For the "learn to take pictures on a manual camera" suggestion, this is probably the reddit multi-part tutorial: https://www.reddit.com/r/photoclass/ (scroll to the bottom for the first lesson)
5,620 karma · joined April 2, 2007
• Nobody gives a fuck ABOUT ME or how cool or awesome I am.
• People only care about how awesome THEY ARE.
• I am competing for their very short attention-span. Facebook, Netflix, and porn are my competition. This better be pretty compelling if they are not going to immediately hit their back button.
• I either need to address some real PAIN they have, or be pretty amazing at entertaining them. In most cases, addressing a real pain is easier. It's much harder to entertain better than porn, breaking news stories, etc.
• Structure for pain is clear:
1. Identify the pain and show how much it hurts and costs them
2. Show them the solution, and how good it will feel to stop losing and start winning
3. Anticipate and address their concerns. Are they worried about cost? Are they worried about how much work it will require? Are they worried what their boss or customers will think? Etc. Think of the most likely concerns or objections they will have and explain how to resolve them. All or most of their questions should be answered so that there is nothing in the way for the next step...
4. Call them to action to do something. Use your tool. Change a behavior. Etc.
The structure can vary a bit, but this is generally the structure. In a purely technical article, you may have very short sections on the pain, then spend most of the time on the solution. If the purpose is more for sales, then you'll want to have it more balanced and focus a lot on resolving concerns.
The article should be clear enough and structured enough so that every paragraph can have a headline. And a reader should be able to scan the headlines and know very quickly and clearly without having to think "what is this article about?"
If the article feels or looks like work to read, they will give up right away and you've lost them. There has to be something really compelling for them. How will this make them more awesome? They don't give a fuck about anything else.
They are milliseconds away from hitting their back button or searching for "nude guitar solos", so put the effort in to deliver something compelling and valuable. One well-thought-out clear useful article is far greater than a hundred jumble-thought aimless ones.
Edit: formatting
"the base frequency is 183.58 and the "binaural beat" frequency is 40hz - meaning the difference in the left ear and right ear is 40hz. The left ear plays 183.58 and the right ear plays 223.58hz the difference being 40hz. "
Apparently his wife was showing signs of Formaldehyde poisoning after they moved into a newly constructed home. This motivated him to investigate the air quality in their house and he bought industrial-level air testing equipment to figure out what was going on (since many of the consumer-grade devices were wildly inaccurate). He also did a deep dive into the research on how air quality impacts cognitive and creative performance. Fascinating talk, worth watching.
Interesting how recently nginx was continuing this campaign. I wonder how effective the "replace F5 with NGINX" marketing push was at increasing the price and urgency for the acquisition.
For the curious, the big headline at the top of the message was "Modernizing Applications by Replacing F5 with NGINX Application Delivery Controller and Signal Sciences"
Then the text of that top section was:
"F5’s rigid and centralized approach to load balancing and web application firewall (WAF) prevents enterprises from modernizing their applications. In this recent webinar we describe how replacing or augmenting your F5 deployment with the NGINX application delivery controller and Signal Sciences WAF helps reduce costs and improve agility."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig
https://podtail.com/en/podcast/the-joe-rogan-experience/-110...
A more knowledgeable stackexchange user says:
If you know Russian, use it. Despite the political situation, Georgians are smart and open minded. They may not like the Russian government but they love Russian people and they love the Russian language.
I'm pretty convinced after seven months in Georgia that people learn Russian there for just the same reason foreigners everywhere learn English: it's cool and it's useful.
English is spoken, but I wouldn't say "widely". It's spoken by people aged in their 20s and younger, moreso if they're in a big city and moreso depending on their level of education.
Source: https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/10640/what-langua... (the full answer is worth the short read)
---
Also, another point of interest for US citizens is that Georgia gives you a 1 year visa-free stay. Could be a great option if you're traveling Europe and need to be out of the Schengen zone when your 90 days are expired.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/international-tra...
I'd also add that much of what we hear or read has slight effects on us that can be profound over time.
In the case of books, nearly every book I read changes my outlook and direction, sometimes imperceptibly, but I believe the effects can be large over time.
Of course, quality matters - "you are what you eat" or in this case what you read.
Reminds me of a quote by Charles de Gaulle:
"Don't ask me who's influenced me. A lion is made up of the lambs he's digested, and I've been reading all my life."
- Github Project: https://github.com/ansible/awx
- Project FAQ: https://www.ansible.com/awx-project-faq
- Demo Video (10min): https://www.ansible.com/tower-demo
- Remove angry potato logo: https://github.com/nanobeep/awx-logos
I do the curation for the 'Ansible & Friends' newsletter and we've been following this closely for a few months...
If you're interested in alternatives to Tower/AWX, see our listing in issue 64: https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64
Kudos to Jeff, he's quite prolific in the community. We've highlighted him recently in the "Community Heroes" section: https://hvops.com/news/ansible/64 And in our September issue, we had to give Jeff his own section because there were just too many great articles he had put out: https://hvops.com/news/ansible/67
(Full disclosure: Ansible Inc hired me a few years ago to update and automate the Tower documentation systems)
Storytime: I once interviewed for job in Delaware. It was exhausting. I did great in the interviews, but my mind was burned out after all the technical questions. So I asked if they had a spot where I could nap for a few minutes. They were a bit puzzled, but showed me to a spot where I could sit in a chair and lean back to nap. It was great and I got the job - it wasn't till months later that they mentioned they almost didn't hire me because of the nap incident during the interview!
So, I do recommend naps at work, but I'd say not everyone will understand if you nap at your first onsite interview. YMMV ;)
Fortunately attitudes seem to finally be changing about sleep and brain optimization.
I recently wrote about this. The TLDR is that 20% time is a great investment and can ultimately save the company a ton of time and money. It gives the engineers some playtime in order to build their CV's and "get their wiggles out". Ultimately, if done right it can protect your production systems from a lot of madness. https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-...
Welcome to the land of engineering, where we will fine-tune an algorithm to save milliseconds, yet waste man-years of engineering time to look like the big kids.
So many engineering choices are based on fashion rather than need.
Gotta get that hot new bag from Prada to show off to your engineering friends! :D
Do not be seduced by the technology!
I killed one of my startups this way. I've seen many many die this way.
It can hurt your pride as a passionate technologist to choose non-cool but mature and easy-to-hire-for tools. But it's those tools that are the most economical.
Remember, your customers care 0% about the backend technologies you're using as long as they are getting the value you promised them.
"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work." Gustave Flaubert
You're running a business, not a technological showcase for other engineers (who are not even your customers!).
Remember that the most economical tool for the job is often not the coolest or trendiest - but is some old boring workhorse that other engineers will scoff at.
Build your business for your customers, not for your technological pride or to demonstrate your technical prowess to friends.
Don't get me wrong though! There's certainly a time and a place to play with all the coolest and trendiest stuff, but if you're optimizing for growing a business, that is the time for choosing low-risk, simple, mature tools.
While I sometimes understand the bemoaning of top engineers spending time on trivial apps, sometimes those apps aren't as trivial as you would think when you consider how they positively impact loneliness. Of course, there's plenty of garbage out there, but I do love to see efforts to connect people in ways that can be serendipitous and have the possibility of leading to more meaningful connection.
I can think of multiple long-time valuable real-life relationships I've had where our first connections were on some trivial platform. Sometimes it's hard to see past the glaring negatives that come with some of those platforms, but I'm hopeful that better options will evolve over time.
From Jessica Livingston yesterday: https://twitter.com/jesslivingston/status/778948962724315136
"A lot of these tactics are mistaken, but they show China cares about startups in a way the US does not."[0]
"China is doing to the US what the US did to Britain in the 19th century: growing their economy while we waste money on our empire."[1]
[0] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/772343525199474688 [1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/772344187995947008
In emailing with Sahil about my concerns about Gumroad's new direction, he said "We want Gumroad to be the core channel for everything. We started with sales, and are moving into audience/list management."
He made it clear that they want me to import my audience lists to Gumroad and that they don't plan to support future integrations with CampaignMonitor, Mailchimp, etc. That makes sense, since those email platforms are now the competition I guess. It's bad news for me though - if I wanted to stay with Gumroad, I'd now have a project on my hands to move everything over to a (currently) much less powerful email platform.
I imagine this will work for many of their customers, but there are customers like myself that don't want to be pushed in this direction. I prefer to keep my audience management separate from my payment provider. I don't want my payment provider deciding that my customers are now their customers that they can now spam and upsell them in order to grow their platform. I'm not saying that that is Gumroad's plan - but I'm increasingly worried that it might be. Particularly if they get in a "desperate for growth" situation like this article hints at.
Again, they've been great for years and I really appreciate that. The new direction just seems too risky and not a good fit for folks like me who don't want their payment provider as the middle-man for communicating with their audience.
I guess there's an argument that they're not a payment provider, but a "sales platform" or something.
Currently I'm looking for a replacement payment provider (or whatever they should be called) to use. SendOwl looks promising. If you've used them, or have another provider you'd recommend, please let me know!
I'm a big Rich Hickey fan. If you don't know who he is, he's the guy behind Clojure and Datomic. I don't use those tools, but his views on simplicity are wonderful.
Here's a great quote of his on the subject:
"Simplicity is hard work. But, there's a huge payoff. The person who has a genuinely simpler system - a system made out of genuinely simple parts, is going to be able to affect the greatest change with the least work. He's going to kick your ass. He's gonna spend more time simplifying things up front and in the long haul he's gonna wipe the plate with you because he'll have that ability to change things when you're struggling to push elephants around."
Here's his classic talk on simplicity if you haven't seen it yet: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy
The title is a little cheesy, but the content is gold. It's one of the books I re-read (or re-listen to via Audible) multiple times a year. I find the repetition is really valuable since I can slip so easily back into my old thought patterns.
When I count books that have been most helpful to me, this one is at the top of the list (followed by "War of Art" by Pressfield).
For a synopsis, check out Derek Sivers book notes on it: https://sivers.org/book/StoicJoy
Derek's intro to the notes: "Rating: 10/10. Almost too personal for me to give an objective review, because I found when reading it that the quirky philosophy I've been living my life by since 17 matches up exactly with a 2000-year-old philosophy called Stoicism. Mine was self-developed haphazardly, so it was fascinating to read the refined developed original. Really resonated."
If setting those up seems daunting for a team, then it's not the right time to use Docker (in production at least).
I'd also love to hear more stories about Docker vs the other virtualized setups. It generally seems to be a dramatic improvement in usability, performance, etc, but I'd love to hear more about the specifics from those who have made the switch.
Here's a few production users: http://www.docker.com/resources/usecases/ http://blog.docker.com/2013/12/baidu-using-docker-for-its-pa...