Dharmesh Shah
Fighting Entropy at Home
Inspired by Dharmesh Shah episode
Pinterest growth team tested one hypothesis: people who save five pins come back. They built for that moment. Find your kid's 'five pin' moment.
Dharmesh Shah says software gets messier over time because of entropy. It's not incompetence. It's physics.
Your house was clean at 9am. By 9:47am there are Goldfish crackers ground into the carpet, a juice box leaking into the couch, and something sticky on the wall that might be jelly or might be a biohazard. You didn't fail. You're just losing a fight against thermodynamics.
A toddler is literally a chaos engine. They take organized systems and increase disorder in every room they enter. The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy always increases in a closed system, and apparently your living room qualifies.
Software teams schedule maintenance sprints to fight entropy. They block off time knowing things decay without intervention. You need this too. Not to achieve perfection - that violates the laws of physics. Just to slow down the inevitable heat death of your kitchen.
You're not bad at organizing. You're up against the fundamental nature of the universe.
