I’m inspired by Jim Nielsen’s Reading Notes to try to make my consumption of daily articles more useful. My hope into writing these monthly reading notes is to:
- Remember what I read. If I’m writing about it, it is more likely that I’ll remember the important articles. Otherwise it’ll disappear as the tab vanishes in my browser history.
- Be more concisous about what I’m reading, and simply asking myself if this article is worth going into my reading notes might trigger some thinking and reflexion.
- Digest and connect the articles by writing with my own words
So here is my first entry, and see you next month
Article: “Thoughts on RSS”
As I’m re-building my RSS reader, and never ending scrolling on social media, I feel more inclined into building some restrictive mechanisms.
- Keep your feed under control
- Avoid feeds that are too busy.
- Disable all notifications from your RSS reader
- Subscribe to content that is not time sensitive.
3 is a must for all notifications but direct messages from work (during work hours), friends, and family. Everything else can usually wait.
Article: “A touch-screen fridge? A seven-blade razor? Why is everything suddenly so complicated?”
Hilarious view on “innovation”. Going from razor with 1 blade, to 2, to 3, to 5! and then 7, why?
But what about innovation with no real purpose other than to drive sales? while my dictionary defines innovate as “to introduce something new”, it also, tellingly, has it as “to introduce novelties”. That is why I’m relectant to get into “smart home”. I own 1 smart light bubble that ends up behaving like a regular light bubble that I can update over wifi, and turns off for a few seconds every so and then.
Podcast: “Rasmus Andersson: A Computer as a Paintbrush”
When talking about vercel:
really at the core of what they are doing is performance, speed, I think that is why they are winning. not because they have a feature that no one else has. AWS has this feature.
Article: “Productive Procrastination”
you’ll 1) have something productive to show for it, and 2) be much more fit, rested, and ready to tackle that project at work. […] rather than fight your penchant for procrastination, work with it.
Article “Good Enough”
This matches perfectly my williness to write more on this blog.
choosing the perfect word, and rewriting the same sentence until it’s perfect. I’d argue that a personal blog is not the place for that. Personal blogs to me are more like conversations
Article “Advice For Engineers, From A Manager”
Alongside other good points, here are the ones I would be on top of my list:
- Give effective status updates.
- Stay ahead of problems.
- Learn what the true scope of the project needs to be.
- Understand business timelines.
- Collaborate on designs.
- Learn the business.
Podcast: “Brian Lovin: It’s all about having fun”
Buidling the product following a feedback loop process:
Monday, Tuesday: show stuff to customers. I onboard people manually. I ask every single person to screenshare. […] Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, iterate on the product
Also mentioning having 30 minutes gap between each session with customers, make a tweak, and see if the flow is less confusing for the next person.
Podcast: “Pete Hunt: The no fun rule”
Do the job, then the title will be given to you.
no one can give the title of Tech Lead or whatever, it is just a thing that you do and it gets recognized later. You get the label after doing it for a while.
no fun rule. If you are having at work, you maybe shouldn’t do that thing […] If this project is fun, you have to pause and think about your own biases. You are probably bias that the project is impactful, and there is a decent chance there is something you should be doing it instead.
Podcast: “Today in Focus: Rewriting Roald Dahl”
First podcast I listen to where I’ve seen Roald Dahl name popping up on my feed and it was a nice way to catch up on the topic. One fact learned during the podcast was that Roald Dahl wrote Charlie and the Chocolaterie and was antisemic.
laughter doesn’t always mean mockery
when talking about a character in a book being “fat”