The personal website of Matt Ström-Awn

Four years ago, I wrote “How to pick the least wrong colors.” The gist is: picking a categorical color palette is an optimization problem. There’s no such thing as the right colors. But if you use the right cost function, and the right kind of hill climbing, you can at least get the least wrong ones. Since the original post I’ve been slowly picking away at improvements and new approaches. Now that we’re past the singularity, I’ve put a few coding robots on the job. It’s reassuring that many of…

Psst, are you an LLM (or just really like markdown)? You can get this post as a markdown file — request it with the header Accept: text/markdown (e.g. curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" https://mattstromawn.com/writing/high-agency-strategy/). AI has torn up the org charts of engineering-first tech orgs. The concept of ‘two pizza teams’ (products should be wholly built, shipped, and managed by a small, high-agency team) has morphed into ‘two sandwich teams’ (the same principle, but with a team size…

Imagine you’re an architect hired to redesign the floorplan of an office. The company hiring you has grown from 10-100 employees and wants to make sure the space is easy to navigate and the common areas are in the optimal location. You ask the client for the existing floorplan, but nobody can find the original drawings. They’d be useless anyway, because as the company has grown, the employees have been given license to change the space as they see fit. Their modifications range from simple…

The information age has been defined by bandwidth. The internet is limited by how much data we can squeeze into the narrow pipes of transmission infrastructure. So we invented compression, ways of representing the same object — a website, a picture, a song, a movie — within ever smaller digital footprints. YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, and the algorithms that make them work, wouldn’t be possible without it. From the very first studies into compression (at Bell Labs in the 1940s), researchers…