iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I have these relationships with people that started online and at one point or another they reach out and ask me for advice or talk shop, and I think now that I’m retired, I’ll never hear from them again. But what is surprising is people check in with me and talk life. And I pause and think, “Huh…”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

I’m waiting for Tswift to come out and say “Surprise! My latest album was written by AI! I’m so behind the curve that I’m ahead of it.”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Great 2 min animated short of the rat race, “The Illusion of Happiness.” youtu.be/H324cMrOBoE?...

youtu.be

The illusion of happiness | Short Film | Steve Cutts

YouTube video by Certified Dad Joke

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

In regards to the latest controversy regarding a GenZ candidate who walked into in-person interviews with a beverage. It’s a kind of vibe check here. As long as the drink is not some desert drink w/whipped cream & caramel where a lot of slurping is required, it should be fine.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

When you go slower there is thinking that happens. Just because you can create 100 prototypes overnight doesn’t mean you have distilled the right questions to ask, so you end up dealing with a lot of noise. Teams naively underestimate the work it takes to scale these non deterministic experiences.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Silo’d empire building helps no one and will kill culture, and the decline in culture is the canary in the coal mine.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We’re approaching Oct and that means AOP and performance evals. First year where I don’t have to worry about that. Even if we offload it to AI, it’s still a pain in the ass. They were my most hated tasks.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

The pay for contract work is equal to what it was 15 years ago.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Something I experienced time and time again was that the hill Design leaders will always die on is branding & Design Systems. It doesn’t matter if the company is in need of strategic direction. If they do put forth a direction, it’s always theater without the distillation of a core hypothesis.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Something I realize years before I retired was that I wanted to live other lives, pursue other things that had nothing to do with technology. It feels like a lot of so what. It’s a process to take that hat off. I don’t miss it at all but my brain is still wired that way.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Culture is the canary in the coal mine. A company that had good culture then squandered it by poor leadership will decline. There is of course, the case where a company is too big to fail like Facebook. But who the hell wants to work for that shit hole? Culture is an indicator of clarity & purpose.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Strong engineering orgs build capabilities. They don’t just execute. Capabilities become the IP and flywheel of the business. Eng should have some foresight to build capabilities to skate to the puck, while delivering near term deliveries. It’s the same short term near term balance.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

Why is it that every job goes bad after about 3 years? Companies either get bought, get new leadership, or something happens and the culture changes.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

I’ve always written with em dashes. You can find essays of mine written 10, 20 years ago with em dashes. I recalled being irritated when an editor from a magazine removed my sentence with an em dash and restructure it. Writing w/em dashes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s written by AI.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Was telling my husband that from the time I was 15 to 21, I’d already had 10+ jobs. This is not counting babysitting jobs I had as a teenager. I did everything from working in arcades, office work to building gallery walls to painting murals at the Children’s Museum. I’ve been working a long time.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

A colleague messaged me this morning. She wanted to hang out since she’s attending an event for San Diego Design Week. Apparently, it’s super close to my house at the Cedros Design District. So I recommend a coffee shop that I occasionally go to write. It weird when different worlds collide.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

When I was a PM, if some leader proposed a feature I didn’t like I’d say, “I’ll put it in the backlog.” In reality there is no backlog.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Not only is curiosity is essential for problem solving but it is necessary for self awareness and empathy. If you can’t continue looking for positions & methods outside of your own, you can’t see where you may be wrong; you can’t decenter yourself and deconstruct your position.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

If you all haven’t seen it, I’d recommend watching the Naudet Brothers 9/11 documentary on YouTube. It’s incredible. They had set out to do a documentary on the Fire Dept, and so they were just following them around. Then came 9/11.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

In my years of working, I’ve always been able to reconcile that software overall was a net positive to society. But after AI, I couldn’t see the integrity in that vision. What kind of future are we creating for our children? What kinds of trade offs are we making and for what?

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

“What I don't have in experience, I make up for in integrity. And what you don't have in integrity, you could never make up for with experience.” Zohran Mamdani

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 11/09/2026

Feeling heavy on this 9/11. I remembered my husband woke me up on that day and said, “Wake up, the world is falling apart! Some plane crashed into the World Trade Center!” I had the opportunity to visit the Sept 11 Memorial in NY and it was so haunting. I never forgot it.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 10/09/2026

They gave me a full PET scan yesterday from the thigh up. It’s a scan that detects metabolic activity in cells. They inject a kind of sugar into you and if there’s cancer, cancer cells are hungry for sugar. Something like that. I feel like this should be something everyone gets every few years.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I think the hardest thing in life is having kids. It’s the only thing that gives you worry and fear. It puts you in a position of need. You need to make a certain amount of money. You need to stay healthy. You need to give your children x, y, z. I don’t think I’d try neatly as hard otherwise.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I had a health scare recently where doctor discovered a small nodule in my right lung lobe. I said, “But I only have 4 lobes left doctor.” Scan indicates that it is not cancerous. But we will continue to monitor.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

I found a journal entry about how tired I was with tech. Different problems, different actors but same movie. I thought it was this year but the date says March 2024. This was before my dad passed when I thought I still really liked what I do.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Taste as a driver for desirability came from Industrial Design. You apply it to a physical object that you buy. I think there is value in UX and Usability but I’ve often wondered how much the average users really care about software branding and app visual styles.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

One reason I’ll never work again is that I can’t see myself caring enough to put together a fucking portfolio. Believe it or not, I’ve never had a formal portfolio web site. I’ve had several case study decks that I send to recruiters and then somehow that gets me to the next step.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

When your family history intersects w/political history, it can be a compelling research project. It’s like I had to build the setting in my head before I attempt to shape whose eyes I chose to see through. But there are moments of complete blindness, bc I wasn’t there, so that’s the challenge.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Something I see over and over again at every job is that there are some leaders who are very good at managing up, but they have zero ingenuity; they got shit for strategy. Yet they keep falling up.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I saw an interview where JD Vance was asked on a scale of 1-10 how confident he was of going to heaven, and he said 6-7. If I was the interviewer, I’d ask “What would make that higher?” (Behavioral driver). Then how confident that he’d go to hell and why (Doubt falsifier).

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

Burnout for me is usually caused when there is no clear direction and when you feel you are being gaslit into believing that things are going well. I usually sense disturbance in the force before they occur. Once I see it, I can’t unsee it and I can’t find the motivation to persevere.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

I thought about retirement about 6 years ago when I had lung cancer but we weren’t quite ready then. Nothing like an existential problem to get you to rethink how you live your life. When I was hired at Zillow, I knew that it would be my last job. I’d only continue working if it was fun.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

This is my writing notebook. I take notes from interviews, write fragments, and record ideas, themes and insights that come to me. The tabs are a kind of topic markers. I do this in analog bc for some reason my the stream of consciousness works better on paper. Then I develop the chapters from this.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Some people have said that if they retire early they have a loss of purpose. But unless their job is altruistic, finding purpose in work is kinda sad. Your purpose is to inflate shareholder value. The best you can hope for is to be a good mercenary and solve an interesting problem or two.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

It seems like when it comes to AI, companies throw the ROI, data management, and customer service best practices out the window. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

The best thing for me about using AI for writing and research is that AI can understand and leverage both Vietnamese and English sources. I can interview someone about an event and AI can provide the related cultural and historical context. It can also help me weigh the nuance of translations.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Two things I’ve thought about since retirement: 1. Invest earlier. We do all right but could’ve started earlier. Investments can outpace job earnings. 2. Quit earlier. There have been jobs where I hung on too long and it affected my mental health. I’m a fearless quitter.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

I’ve never been laid off but I have quit plenty of times, and then lay-offs follow. There have been times where I contract for inbetween jobs. This is more about boundaries & purpose. If I dislike the values and if I lose faith in the company or the product, then I walk.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Someone asked me, “What’s the longest between interview and offer?” And I said, “For me, it was 2 months, since I was the first person they interviewed. But the recruiter always kept me updated, and I never stopped interviewing.”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

My mom has this smart pill dispenser that is not so smart. Sometimes it says a pill is out and it’s not, or sometimes it still indicates a prescription is low after we’ve refilled it. I said, “Typical firmware to hardware, local cache that gets updated.” My brothers are like, “Nerd.”

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Still getting recruited for contract gigs. I tell them to reach out to me next year.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Was following the latest news about Meta’s Organization Transformation. A lot of company are trying to do this, but I find the automated value chain is a culture killer, and efficiency is a mirage if vision and strategy are unclear. After all, 10 x 100 bad ideas is still zero.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

A long ass time ago, my son made a little book for Mother’s Day — one of those templates that you fill out. The sentence starts: If my mom could do anything ___”she’d work” he wrote. Then he drew a picture of me in front of a giant computer, and a speech bubble that says, “Ah, all done!” So sad.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

A lot of days I go to the library to write. There’s a library close by that’s near the coast so there’s an ocean view. It even has outlets on the floor next to lounge chairs. The only problem is that when the writing is flowing, occasionally it makes me cry. So I have to find some corner to hide.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

I find most people’s advice on social media unhelpful including my own. In my long career, I haven’t ever followed the same process. Same principles, yes. But different approaches based on business, risks, unknowns, team dynamics, politics, appetite for ambiguity and change.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

When you stop working, you start recalling all the exhausting things you spend so much time on to be part of the culture: the mutual applause/pat on the back, faking extrovert behaviors at team events, asking questions to show engagement, keeping your doubts to yourself.

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

There was a job posting today that made me stop and think, “That’s the kind of job that was made for me.” It was a Research role to shape the glass experience for Google. It’s a lot of behavioral research — similar to a lot of work I did earlier. But why?

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Hà Phan @hpdailyrant.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

There is this old dude on TikTok who makes videos dancing to old songs like Radiohead and he wears mismatched socks. I’m certain he grew up in the 80’s bc of how he dances. I’m sure he’s likely retired because he’s so unbothered.

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