Coisas que continuo relendo
List · 11 items

Coisas que continuo relendo

Marcus EllisonMarcus Ellison · 5 likes
11 items
ListAcademic Papers · Entertainment

Coisas que continuo relendo

Marcus Ellison
@latecheckoutmarc
11Items
5Likes

These are the papers I keep coming back to when I’m trying to sound smart in product meetings or explain tech to my non-tech friends at the bar. Very mixed bag: some CS classics, some behavioral econ, one that basically explains why your group project always goes off the rails. Think of it like my academic playlist: a little theory, a little "humans are weird," and just enough math that I can pretend my student loans were worth it. You don’t need to read every equation or prove every lemma. Skim the intros, steal the diagrams, and let the big ideas marinate while you’re killing time on the Brown Line waiting out another delay at Merchandise Mart.

The list

Rank
Coisas que continuo relendo — 10 items
NameFieldYearMy take
1The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus TwoCognitive psychology1956The OG "your brain has limited RAM" paper. Great for reminding PMs that dumping 14 menu options on users is not "empowering" them, it’s just making them feel like they’re trying to order at Cheesecake Factory without a game plan.
2A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice (Kahneman & Tversky)Behavioral economics1979Prospect theory is basically: people hate losing more than they love winning. Explains everything from why Bears fans are permanently stressed to why users freak out more over losing data than they celebrate new features.
3The Cathedral and the BazaarSoftware engineering / open source1997Reads like a slightly chaotic blog post that accidentally changed how everyone thinks about open source. Great ammo when you’re arguing for transparency and iteration over big reveal "cathedral" launches that never ship on time.
4End-to-End Arguments in System DesignComputer systems / networking1984The reason every senior engineer side‑eyes putting too much logic in the middle of the stack. Good for grounding product debates: not everything belongs in the platform, sometimes you let the edge be smart and the core be boring.
5The Mythical Man-MonthSoftware project management1975Core idea: adding more devs to a late project just makes it later. Required reading before anyone suggests "we’ll just add another team" like that ever fixed anything except somebody’s org chart.
6Designing for Adoption: Diffusion of InnovationsInnovation / diffusion theory1962Ever seen that bell curve with "innovators, early adopters, early majority" on some slide? This is the source material. Helps you accept that some users will just never touch your feature, and that’s not a bug, it’s human nature.
7The New Science of Strong Materials (and Why They Fail)Materials science1961Technically about materials, spiritually about life: everything breaks for reasons that are invisible until they’re not. Good mindset for debugging systems and also, honestly, relationships and Bears offensive lines.
8MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large ClustersDistributed systems / big data2004The "let’s split this giant job into tiny chores" paper that made big data feel less like magic and more like organized laziness. Great if you want to understand why half of modern data tooling exists without memorizing every Hadoop buzzword.
9Don’t Make Me Think (Krug’s usability thesis)Human–computer interaction / UX2000Technically a book, but the core argument lands like a paper: if users have to stop and think, you’re probably losing them. Pairs nicely with watching someone’s face in a usability test when they hit a confusing flow—painful but enlightening.
10The Innovator’s DilemmaBusiness / innovation strategy1997Why big, comfy companies get smoked by scrappy little ones chasing "worse" customers. I pull this out whenever someone in leadership says, "Our existing users would never want that," like that’s a good thing.