September 2022: PostHog, Vancouver, Urbit
What I Did This Month
Joined PostHog as a technical content marketer. Started shipping work fast, updated an event tracking guide, and wrote a bunch of tutorials, onwards!
This also means I wrapped up work with tap.video, camp.social, and freelance writing. Learned a lot from each, but the focus is important at the moment.
Worked on a draft about AI First Drafts, but didn’t get it published. Hopefully soon. Published for Upstream on On Chain vs Off Chain Governance. Some other final pieces are also in progress for them.
Enjoyed the end of summer, went to many places around Vancouver (including Bowen Island, PNE, and Bard on the Beach), played basketball, ate bannock and sopapillas, and once again, ate a lot of BBQ. Went to see Flume and Said the Whale. Got a haircut from Mihai while hosting a dinner. Moved into a new apartment.
Still coded a solid amount on my projects, figuring out infrastructure a bit more which is interesting because each piece feels unique.
Thoughts
Sadly, Vancouver has to be one of the worst cities in the world for two of my favourite foods: pizza and tacos. Everywhere I’ve traveled to does both better. On the flip side, Vancouver has consistently great ramen and sushi (as well as coffee and beer).
Side projects take a surprising amount of maintenance. Even if you design them to be low maintenance, maintenance sneaks up and takes up a lot of time. Things are always breaking in ways you couldn’t imagine.
Everyone always talks about escape. They want to leave places that are decaying for places they perceive to be not decaying. They want to live somewhere else and do something else. They fail to realize escape is only a temporary solution. Decay will always chase them. We need people who aren’t leaving and instead fight back against decay. A very good place to do that is the place you are now.
If you make a conscious decision to have a good time somewhere, it is more likely it will happen. Looking on the bright side somehow does make things brighter.
“There is more opportunity out there than anyone wants you to believe” - Riva Tez
The best way to make everyone happy to not to figure out how to slice the pie better, but to make more pie.
Recommendations
Timeless Way of Building. The beginning where he talks about the quality without a name is the best part. What makes a place good? We have a feeling about what places are good and what are bad, but how do we define that? Alexander proposes several solutions including “aliveness,” “the realm of the eternal,” and “patterns.” The second half dives deep into patterns which is a summary of “A Pattern Language.”
Life after Lifestyle has been getting deserving rave reviews. I think it is a top piece of writing for this year. It dives deeply into internet and consumer culture’s impact on culture of the wider world. How companies spent their time trying to create culture in the early 2010s, and how “realer” culture will form differently now and in the near future.
Render is nice for hosting web apps and projects, simple to set up and keep updated, has a shell if needed, and connects nicely with other services.
Urbit has taken up more of my attention and thoughts. The most interesting part of Urbit for me is the community of people who have gathered around Urbit, it is an extremely high density of talent. Although the use cases are far from flushed out, the potential is there.
Vaughn Smith on Conversations with Tyler. I’ve been learning Spanish and having a good time, this podcast made me so excited to continue learning and expanding into more languages. Language learning has such an addictive sense of progress and exploration potential.
The Network Age podcast. Guys talking about the future of work and Urbit, fascinating to see practical use cases. These guys are living 3ish years in the future, and I expect people to catch up.
Erik Hoel on Econtalk. Makes cases against Effective Altruism which I haven’t heard to much of. As the EA movement grows, it is going to happen more and more. Will be curious to see how it pans out, but this podcast gives a preview.
Most People Won’t. What Distinguishes Great Software Engineers? Automating a software company with GitHub Actions. A minimal comprehensive map of technical knowledge.
Some Painful Questions We Ask Ourselves. We should ask ourselves these questions much more often, nice to have them in one place, I think they’ll make you better thinking about them.
What do you want to do for 20+ years? What people believe, happens. The scale of Mr Beast Inc is unbelievable. Copilot is very important. Foster is more affordable for indie writers. NPCs are despawning. How to live right. Get rejected more, have more ambitious goals.
An epic Seiko watch. Imaginary football team coach.
Upcoming
Focus on PostHog work, they value being prolific and I want to do just that.
Figure out work-project balance so I can get back to personal writing and coding more. I have some upgrades I want to make to WriteConcise and I want to explore Urbit, AI creator tools, and fundamental computer science more deeply.
Going to London (I already went when this is published), having thanksgiving dinner (which also already happened), and going to New York for a weekend. Busy, busy.