September 2023: Camping, SQL, Reality
What I Did This Month
For PostHog, published about feature flags as a service, SQL, our Temporal batch exports system, decoupling deploy from release, and a newsletter on uncovering users’ real problems.
Upgraded Iliad Translations with some new and improved styling in Tailwind.
Got my art hung in my apartment (after 2+ years of it sitting on the floor). Saw the Challenger map once again. Ate Liquids and Solids as well as BBQ many times. Ran more, changed my leg day to fix my knee and squat form. Went camping for the first time.
Thoughts
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. As much as computer tools have automated it, there is still alpha on doing it well. Learned it is surprisingly similar to good writing. It requires ruthless focus and editing. The book is also filled with beautiful and inspiring graphics.
There is a shocking gap between the quality of art and code LLMs create versus the quality of writing. This is because of the quality of the sources (training data). Few people publish bad art online. Few people publish code that doesn’t at least work online. Basically everyone publishes bad writing online.
Nearly everyone is too risk-averse. Doing MVPs reveals how risk-averse you are. Having an MVP fail isn’t as bad as you think it is. It makes you realize that often motivation is the blocker, not anything else.
For everything you are trying to learn, working with a coach or a tutor can help you be more successful. You can even do this for things you don’t think of as “coachable” skills.
When talking with someone, how interesting they find you is a function of how interested you are in them. Every person you meet knows a lot about something you know virtually nothing about. It's your job to discover what it is.
Startups have a big advantage over big companies in marketing because as a company grows, they care more about attribution and take fewer risks of illegible channels. A lot of marketing simply doesn’t scale either, but startups often benefit from doing things that don’t scale.
ARIA is an example of an ambitious government agency trying to transform the UK economy and create a radically better future. Doing this requires risk and government agencies will not take risks unless they are forced to. BC can learn a lot from this, specifically InBC and Innovate BC. Matt Clifford, the Chair of Aria, explains this well.
Recommendations
Discovered
this month. Although mostly focused on value investing, there are some standout gems worth reading including “The Reading Obsession” (Warren Buffett’s network is more important than you realize), “Focus: The Last Superpower?” and "Three Years Of Writing Online.”At least 2-3x a year, Elon sets an insane deadline which requires all-hands-on-deck and around-the-clock activity to meet a goal. This helps make his grand missions a reality.
Great ideas require the cultivation of a state of mind that isn’t found by accident (via
).We are entering an era of new technologists who focus on increasing the “capability landscape” (via
)Three excellent podcasts I’ve been listening to lately: Audience of One, The Danny Miranda Podcast, and Moth Minds (via
).A highlight from Justin Mares’ episode with Danny Miranda: Joe Lonsdale has 3 minute calls with 100 of the USA's top (entrepreneurial) graduates every year where he asks what he can do for them and then gets his team to do it. This is what 10/10 networked looks like.
An app for visualizing weather year-round. A JavaScript library for interacting with PDFs. An app for testing and developing with webhooks, wildly functional design. A map of pinball tables.
There’s still a lot of alpha left in newsletters. Lenny’s newsletter hit 500k subscribers, seems to be a successful business, and is focused on a niche profession (product managers). Similar newsletters are waiting to be created.
Praxis reading list. Jarred Sumner shipping Bun. Don’t be afraid to read the code, most of it is just for loops, variables, and if/else statements. A real, successful, walkable development project. Elon Musk’s algorithm. Foundational books. SF Bay area hosted 106 in-person AI events in August 2023.
Do you ever yearn? Digging a hole. Believe children can do great things. Write something online every day forever. Believe unbelievable things more. Walk around, get a coffee.
Upcoming
Celebrating birthdays. Going to the UK.
Writing, coding, working out, reading. Thinking about AI, programming fundamentals, and coaches.