Pocket's reading list
Jul. 12, 2020
Note: This page is generated using Pocket’s API and gets updated automatically.
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Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?
No, but seriously. Why is there something instead of nothing? Last night, as I was creeping around the internet at 2:43am while the adults of the world slept, my eyes glanced by the headline, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” on the sidebar of a site I was on.
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Reality has a surprising amount of detail
My dad emigrated from Colombia to North America when he was 18 looking looking for a better life. For my brother and I that meant a lot of standing outside in the cold.
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What is Jobs to be Done (JTBD)?
Upgrade your user, not your product. Don’t build better cameras — build better photographers. Ten thousand years ago, we were hunter gatherers and used our feet to roam the earth. Today, we have fast food restaurants and autonomous cars.
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Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
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PersonalSit.es
This site was built to share and revel in each others’ personal sites. Witness these in wonderment and awe. Immaculate. Stunning. How did they do that? Yes, you should definitely get around to redesigning yours soon.
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Decomplication: How to Find Simple Solutions to “Hard” Problems
This article is long and will make you think. I recommend saving it to pocket and reading it in a comfy chair with a cup of earl grey tea. How do you lose weight?
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Free Solo and Economic Growth
We recently watched "Free Solo", the great movie about Alex Honnold's free (no aids, no ropes) solo climb of El Capitan. Among many other things, it got me thinking about economic growth. The abilities of modern day rock climbers are far beyond those of just a generation ago.
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Obviously Awesome
This is a summary of a great 🌿 branch book.
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Social Capital in Silicon Valley
It’s January 2020. And if you’re a founder just starting out, trying to create something out of nothing, one of the best investments you can make is still a plane ticket to San Francisco. A lot of people, including me, got this wrong when we looked forward to what the 20s would be like.
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Signaling as a Service
One of the best books I have read in the last few years is The Elephant in the Brain by Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler. So we think and say that we do something for a specific reason, but in reality, there’s a hidden, selfish motive: to show off and increase our social status.
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Patricia Mou
THREAD / the best digital syllabus' i've come across🧠 Web content is pervasive. Curation isn't. Been thinking abt best of class syllabus' that guide users across existing open materials on the web (podcasts, articles, vids) to quickly get smart on a topic! 🙏add
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Stay in the Game
This is going to be an uncharacteristic departure for me. This story is deeply personal, for our family, and for our oldest son in particular. But it is a story he’s letting me tell, because it is a story he wants people to hear.
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Recession Proofing My Tech Career
I’d written this in August 2019 (here), with a bit of foresight of a pending recession. I wrote this primarily for myself. Multiple reviewers have mentioned that they found it immensely useful, so sharing it with you here!
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Trauma Identity Politics
Trauma is a state of being overwhelmed with information to the point of being unable to process, causing one’s internal state to become fragmented and linked with strong negative affects. It often results in a state of dissociation, making one’s internal world chaotic.
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Technical reading
If you like what I've collected here, I write a lot on my blog and sometimes it's about tech, too. These are just pulled from a private YouTube playlist I have.
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Fail like a scientist
Working on a new project, learning a new skill, trying a new experience—getting out of your comfort zone can be both exciting and frightening. Our fear of failure can be driven by many factors, including a fixed mindset or a fear of being judged.
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Social Software Sundays #2 – The Evaporative Cooling Effect
This is the second of a weekly series of posts on various aspects of social software design I find interesting, here is the full list. Each of these posts are written over the course of a few hours in a straight shot. Contents may be mildly idiosyncratic.
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Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases
A large majority of computer systems have some state and are likely to depend on a storage system. My knowledge on databases accumulated over time, but along the way our design mistakes caused data loss and outages.
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Australia's frailties were exposed by inspired India - Tim Paine is now under serious pressure
We've noticed you're adblocking. We rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism. We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future. Thank you for your support.
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How Litestream Eliminated My Database Server for $0.03/month
Here’s a riddle. My web app keeps all of its data in a SQL database. I can spontaneously tear it down, deploy the code to a different hosting platform, and the app will still serve all the same data. Running my app in production costs $0.03 per month. How is this possible?
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Lessons learned from becoming CTO of a small startup
Update 2021: I wrote this in 2018, a year and a half after joining a startup to lead their development, it was called "switching from engineering to management", but I decided to change the title to make it clearer.
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Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
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How to Build a Proposal Culture on Your Team
It’s hard to say for sure, but more than likely, some amount of “remote work” is here to stay for those of us who can sit in front of a computer to earn a living.
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Consider SQLite
If you were creating a web app from scratch today, what database would you use? Probably the most frequent answer I see to this is Postgres, although there are a wide range of common answers: MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, etc.
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Badal Pandey
The easiest way to drop your customer acquisition cost by 20-30%: High-Converting Landing Pages. But most DTC brand have terrible landing page, Even if your ad attracts quality visitors, Still website has to convert them Here's how you can create high-converting landing page
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The Importance of Friendship
I gave a commencement speech at Vanderbilt earlier this month. It’s an honor to share these transitions in life, so I try to share transitions from my own life’s path.
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Stop Interviewing With Leet Code
During interviews, technical skills in the industry are still largely vetted through LeetCode-style questions. These are small algorithmic riddles in the form of “I have an array with positive numbers, find the n^th largest”, or “Print nodes in a binary tree in a zig-zag order”.
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Why men don’t age like wine
Back in the glory days of the hedonistic 1990s one of the women most beloved of frustrated adolescent males was Anna Nicole Smith.
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no more life as story
I think Madame Bovary is the book that’s affected me the most in love and art. I’ve spent all my time trying to not be Emma. I’ve spent all these years haunted by the purity of Flaubert’s prose.
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Software Engineering - The Soft Parts
Today I'll share some of the software engineering "soft skills" I've learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering Manager. On my 10th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on some of lessons that have stayed with me.
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Stringing together several free tiers to host an application with zero cost using fly.io, Litestream and Cloudflare
The image was generated by putting the blog post title into DALL-E 2. Quite fitting! I have a side project called bostadsbussen. It scrapes property listings for the Swedish real estate market. The site needs to persist data in the form of user accounts, property data and images.
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We are still early with the cloud: why software development is overdue for a change
This is is in many respects a successor to a blog post I wrote last year about what I want from software infrastructure, but the ideas morphed in my head into something sort of wider.
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Why Everything Looks the Same
Do you ever get the feeling that everything around you looks the same? Across every consumer category, variety and originality have given way to monotony and conformity.