Writing - Andreas Fragner

Quantitative hedge funds make software designed to produce uncorrelated return streams.

In a recent post, Sean Goedecke argues that you can’t design software you don’t work on.

Figma is the dominant software for UI/UX design today.

Back when I was in quantitative trading I was a big proponent of the ‘quant developer’ role — a hybrid between quant researcher (strong math and stats background) and software engineer (often with an HPC background).

One of my favorite definitions of a problem comes from the late Gerald Weinberg [1] A problem is the difference between things as perceived and desired.

I’ve been using LLMs for writing code since late 2022, starting with the Copilot VS Code extension.

Hiring is an incomplete information game and to succeed you have to treat it as such.

Dependencies that point in the wrong direction are one of the easiest and most costly design mistakes one can make.

Books have a nice kind of survivorship bias: If something is still being read after decades or centuries, it must contain some universal truths or be useful at a fundamental level.

Ben Kuhn makes a great observation in his latest post: Trust is a key enabler of growth (and conversely, lack of trust a key inhibitor).

High performance can manifest itself in different ways and it’s important to recognize that.

The best-performing firms make a narrow range of products very well.

Early on you need to be fast.

When people ask for advice on personal investing, I’ve found they are either looking for confirmation that what they do is great (it’s usually not) or some sort of secret sauce for outperforming the market (which doesn’t exist).

One thing I’ve learned over time is to read fewer books but to take the time to write summaries for the good ones.

Kevin Kelly points out that trying to future-proof your technology stack is often a bad investment.

Code generation is arguably one of the most interesting applications of LLMs, and one of the first with real commercial use (Copilot/Codex, Codegen, etc.).

People sometimes argue that you’re more likely to build a successful business as a solo founder.