Early September in Chicago

Weekly Update 9/1/2023 - 9/8/2023

Sep 25, 2023

On building textlife at ‘nights and weekends’
Article on building with boring technology
Steve Jobs mind shift - you can change the world
On building in public as an integral part of operating process
On how to write twitter posts

On building textlife at ‘nights and weekends’

I have been creating public posts on my update on my Software-as-a-service project as part of the ‘Buildspace’ program.

What really resonates with me in this program is the amount of valuable real world advice on building a startup. Things like starting with metrics as a requirement, on launching early and getting your product in front of people, on listening to feedback and iterating, on using the newest and best tools for your work. This is all really great content and you are surrounded by really cool people that are excited about creating something. I was going to build this stuff anyway, so doing it with this group is an amazing addition.

Article on building with boring technology

I read this article on choosing ‘boring technology’ and it strongly resonated.

It’s thesis is that we only have a limited amount of attention, call them ‘attention tokens’ and we need to spend them wisely. If we use the same technology for a long period of time we develop high proficiency in it, which allows us to build things fast and not have to use time and brain bandwidth to look up how to do x and y things. This article advocates for wise choosing of which new frameworks and tech stack to use. It was referenced in this article about a migration away from supabase to postgresql hosted in render dot com.

This has been a view that I have intuitively felt for a long time, and it feels good to be reminded of it by another experienced developer.

Steve Jobs mind shift - you can change the world

This week I watched a lot of Steve Jobs interviews and I was again reminded how sharp and clear he was. They are a gold mine. It takes rewatching them many times to fully get them. What he talked about was recognizing that we as human beings are tool makers and that we can change the world by creating tools.

His key trait was a fierce belief in himself, in his own spirit, in his own mind, over the noise of others. This is actually very difficult to do. This is what artists do. They preserve the view of their inner child into adulthood. All children are genius artist, the genius adult artists are the ones that are able to preserve that view into adulthood.

On building in public as an integral part of operating process

I believe that the build-in-public trend on twitter that has been around for many years is really the future of working. We need to make use of the tools that we have available to us to communicate to the world. Everyone is able to broadcast their work to the world at zero cost. This is still a new capability that few actually make use of. When you put this at the center of your work, as a developer or anything else, then you are connecting your work with the world and you naturally have the whole word as a audience. This allows you to refine your work in a way like nothing else, because you receive feedback and you learn from that and learn what people want and need from you.

On how to write twitter posts

sharing your wisdom
sharing pieces of how you think, how you solved a project, proving your solution, proving your thinking abilities, sharing some knowledge

Posting on twitter is like inviting the world to take part in your journey. In order to be a truly, sustainably a valuable twitter writer, your life needs to be an adventure that is breaking some new ground in some way. It doesn’t mean that you need to be some billionaire founder or groundbreaking researcher or famous director, you can be a regular person working a 9-5 job, but that your life is transformative to yourself and to others around you in some way. You are truly living, and sharing your spark of life with the world, and they come to you for the fire, for the light and the warmth, of a living breathing human being that is awake and showing them day in day out what a mind that is aware and learning and loving is like. This is the power of the internet at play. Instantly connecting you to billions of people of an audience.