Good article! Two things popped into my head when reading it. First the talk "Programming with Hand Tools" by Tim Edwald[0]. It's a very cool, entertaining talk with emphasis on the craftsmanship side of things and provokes thinking about which parts to automate (or maybe abstract away) and which parts to craft by hand when we're building stuff. Aside: also reminds me of Casey Muratori's Handmade Hero project [1]. He is a strong advocate for structuring things bottom up and building them ourselves.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShEez0JkOFw</a><p>[1] <a href="https://handmadehero.org" rel="nofollow">https://handmadehero.org</a><p>---<p>Secondly when reading this:<p>> Regardless, the basic idea is that companies are often faced with the decision of doing N units of shitty work or far fewer than N units of great work.<p>This is obviously oversimplified, but there is an important point that wants to emerge from this line of thought.<p>As someone who grew up on open source, standardized technologies and the Web, I have been empowered to build a livelihood on Web development, mostly "self-taught" (or rather self-directed). All of this Web stuff is very accessible and gives you actual _leverage_. You can build something useful very quickly and the community around it is happy to share so much knowledge and work. I'm _very_ thankful for that.<p>But I think as the wider web development community we're losing sight of what that essence is. We started to think of the Web as merely a vehicle for pure scale as in "how to reach the most people and annoy them with notifications" and "how to produce cheap software very fast".<p>Maybe we, or some of us, should slow the fuck down a notch and think about producing valuable things for the specific needs, pain points or taste of actual people. What the article describes is a process of thinking about the real people and building a human connection. The "top 100" costumers in the article are most likely people who _actually_ need/want/use the damn thing if they see your point. Instead of trying to manipulate the masses to buy a lot of crap (excuse my meta), we should be building relationships. One very good reason for this is that only the latter is sustainable - on all the axis of what "sustainable" means.<p>I'm writing this "out loud" partly because I started to drift into this abstraction/automation mindset myself more and more. But yes, leverage is solving real problems.