8/14/2023 Last edited: 6/3/2024

Excellence

Headshot portrait of Dustin Schau

Dustin Schau

Product & Engineering Leader

A prefiw for a blog post

Note: this post is a work-in-progress. If you’re reading this, kudos! I have a super fan. I’ll update it with more examples on a rolling basis as I find them. Excellence is hard!

Excellence is a concept that is often talked about, frequently claimed, and rare. Some examples of products, ideas, and concrete examples of excellence on display and what makes them excellent:

  • rsync, command-line utility for syncing files. rsync is a prototypical example of a utility that just works every time, consistently, without fail. It does its core job completely: syncing files from a source to a destination consistently.
  • Uni-ball Kuru Toga, Mechanical Pencil. The best pencil I’ve ever used. The lead rotates subtly and slightly as you write, which keeps the lead sharp and your lines crisp and clean.
    • Note: I’m kind of a pen/pencil nerd, check out Jet Pens for some even nicer iterations of the Kuru Toga pencil
  • Nonstick pan, Made-in. I’ve used countless iterations of “non-stick” pans and they all suffer from a singular fatal flaw: notably, that they all begin to stick after a period of 3-6 months. After 1-year plus, still highly non-stick.

For a similar post that served as inspiration for this post, please check out Patrick Collison’s Fast which is a rolling list of projects that demonstrate some of humanity’s best achievements, done fast.