmates with different majors.
Daytime: classes
Nighttime: deep discussions, workshop each other’s writing/art/projects, Zoom in alum guest speakers.
Weekend: Jam, hike, games.
1/
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I told my house of 5 engineers about Ctrl-R on the terminal and everybody lost their minds. That's right—you too can search through your past commands on the terminal.
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Really hoping 👁️👄👁️ isn't meme marketing for any app or network, but rather, social media performance art that satirizes elitist invite-only cis-male-dominated social apps and exclusive secret societies/clubhouses.
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👋 Personal update: 1 year ago, I joined a stealth startup as an engineer...today, we go out of stealth.
Introducing Warp: a blazingly fast, modern terminal for engineers.
I’m grateful to have the chance to reimagine an iconic developer tool. AMA
1/4
Excited to come out of stealth and share what we've been working on:
Warp is a blazingly fast, Rust-based terminal for the modern age.
With Warp, you get
-Grouped commands and outputs
-A full text editor for input
-Visual menus for history & completions
-Command palette
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If your startup can afford it, definitely host engineering interns. It worked for us even when we only had 5 people.
They are down to work on anything, so they end up fixing a lot of things. Most importantly, they are fun and bring a lot of positivity to the workplace. 😊
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Writing code on paper now to conserve the 5% battery on my work computer.
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wow someone made a slack theme for vs code and 139k people downloaded it
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People say this a lot but I only experientially learned this recently:
In startups, making decisions quickly is way better than making the right decision slowly. The cost of delaying action is often worse than the cost of a wrong decision.
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Something I’m surprised Apple hasn’t fixed:
I often suddenly lose data connection when I’m outside. This happens when my phone latches on to a random open wireless network that's not providing service. I have to manually turn off wifi each time.
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A huge reason I stuck to engineering (over PM) is that it gave me early access to startups.
I interviewed to be employee
#2
at a startup. I offered to do product/sales. The founder said “We don’t have a product to sell yet. Can you code first?”
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Yale's starting again this fall, and inviting students (first-years, juniors, and seniors) back to a "hospital unit" aesthetic.
Here's a before and after photo of a residential college common room:
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Singapore has been installing mirrors in front of bike racks to deter bike theft. I think the idea is that you're less likely to steal if you see yourself stealing.
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I’m ~2 years out of college now. Anecdotally, most of my investment banking and consulting peers who’ve left their jobs, have left to join tech startups.
Super cool to see this new influx of generalists into startups.
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If you’re an engineer starting a company, here’s how I’d recommend you set up your Growth stack (data, SEO, email, etc.) 👇 (1/10)
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Had an intro CS class where we recreated the 2016 election Russian twitter bots with GPT-2...
In. under. 4. hours.
By Nov's election, hundreds will easily make GPT-3 bots. With credible profile pictures, bio's, and tweets. We won't know what's real anymore.
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My secret? I always eat breakfast before going to brunch with friends.
Brunch always starts late and I don’t want to unleash Hangry Michelle on my friends. 🥺
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Just received the best cold request for advice ever:
Someone sent me a two-page Gdoc on their particular career decision. They asked me to add comments.
It took me only 15mins. No scheduling. And since I could see other commenters' advice, I didn't have to repeat if I agreed.
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2/5:
“Being a good engineer means knowing best practices. Being a senior engineer means knowing when to break best practices.”
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3/5:
“The most underrated skill to learn as an engineer is how to document...
Writing good proposals for changes is a great skill.”
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Young people tend to dismiss B2B startups as boring...thinking they serve faceless companies.
Actually, B2B is more personable than B2C. You develop few meaningful relationships with real ppl just like us. 👩💼
In B2C, you spend most of your time with numbers/cohort analyses.📊
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5/5:
“Learning a language isn't hard. It's learning the ecosystem.”
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There is such a thing as too much transparency at a startup.
A startup I interviewed at two years ago records every technical interview. Months later, a peer working there told me they went to watch my technical interview videos for fun. ☹️
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GitHub CI on our PRs was taking too long…so we turned a spare intern laptop into a self-hosted runner for MacOS CI jobs.
It cut CI time down by 5x.
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My little brother accepted his place in UMich class of 2025! 🥳
Then he promptly registered for a email address with the word "btc" in it. Send help. 🙄🙃
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4/5:
“I know enough about security to know that I don't know shit about security.”
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Happy to break in my new apartment with a birthday celebration. Seeing my friends makes it feel like home.
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Broadly speaking, there're 2 types of engineers:
1) "Product-first" engineers. They're obsessed with using code to solve a user problem. Code is just a means.
2) "Code-first" engineers. They're obsessed with the abstractions, tools, and libraries in the code.
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TIL it's fairly common for investors to create bots that track twitter bio changes. The bot alerts them whenever a startup person changes their bio. That's smart.
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the most transformative thing I’ve heard as a new grad:
“You are here BECAUSE of your perspective, not DESPITE it. “
I felt less pressured to over-perform; I asked more questions; (and a few of them actually changed the team’s decisions.)
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🚨 Hey all, the product I've been working on for the past 1.5 years just launched.
We are building a Rust-based modern terminal that will make development more frictionless for all.
Please try the terminal and let me know what you think!
Excited to share that
@warpdotdev
, the Rust-based modern terminal, is now in public beta!
Any Mac user can now download and use Warp here 👉
More on Warp and our Series A below 👇 1/6
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@c3kel
‘s elaboration:
Two ways to think about opportunity:
The Founder: narrow focus, high conviction, perseverance. Win by proving your idea is right -> earn outsized returns.
The Tycoon: fluid, opportunistic. Win by wrangling relationships and being the best at stacking legos of opportunity.
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My boss said he likes doing live debugging with me, and wants to do more.
I said, “Ok boss, I’ll write more bugs!” 🥺
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Discussing my immigration worries with American friends has taught me that I have 2 kinds of friends:
1) those who give solid advice
2) those who offer to marry me
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I came across a decentralized social media protocol lately. I'm disappointed I didn't learn about it earlier.
It enables consumer social apps to share the same social graph! Here're my thoughts on what social apps stand to gain from doing so.
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I'm excited to nerd out and share an interesting engineering challenge I tackled at
@warpdotdev
.
Here's how Warp rendered our rectangle elements using graphics shaders. Learn about distance fields, antialiasing, and vector projections. 1/10
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I almost never buy anything nice. But when my brother asks for something pricey for his birthday, I buy it immediately. I wish I was as nice to myself as I am to my brother.
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TIL Brad Pitt was an executive producer behind Minari. He's also produced Moonlight, Twelve Years a Slave, and Selma. Man's been quietly backing minority-led films for years.
the minari scene was an acknowledgement of the grandma's wisdom. it was also a symbol for the family's resilience to thrive under all circumstances 4/
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My friend works in a hardware team with mostly women. I always thought majority-women teams came about by chance.
TIL their manager aggressively recruits at Grace Hopper, skipping bathroom breaks in case he misses a good candidate.
The difference one good manager can make.
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Moved to Montana over the weekend to see nature for 2-3 months. ⛰🏔🗻
(Will probably return to NYC in January!)
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1/ New grad tech recruiting for large/midsized companies start & end this Fall.
This timeframe biases students against startups.
1) Most co's want you to sign by Sep'20 for a Sep'21 job
2) Startups don't hire this early
3) Many exciting ones won't exist until Sep'21
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Warp just launched the first team feature for the terminal, and also announced our Series B fundraise from
@sequoia
.
If you haven't tried our terminal yet, give it a try! If you tried it earlier, I guarantee it's 10x better now: try it again and let me know what you think!
Warp is bringing collaboration to the command line.
The modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in is now available for teams. With Warp Drive you can save and share your team’s commands right inside your terminal.
Learn more about Warp Drive (and our $50M Series B!) 👇
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@KavirKaycee
@kushaanshah
@downloadcue
Very often, these “successful” people were in Google/FB/Uber back when Google/FB/Uber were the Slack/Lambda/Atrium of today.
Perhaps the take-away is to join an early high-growth place now.
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The most underrated technology? Federated Learning. It’s already on your phone. It may replace website cookies. It’s coming for pharma and finance next.
I think it can be the next billion-dollar product. Here’s a 3min primer on the technology. 🐱💻
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It's a lot more common to quit jobs after mere weeks than we think.
These events are naturally less visible since people don't put these on Linkedin.
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Just got off a video call where someone said it looked like I have a server farm behind me.
Well, kids, this is how I mine my Bitcoins and how the bills get paid.
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I wrote out that "frontend/backend engineering leads to job mismatch" Tweet thread into an essay. Check it out!
Shoutout to
@bolu_ben
for encouraging me to do this.
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My recent realization is that I have a dysfunctional relationship with money. I’m irrationally averse to spending any money on myself. This is due to growing up with scarcity.
I’m trying to recondition my thinking and treat myself better. Any tips on this?
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Just submitted my last assignment of college.
I'm infinitely grateful to my family, friends, and mentors who guided and supported me through the journey.
They've instilled in me a love for new fields like coding, writing, history, and art, and a dedication to public service.
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I'm so excited to finally announce my newest venture. It's been a long time coming, but I think this has a shot at becoming a unicorn! 🦄💃🚀
Check it out ---->
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The genius of calling the movement “web3” is that it automatically classifies today’s tech as “web2”. Positioning today’s tech as backwards whilst positioning dApps as the inevitable future.
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Never thought I’d be spending my 23rd hiking, kayaking, and pickle balling in Montana.
Thank you for the birthday love!
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Warp has built a popular product with 15 engineers and 0 PMs. How did we get this far with just engineers, and why are we hiring PMs now? (1/8)
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The "frontend" vs "backend" engineering division doesn't map well to the psychology of how engineers pick projects and why they learned to code.
A division that works better for me personally is "product eng" vs "infrastructure eng."
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If I were a pre-seed investor, I'd identify talented early-career aspirational founders and offer to regularly review ideas with them and make intros where needed.
Investors do this often with repeat founders. But I bet there is untapped talent among first-time founders.
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When I was at Slack, they taught me the 3 golden rules of using Slack:
1. Almost always use channels over DMs so people can search your message
2. In channels, use threads to keep discussions focused and to avoid spamming
3. Always search Slack first before asking a question
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Life update: I moved to downtown Manhattan last month. My new room is tiny, so my housemates & I built a loft bed from raw lumber.
I wrote down the story of why and how we built it. Read for NYC apartment hunting and move-in shenanigans.
Excerpts below:
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Just finished my third week as an engineer at a 4-person company. 3 quick takeaways so far:
(1) I get to jump on calls with investors.
These are insightful people I previously only could access via large Q&As. I'm grateful that I get to pick their brains in a 5-person Zoom call
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Greatest habit I learned from TA training is:
When you're done explaining something, do not ask: "Any questions?". Instead, ask: "What questions do you have?"
The latter invites more questions. You make it clear that it's normal to have questions after that explanation. 1/3
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Strangely, I feel relatively more risk-tolerant in these unstable times.
Because traditionally low-risk options have now proven to be unreliable too. And because the Covid death toll reminds me of how short life is.
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It is poetic... that the two main streets running through downtown San Francisco are Mission Street and Market Street. They run parallel to each other; they never intersect.
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Passed my NY driving test 🎊
I've been a city & train person all my life (Singapore➡️ Manhattan). So why do I need to drive?
Well...trips around the US lately have made me feel helpless without a car. I want the independence to buy groceries, and the power to explore nature!
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I wish I could sort restaurants by loudness on Yelp.
I invited someone to a new restaurant the other day. And I was worried I wouldn’t be able to hear them.
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I am still in awe that relatively simple UI tweaks can make an app feel dramatically faster.
I always think back to the classic example of using mirrors to make the elevator wait feel faster.
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One of my favorite features to build. No more manually scrolling through a wall of text.
A sneak peek:
🧭 Block Navigation 🧭
We added a snack bar so you can always jump to the top of a command regardless of how long its output is. You can also use arrow keys to navigate between blocks.
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I'm often asked how I went from being an engineer to being Growth Lead at Warp. Here are some notes:
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I wrote a new essay!
Speaking Chinese can feel like speaking in tales. Many of its everyday phrases refer to specific details of historical stories. I share my favorites and their epic stories here 👇
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We like to penalize people with the zero-sum scarcity mindsets, but often forget that the abundance mindset is a luxury belief highly correlated with being in stable environments and growing up in abundance mindset families.
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1/3 I’m a first-time manager and the hardest thing for me to unlearn is giving answers when presented with problems.
Instead, we managers should be asking questions and coaching teammates to find their own answers.
I recently learned two techniques from a management class:
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Life update:
I’m one of 79 Yale seniors who completed the challenge of going to a party every day in February.
Prioritizing this (over thesis, midterms) was tough. I’d like to thank the Academy, desmos and my friends, and my family for their support.
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Yale juniors created a googlesheet to see who's deferring & who's still going to enroll in (online) class.
~20% are deferring, with some planning to do gap semesters near campus.
Interesting to see how the live poll may sway opinions to 100% deferral or 100% enroll off-campus.
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I tweeted about a consumer desktop app and people replied with a github repo that does the same thing.
There are truckloads of consumer software on github that will go unused because they don't have a landing page with a 1-click download button.
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As an adult, you are allowed to buy out a whole theater for your homies to watch Barbie…
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The secret to life is to buy 10 pairs of the same sock so you can always find the matching sock.
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Since coming to a US college, I've become worse at receiving direct criticisms.
They won't tell you your singing is bad. It's just a "competitive applicant pool".
They won't tell you that your work's bad. It's "a good start".
They won't say you're annoying. They avoid you.
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Next.js was built for marketing sites that need static pages and great SEO.
But they’ve improved the React experience so much that it’s become the de facto way for building any kind of app. Including the client side rendering ones.
🤯
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While the "APM to founder" route was not the main narrative amongst new grads, it was a prominent one amongst my entrepreneurial friends in the Class of 2020.
APM programs are still one of THE BEST new grad places for learning cross-functional skills & to become world-class PMs.
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Today I had to add a button.
“Ah this just needs a little refactoring,” I said.
600 lines of refactoring later, I have still not added said button.
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Moved from Montana to Idaho over the weekend. Thankful to be seeing more of this beautiful world.
Just as there are “study abroad” programs, there should also be “study domestic” programs.
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In the age of Zoom, tall people no longer have the advantage. By adjusting my camera angle, I can appear just as tall!
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