The road to hell is paved with good intentions...
We have all been there.
Starting with some great intentions, we get the opposite effect.
In 1900, when British colonials ruled India and had a major problem with venomous cobra snakes, they tried bounties to solve the issue.
However, local enterprising folks responded by breeding more of these deadly creatures to maximize the benefit of the newly offered bounty.
This, in turn, increased the number of snakes!
When the government canceled the program after realizing what was happening, all the farmed snakes were released into the wild, undoing any positive effect they might have already gained.
After noticing this, German economist Horst Siebert coined the term "cobra effect" in the early 1900s.
In tech companies, we often get the same phenomenon when we put metrics on developers; lines of code/testing metrics where developers will create more complex code to provide the required results, which in turn creates more fragile code and less productive developers as they fight against the metrics rather than towards the intended goal.
If you're considering implementing a solution to a problem, consider whether it might have unintended consequences that make the problem worse.
Make it an exercise of thinking about how you would cheat the system you are creating to get creative when considering abuses of the system.
Knowing this, when helping a business change its way of working and in an attempt to prevent an unseen pitfall, I test my ideas with a team rather than the company and examine the results carefully.
I ask for feedback and ask the teams how they think this could be abused.
With feedback, tests, and evaluation, I gain confidence in either proceeding with or canceling my next "great idea".
The cobra effect reminds us that what works in the short term doesn't always work in the long term---and sometimes, our actions can have the opposite of their intended effect.
Think clearer: This knowledge, combined with another of my favorite mental models, second-order thinking, could protect you from making the same mistakes.
Git for Beginners
My Git series is completed. So, if you want to learn Git or know someone who does, send them this series:
Other Articles/Resources
This is the first article in a series on SVG filters. This guide will help you understand what they are and show you how to use them to create visual effects.
In this article, we'll work with Hono and Bun to create an API to learn how to build with Hono.
"The Instant On-demand Atomic CSS Engine". I've been hearing a lot of praise for this one lately.
Here are the top 5 considerations when deciding between big tech and startups (~Series B and earlier) for your first job:
A case study and some reflections on building and shipping with this stack to production.
Linux is something we can't avoid as developers os learning at least the basics can pay back huge dividends over your career.
These are isometric icons you can use in your projects. They look really sharp and are a nice change from the usual icon libraries.
Something I've been enjoying
Supabase is one of my favorite developer tools. Since it's new, I often get lost looking for production examples and guides. This book is filled with absolute gold and has given me more confidence in using Supabase in different scenarios.
If you are building with Supabase, it's definitely one to grab!
That's it for this week!
If you have any ideas or feedback, reply to this email.
Thanks, and stay awesome,
Niall
Founder @ Codú