Tony Ennis
@tonyennis
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Interested in making it easier to build software Runs @rlygoodsoftware . Avid hypertexter
Joined March 2009
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@t3dotgg
I don't follow any other dev accounts who I feel more compelled to discourage people from listening to than yours. You do some great teaching and I admire that, but you confuse subjective opinions (many ways of doing the same thing - here's mine) with a normative "This is the
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Life Update: After 4 years as Co-founder & CTO, I moved on from First Circle last month. Couldn't be prouder of the team & org we built, still growing and destined for big things 🚀Plan for next 6 months: Build some stuff. Prototype a new big thing. Document the process. 🤓
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Announcing 💡 Marketing Site In A Box 💡 - A free, cms-backed marketing site. In less than 2 minutes
🎁 Content included: 300+ content pieces to start you off
🌈 Beautiful out of the box, tweak to fit your brand
⚡️ Next/Tailwind powered
🖊 Inline realtime content editing 😱
👇
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We'll hit a low-code tipping point in 2021 where anyone can go from zero-coding-knowledge to creating a codebase-backed product in 8 to 12 weeks.
Going to try this with
@harshal_kokane
& post updates here
Toolkit:
@replit
@airtable
@rails
@tailwindcss
Like to get updates 👇
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Great single slide overview of the actual “tradeoff” that many teams make and how ridiculous it is, particularly when compared to “add a single line of code to your page (
@htmx_org
) which gives it the missing capability”.
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@csswizardry
I had read it before and just re-read. My takeaways:
- Compression favours larger files, so overall css/js shipped is higher without bundling.
- Shipping multiple files also carries increased latency (dark vs light green in your graphic)
But
- The 22x cumulative latency number
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Made a video explaining what
@atlas_knowledge
is and how it works for some of our beta users (featuring cameos from
@shreyas
and
@visakanv
).
Onboarding more beta users this week, sign up here if interested 👉
So far, I'm calling it Atlas. Some soundbites I'm playing with:
- Share and curate what you read and listen to
- Find and follow your favourite thinkers
- The internet’s missing knowledge meta-layer
- A platform for collective learning
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Further update. Last week I launched Editmode on ProductHunt. We want to make it ridiculously easy to edit content on the web, and to remove the engineering dependency for making simple content changes to websites and web apps.
Life Update: After 4 years as Co-founder & CTO, I moved on from First Circle last month. Couldn't be prouder of the team & org we built, still growing and destined for big things 🚀Plan for next 6 months: Build some stuff. Prototype a new big thing. Document the process. 🤓
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One of the first ideas
HTML First: Principles for building simple, maintainable web software
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In 2011 I received a call from
@paddycosgrave
asking me to come to the
@websummit
office for a chat. I had just begun my own startup journey so had no intention of joining, but was curious so took the meeting. 3 weeks later I’d agreed to become their first tech hire.
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Ok, hear me out on this one:
code/low-code: Target: Developers
no-code: Target: Non-devs
co-code: Specifically built to allow *both* developers and non-developers to build in the same environment. Requires upskilling non-devs & altering stack
cc
@bentossell
@thisiskp_
thoughts?
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My feed is full of compelling testimonials for
@LambdaSchool
although I feel this is up there.
Cc
@AustenAllred
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🤯 Just got delivery of Roam Postman (send API requests from inside Roam) from
@dvargas92495
less than a week after submitting to .
This thing is going to be so powerful
Quick demo of setting up a Roam -> Airtable flow
cc
@Conaw
@RoamResearch
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Cities would be much more peaceful if car horns were as loud inside the car as they are outside. Asymmetry at work.
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Big week for us this week at
@firstcircleph
. Thanks for the write-up
@jonrussell
!
Philippines SME lending startup First Circle raises $26M ahead of regional expansion by
@jonrussell
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Have been running some experiments to combat the newbie:expert/junior dev hiring issue recently.
Without doubt has reduced codebase/workflow complexity by an order of magnitude. Planning to on-board new junior devs in the next few weeks, so we'll see then if it works as intended
One of my deepest held beliefs:
The fact that, as web software practitioners, we’ve built a system which at any kind of scale (unnecessarily) requires a ratio of experts:newbies in the low single digits, is *the* major contributor to the widespread shortage of technical talent.
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Because building software is so new, people rely on existing mental models to understand it, and most think of it as a *manufacturing* process, with design as a step, as opposed to a *design* process. Both are useful heuristically, but it's useful to know which style your team is
③ Software making is a compounding creative process. As with any creative process, we 1. Transfer our thoughts to the medium and 2. Move them around until they "make sense". The longer the feedback loop between these, the slower and less fluid the process. Our loops are🐌
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1. Find solution to a specific problem.
2. Solution imposes structure and creates a habit which solves the problem.
3. Over time the habit created becomes pathological, extending far beyond the original problem.
4. You’ve transitioned to starting at the solution, not the problem
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I've been thinking about this problem and experimenting with solutions pretty much non-stop for the past 4 years since I tweeted this. I'm confident we've solved a big chunk of it at the agency now.
Working on the best way to package and share the ideas. 2024 will be fun.
One of my deepest held beliefs:
The fact that, as web software practitioners, we’ve built a system which at any kind of scale (unnecessarily) requires a ratio of experts:newbies in the low single digits, is *the* major contributor to the widespread shortage of technical talent.
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Starting a thread on software engineering opinions, given I've racked up quite a few at this point. ↓
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⚡️ Powered by next.js. Deploy to
@vercel
direct from Github in less than a minute, for free, lightning-fast, cdn-backed hosting. cc/
@rauchg
@timneutkens
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Website Revamp nearing completion, excited to share this soon 🤗
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@dcurtis
We have them
-
@ContaboCom
-
@Hetzner_Online
And a bunch of others. IME the problem is cultural. A cheaper AWS today would still be dismissed by almost everyone because the norm is to follow "best practices" over reasoning bottom up about what's actually required.
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I think this is directionally correct. Here's a shamelessly self-promoting thread of companies and products I've made or helped make.
The future will be defined by what you’ve built, not who you know.
The way to generate business is no longer networking - it’s showcasing the things you’ve built. The gate-keepers have been replaced by an internet connection.
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How to build a product that sells itself:
1. Convenience: (Is it always there?)
2. Reliability (Does it always work?)
3. Does it do the basics *really* well?
Products that did this for me in 2018:
@RevolutApp
@airtable
@metabase
@Bose
QC35 headphones
@secrid
wallet
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@johncutlefish
Yes! Stated slightly more bluntly here, but I think we're making the same point
Because building software is so new, people rely on existing mental models to understand it, and most think of it as a *manufacturing* process, with design as a step, as opposed to a *design* process. Both are useful heuristically, but it's useful to know which style your team is
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One thing that doesn’t surface often is the opportunity that’s given to young people at
@websummit
. Those given most responsibility early on were in their early twenties, most of whom are now doing amazing things off the back of that experience.
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The reason many hosting/cloud bills are *way* higher (often 10x+) what they could be
The Prevailing Wisdom
-The only acceptable cloud platforms to use for reliability are the big ones (AWS/GCP/Azure)
- We *must* have every service (including non prod) on it's own server (best
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Really enjoying both
@AcquiredFM
and
@FoundersPodcast
recently, difficult to listen to them and not want to do something great with your life.
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Up to 8 projects now at the Agency 💪 and the wheels still firmly on. Team is the best I've worked with, and *really* enjoying it
🚀
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Sharing ideas on the internet is crazy fun
a good pro-HTML site/article:
the hypermedia renaissance is building!
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Haven’t checked this out yet, sharing because I know if
@Modulz
released it it’ll be good. Check it out and give an upvote if you’re so inclined.
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One of my deepest held beliefs:
The fact that, as web software practitioners, we’ve built a system which at any kind of scale (unnecessarily) requires a ratio of experts:newbies in the low single digits, is *the* major contributor to the widespread shortage of technical talent.
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To anyone who follows me that's skeptical of the current social distancing they're being asked to undertake, please, please take 2 minutes to click and have a read through this 👉
#HighRiskCovid19
This isn't about us.
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The Lisbon deal is no surprise to anyone close to them.
@WebSummit
is undoubtedly of the most successful Irish startups, especially considering it’s largely bootstrapped. I enjoyed this take by
@connorpm
that they're a tech company in the events industry
A huge congrats to
#WebSummit
on their 110m+ deal with Lisbon. My thesis is that Web Summit is already a unicorn worth €1 billion, probably closer to €2 billion. Here’s why:
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I now understand why I'm always super confused when I see the Americans in my feed implying Europeans don't work, which doesn't match my experience at all.
(Ireland works on avg. more than US, but not true for most of Europe).
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Built myself a little app to track my finances over Christmas. Decided over the weekend to make it look nice and let some friends use it.
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Thread of companies/products/people (various stages) I'm long on, and why. Will be interesting to look back in 5 years. (✨ = past/present paying user)
👇
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Prediction:
@budibase
will become one of those products you start to hear more and more companies using as low-code tools continue to gain steam. World class team and product in growing space, nailing execution. Happy to be a tiny lil’ investor. Congrats on the launch guys 👏
Super excited to see
@Budibase
launch:
✅ Low code
✅ SSO+RBAC
✅ Open Source
✅ Mobile friendly
✅ Built with
@Sveltejs
✅ Connects with *everything*
Why ever handwrite internal tooling again?
Used by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, P&G
#ProudInvestor
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The agency I run had a slot open up this week. We do plug-n-play, high output software teams (and software) for real-world software-supported businesses, usually on a retainer basis with a project scoped up front. If you know anyone, send them my way - tony
@clearlabs
.ltd
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One year since we did LA to Vegas in 10 days instead of 4 hours. Highly recommended. I miss America ♥️
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③ Software making is a compounding creative process. As with any creative process, we 1. Transfer our thoughts to the medium and 2. Move them around until they "make sense". The longer the feedback loop between these, the slower and less fluid the process. Our loops are🐌
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Still a daily
@RoamResearch
user, surprised not to have seen any conversation about how it handles tabular data. Given that the spreadsheet is one of the most successful and proven tool for thought interface formats, feels like it should be a first class citizen.
@Conaw
thoughts?
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There are many reasons to have a designer at your startup, but a non-trivial one is to prevent non-designers debating UI, UX and interactions with no visuals. Sucks tons of time for usually inconsequential details.
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A lot of the responses to were "Cool but it's just not possible to do X without react" (multi-selects, styled dropdowns etc.)
I get the sentiment, but there's nothing fundamentally preventing us from building these things in an HTML First way, and until
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Spent some time digging in to
@solana
in the past few weeks as a first foray into understanding blockchain from a technical and product perspective - here's an evolving thread of findings - both technical and non-technical.
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We just wrapped the first week: Constructing Pages with Tailwind.
Input:
Output:
Status: Success 💪
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Wasn’t expecting this from the react ecosystem. It’s cool that hooks help, but ultimately you’re still trapped inside react/npm/pre/post processors etc
What if I told you you could insert dumb-tailwind, hyperscript and htmx in your head, and get copy-paste-ability in raw html.
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#websummit
news demonstrating the ease at which the public will opine authoritatively with almost no information
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My experience as a founder is that there are renewable and non-renewable energy sources:
Non-renewable
- Proving the haters wrong
- Returning for your investors
- Getting rich
So far I've only found one in the renewable category:
- "Loving what you do"
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All I want is to see one company - when they eventually sell out to the incumbent they disrupted and likely hold in contempt - just be honest and say “Yeah that’s just an absolutely outrageous amount of money, so 🤷♂️”
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Ok, the
@atlas_knowledge
website v1 is live.
Currently seeking: 1. Beta testers to help kick the tires, and 2. Part-time PM (w/ potential to co-found) to work w/ me and eng. team, help guide roadmap/direction over time.
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Today's fun: Someone (
@vinnyglennon
) posted us to Hacker News and we've found our way to the homepage. It's sending a ton of traffic and sign-ups so if you have an account please send an upvote our way 🙏:
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An idea I can’t get out of my head
For most people, time is substantially more valuable than money.
Many goods and services are paid for with both money *and time*
Organizations that impose unnecessary time costs on users are unethical and will eventually be viewed as such
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I built a thing that I'm using to collect and categorize tweets, blog posts, videos and podcasts I find around the internet. A cool second order effect is that using it regularly has kind of surfaced my interest graph.
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I’m *loving* the increase in concentration of young Irish entrepreneurs with global aspirations. Quorum have the rare quality of being as humble as they are ambitious, which is impressive because they are very ambitious. 🚀
Big day at
@QuorumChat
HQ 🚀 Excited to grow the team and see where the next part of the journey takes us.
Join our tiny team:
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@jackbutcher
@gill_works
If you’re only measuring time yes. But incorporating things like flow, cognitive bandwidth and opportunity cost it likely pays off much sooner 🙂
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.
@riveravictor
is building Lambda for 🇵🇭. We’ve hired one Lambda grad and two
@AvionSchool
grads. Positive vibes are very much warranted. 🙌
And they’re just getting started.
The amount of support we’ve gotten on our first day of demo day is overwhelming! I didn’t realize there are that many people around the world who care so much about the Philippines 🧡
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Working on a new post for that outlines the flavour of web software that this approach is meant for.
We don't yet have a term for simple web software that is, at its core, a set of screens and forms on top of a relational database. I like "Formware"
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Won't be long before these lists need a designated section for
@websummit
alum.
Delighted to be a part of this group with
@grandpalco
and
@dalynewspaper
, amazing early birthday present for us both! 🎈
Congrats
@deckelly
,
@Aoils
, and everybody else featured plus a BIG thank you to
@emmetjryan
and
@businessposthq
🙏
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In retrospect our collective hubris and naïveté was pretty incredible. I can’t count the number of mistakes I made in that period. But being given the space to make them was crucial. And that unbridled optimism gave people the belief they could do anything. Exhibit A:
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Twitter! We (
@editmodelabs
) are exiting beta and are looking for more 5 - 50 person companies that are using something non-typical (e.g.
@airtable
or something else) to manage their product copy (react/rails/react-native). Know anyone?
Editmode in 3 steps:
1. Add a single line of code to your codebase.
2. Replace your copy with our view helpers.
3. Voila! - you’ve freed your text - anyone on your team can now edit your web app and website copy, at any point.
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Mr HTMX approves 😊
a good pro-HTML site/article:
the hypermedia renaissance is building!
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Spent the last 10 days in an Airbnb in the countryside and starting to think there might be something to this. Never slept this good in my life.
The ideal lifestyle is alternating between hermit-like living in the countryside, low sensory stimulation, inner life; and an electric city life, buoyant, erratic, high sensory stimulation, outer life
Apollonian / Dionysian cycle
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We used to have a DIY recording studio in our back garden where my dad would jam with pals. Sometimes he’d give us a heads up someone good was playing and we’d listen from the house. One of them turned out to be
@Hozier
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Not sure who’s worse - the people using war as Twitter engagement bait, or the people using the people using war as Twitter engagement bait, as Twitter engagement bait
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Ok, let's do this. First, I wrote a little more about the rationale behind the experiment here. I'll also be adding exercise outlines and weekly updates at this link:
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It’s exciting to watch a small group of people working on an idea which will fundamentally change a discipline, and flying (relatively) under the radar. If you’re involved in building software in any way, I would recommend reading this, from
@colmtuite
:
The general consensus seems to be that as design tools mature, they will "bridge the gap" between design and development.
That's not how it works. Let me explain why I think that is the wrong approach.
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Biggest mindset-shift I've had this year: It's 100% possible to work on several projects at the same time and make progress without becoming completely stressed out. Was always in awe of people who could do this, now realize it's just about being smart about how you set it up.
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Most software companies send welcome emails when you sign up.
@LayerHQ
prefer the tangible route, Cheers folks!
http://t.co/kAgh8GiOtH
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If you follow people like this and are new to the industry, please ignore messaging like this (that if you don’t adopt a certain style or framework that you’re an “incompetent” engineer). Some people need to use strong normative statements to justify their decisions and
I’m thankful for DHH. Incompetent engineers love to defend his terrible decisions. Great way to identify people you should ignore
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The
@atlas_knowledge
plan in 3 graphics:
Made a video explaining what
@atlas_knowledge
is and how it works for some of our beta users (featuring cameos from
@shreyas
and
@visakanv
).
Onboarding more beta users this week, sign up here if interested 👉
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Week 4 - We have fully functioning rails codebase running in replit, and the beginnings of a real product.
Links
👈 the app
Great work from
@harshal_kokane
Also,
@replit
is awesome.
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Improved Atlas onboarding & more beta invites rolling out today, keep an eye on your inboxes.
This is what it looks like 👇
Wait list signup here:
Made a video explaining what
@atlas_knowledge
is and how it works for some of our beta users (featuring cameos from
@shreyas
and
@visakanv
).
Onboarding more beta users this week, sign up here if interested 👉
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Last year, my team started a "Remote Development" experiment. We're still iterating, but it's already a core part of our workflow. The learnings are broadly applicable/interesting to both a technical & non-technical audience, so I've written this thread for both.
👇
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In my experience, a big chunk of product design feedback (maybe a majority) comes after an interface is built. Working with images in Invision/Marvel etc. is ok, but the closer someone comes to being able to use the actual product, the more comprehensive the feedback tends to be.
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Ahhh! First community-contributed library for
@editmodelabs
, big milestone 🤗
Thanks
@xaviablaza
, will have to check out
@CrystalLanguage
now!
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🤭 look what arrived while I was away. Now to brave the elements 🥶
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1. Technology allows startups to scale super-linearly.
2. Technology team productivity scales sub-linearly.
I keep thinking about: Why are there so few people working on (2), and what kind of advantage would that give a post product market fit team.
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I can see Cloudflare Workers becoming a much more common part of the average stack. I built my first one a month ago and have since deployed 5 more - there’s *so* much you can do with them once you get the basics down.
☁✨ I made my first
@Cloudlare
Worker
It filters Nomad List's city db but the data and filtering is on their 300+ edge servers near you instead of my server, so it's faster
Right now I've been able to get filtering response time down to ~50ms (or 1/20th of a second)
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Seeing a bunch of anecdotes of this "Barbell Approach" becoming a real work trend: Pairing an expert (on a part time/fractional basis) with one or more high-energy, high aptitude on-the-ground executors. Could see it becoming much more common as work continues to go more remote
The idea is simple: Full time, college educated growth/mktg/sales trained people to work directly on startups/DTC teams. We find, screen, train and place them with companies.
They do reporting, URL tagging, QA, video edit, creative formatting, SDR tasks, affiliate, influencer
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Storing this in "Not sure if obvious or deep"
Nouns: HTML
Adjectives: CSS
Verbs: Javascript
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Now that we're tracking and syncing everything, why are there so few companies doing BI for individuals -- unified reporting on the important things - health, finances, habits, goals etc. in a single dashboard?
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Every now and then, you come across a model that has 10x more explanatory power than your previous way of thinking.
@LFeldmanBarrett
's theory of how emotions work is one of those for me - feels like I gained a key piece of missing conceptual vocabulary.
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Xmas Eve hacking: Building an animated toast library with hyperscript, stock tailwind and the teeniest bit of CSS
cc
@htmx_org
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Reposting this as I jumped the gun last week. Ondeck 4 is now accepting applications. I'm on batch 3, which is happening completely online. Can confirm it's the smartest, most ambitious, most willing-to-help peer group I've been a part of. And they're just kicking off.
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@andrewchen
Probably not same kind of social/audio/video/text you were getting at, but I’ll just leave this here just in case 🙂
So far, I'm calling it Atlas. Some soundbites I'm playing with:
- Share and curate what you read and listen to
- Find and follow your favourite thinkers
- The internet’s missing knowledge meta-layer
- A platform for collective learning
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