Max Stoiber's Essays

A rough first version gives everyone the same thing to react to.

Internal communication should be clear and useful, not performatively polished.

The smallest project management setup I need: visible workstreams, one accountable owner, deadlines, status updates, and fast weekly demos.

Credit to Sue Ko who taught me this many years ago.

1.

Send me messages whenever inspiration strikes or when it makes sense for your workflow.

Kanban board with five columns: Inbox, Backlog, Blocked, Delegated, Done Most importantly: GTD-style “if it takes less than 2 minutes, do it immediately.”

Start with a checkin question for connection (10% of the meeting length) Capture decisions made Capture open action items and check in on open ones every time, otherwise they get lost/forgotten due to poor personal execution Align on discussion ...

Taste is what differentiates the good from the great.

The more my stories resonate, the higher the chance I will achieve my goals.

Brainstorming usually fails.

Innovation happens by combining things we can see and touch today in novel ways.

Creators who respond to feedback quickly unlock two virtuous cycles that allow them to build better solutions more quickly.

Every day, you will find me hunting down a founder's email to send them feedback about my experience with their product.

Humans have the ability to get ambitious things done ridiculously fast.

What can I do before, during, and after making decisions to be better at making them?

My quests with this digital garden are to publish more and to have fun.

I love this reframing from "goal" to "quest": "goals" feel like pressure, "quests" feel like excitement and adventure!

Many people are doing deliberate practice wrong in one specific way though.

I believe that teams that are more connected perform better and that remote teams have worse connections.

When people see somebody they perceive to be really good at something, they often say, “Wow, they are so talented!”

Childhood memories seem endless because they were filled with constant discovery.

My 1:1s are unusual.

How do you build a business selling tools to people who can technically build anything you can?

We developers build our own “commercial-grade” tools every day.

It might be surprising to hear the co-founder of a GraphQL company say you probably don't need it.

Why Tailwind is blowing up, why I (the creator of styled-components) love it and how I avoid the downsides of atomic CSS.

We should ban margin from our React components.

I am joining Gatsby to work on open source R&D projects including Blocks, the visual editor for React apps, theme-ui, mdx and Gatsby themes!

For three years, I have written all my CSS in JavaScript.

Spectrum is an open source chat app for large online communities.

We recently implemented streaming server-side rendering and caching for Spectrum, here is how