Since health prevents me from reading these days, I transitioned to watching (and listening) to a bunch of people talking about their life path and experience. Of course, the large majority of content in that category is garbage: rich folk selling trainings to wannabee rich folk about avenues that are now closed. But there is the occasional gem.
In particular, I enjoyed:
- certain interviews on the channel The Diary of a CEO
- certain stories from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
- the general vibe and cultural heading on the Angelo Somers channel.
Of course, I also did enjoy a few reads, despite my malfunctioning elbow. In particular:
- Panic! at the Job Market - Matt Stancliff
- Where Matt analyses the current dynamics of labor/money trades in the tech industry, how they are different from a few years ago and what we should expect next.
- Disrupting management - A fix for Tech Culture? - Chelsea Troy
- Where Chelsea points out that traditional tech management is ethically corrupt at best, and actively toxic on average, and proposes a different approach. I like her ideas.
- Why don’t developers water the plants - John Yorke
- John reflects on the pitfall of organizational design: without intentional structure, tasks that are important or necessary but do not map to the core purpose of the individuals already in the team, get ignored.
- A discussion of discussions on AI bias - Dan Luu
- Where Dan reflects on the fact that LLM inference is still multiplying the most problematic discriminating biases about human populations and there is still no hope on the horizon.
- The six dumbest ideas in computer security - Marcus Ranum
- This was written in 2005 and is still relevant. Ironically, I read this just a few days before Crowdstrike burned the world down. Some things people never learn.
❦❦❦
So here we are. I find myself with a number of serious projects in front of me:
- continuing the project from April.
- networking like “Vibend but better”.
- something something incubator between now and one year from now.
- straight-up non-tech career consulting billed hourly.
- something about advising and directing home remodeling projects.
- something about investing into (read: acquiring) a super-boring business (e.g. car wash) and getting “real world” experience from that experiment.
- publishing AI-generated smut for money.
- one really cool urbanism project that someone whom I met recently successfully pitched to me.
- another somewhat cool tech infra project that someone else whom I met recently also successfully pitched to me.
- probably some other cool projects that numerous people I already plan to meet will likely successfully pitch to me.
What happens next?
❦❦❦
One thing that needs to happen real fast is a funnel factory. I need to be able to try out things using my own pipeline for inbound interest on these various projects. I want to be able to build multiple web sites (one per topic), each with a contact form, some pricing gadget, some marketing campaigns, and a way to collect contact details, then collect customer cases, then convert whatever needs to be converted, with metrics etc.
But making just one of these things is already so much work! I really can’t stand the thought of doing all this manually.
Just last week, I was asking Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot to help me with integrating Stripe and a bog-standard 3-column pricing model into a Flask application, and I was simultaneously enthusiastic about how little boilerplate I needed to write myself (these tools are truly helpful for that) and also absolutely irritated by how much grind there was remaining to tie all the loose ends together—mail integration, metrics, visual design, copy editing, etc.
Can we do better?
Well, it turns out that…
❦❦❦
The “algorithms” on Youtube and Instagram really know me well. They led me to Ship Fast, a tool from a good guy over somewhere in Europe, which gives you a template to do all of the above multiple times, but for a fixed price.
Gold! Gold! So many people are producing virtual gold all the time and it is all so inspiring. Shoutout to Marc Lou.
❦❦❦
References:
- Steven Bartlett - Diary of a CEO
- Ali Abdaal - Deep dive with Ali Abdaal
- Angelo Somers
- Matt Stancliff - Panic! at the Job Market
- Chelsea Troy - Disrupting management - A fix for Tech Culture?
- John Yorke - Why don’t developers water the plants
- Dan Luu - A discussion of discussions on AI bias
- Marcus Ranum - The six dumbest ideas in computer security
- Marc Lou - Ship Fast
- Marc Lou
is an entrepreneur who occasionally publishes field notes on systems, leadership, and the messy edge between technology and people.
Comments
Interested to discuss? Leave your comments below.