Pocket's reading list
Jul. 12, 2020
Note: This page is generated using Pocket’s API and gets updated automatically.
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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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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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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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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
The first thing to say is hats off to India. That was one of the best Test match victories of all time, and one of the greatest series wins, too. I predicted Australia would win the series 4-0 after Adelaide, and with good reason.
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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
89+ people joined this week Get insights from a CTO into your inbox every two weeks. You've probably read a few of my articles already, that's the kind of content you should expect in the newsletter. I share my thoughts as a CTO.
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Repository of Cohort Based Courses | Notion
A curated repository of successful cohort-based courses (CBC's) for the creators. A curated collection of landing pages of the successful CBC's so that new creators can get inspiration and create optimized landing pages. Instant access to all cohorts, no need to visit the landing page.
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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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x.com
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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.