From the Desk of Eric Ries

  April 2019

"

Our most precious gift is the capacity to think. Our limits are not defined by whether we prefer Rust to Haskell or Scrum to Kanban, but how much we're burdened by stress and sleep deprivation. No method, tool, language, matters nearly as much our own minds. If you want to write good code, be human. Be healthy. Nothing else comes close...Except for code review. That still holds up."

That's from a Twitter thread by Hillel Wayne about the relationship between sleep, work, and living a balanced life. It has everything from opinion to scientific studies, including one that found

that "After 24 hours awake, novice software devs lost half of their dev skills", and another that applies to anyone trying

to do their best work since

it shows that "Chronically getting less than 7 hours of sleep causes dramatic degradation on all mental tests

". The responses to his original tweet storm are also worth checking out.It's been a busy month. The new, updated audio version of my Kickstarter book The Leaders Guide, read by me and released by Audible, is now available to everyone looking for guidance on how to start a transformation project at work, including tools and tips and stories from the field. Also, planning for this year's Lean Startup Conference is moving ahead and I'm already excited for the great line-up of speakers and events we're putting together from October 23-25 in San Francisco. If you're interested in joining us, you can find out more here.None of the above has kept me from reading, though, and I've gathered a few pieces below that have held my attention, as well a few recent discussions of my work. In case you or someone you know is pondering a professional change, I'm including information on that front, too. As always, if there are things you think I should be reading, send them to: [email protected]

[Hiring]Crayon is looking for a VP Engineering to lead and scale their R&D team. I'm an investor in the company, which does market and competitive intelligence. You can learn more about them in the job description along with what they're looking for in a hire.[Conversations]The Uninsured: Two Women Entrepreneurs See A Market Opportunity for Healthcare17 Excellent Entrepreneurship Books You Can Read In A Weekend11 Steps to Hasten Digital Transformation As Technology Flattens the Playing FieldThe journey so far: Eric Rutayisire, CEO, Charis UASValue, growth, impact: how the lean startup approach can transform social enterpriseWant an online shop? We'll build you one in minutes[Readings]The Day the Dinosaurs Died"If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial...to explaining our own genesis as a species."Gutenberg's moving type propelled Europe towards the scientific revolutionA look at how another major technological transformation on the scale of what's happening now affected labor markets, book prices, politics, religious beliefs and "the production and spread of knowledge."The Metrics of BackpacksA meditation on working in tech as a woman and an artist, from a series that also manages to fold in Alfred Hitchcock, backpacks, coyotes, and a whole lot more.Why was it so hard to take a picture of a black hole? What are we even looking at?A physicist weighs in on that amazing photograph of M87*, including the information that "space is bonkers big and filled with just enough stuff to give astronomers things to look at while simultaneously getting in the way of looking at said things."Mystery of the Universe's Expansion Rate Widens with New Hubble Data"The universe is getting bigger every second. The space between galaxies is stretching, like dough rising in the oven. But how fast is the universe expanding? As Hubble and other telescopes seek to answer this question, they have run into an intriguing difference between what scientists predict and what they observe. Hubble measurements suggest a faster expansion rate in the modern universe than expected, based on how the universe appeared more than 13 billion years ago."