+1 usually a sign of midwit and mediocrity. not once I seen "first principles" blogs have any value.
I skimmed the article after I realized that I was being negative. It has some nice explanations so my comment wasn't about the content but just about the wording of the title. :D
Which is really sad, because actually working from first principles is a valid methodology to build efficient products that bypass layers of unnecessary abstraction.
The term itself seems to have lost its real meaning however.