Insights

1. make it work
2. make it pretty
3. make it fast but don't forget to (only) think about #3 even before you start with #1

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time.

You must own equity, a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom

My favorite productivity hack is saying no

Ikigai: A reason for being

🍰 Only 4 out of 70+ projects I ever did made money and grew

📉 >95% of everything I ever did failed

📈 My hit rate is only about ~5%

🚀 So...ship more

There’s a difference between being happy and being distracted from sadness

Persistent Terminals.

Loading a project in PHPStorm will also load the terminals you had set up before you exited the last time. I like renaming my terminals to keep my processes separate. That gets saved and reloaded every time too.

Reducing Work in Progress (WIP) is perhaps the most important single thing you can do to improve productivity. An unfixed bug is Work in Progress. You cannot move quickly if you cannot trust the code. Don't log the bug, fix it.

Refactoring is not something distinct from writing code. It's integral to writing code. I do it constantly as I work. By reflex. I see something that can be improved and I improve it. Refactoring is not just something you do when tests fail. Doing it without tests is risky, tho.

One of the more surprising things in business is the degree to which an inexperienced person with the right mindset will outperform a highly experienced person without it.

The less time I spend on social media, the more at peace I am

As a knowledge worker (developer, writer, creator, etc.) If you have zero distractions, and complete focus, it's really hard to work more than 4 hours in a day.

If you're working more than 8 hours in a day there's some gross inefficiencies. You're not working your brain enough.

I'd always take 4 hours of intentional focussed work over 8 hours of unfocussed time

Why offices suck

Office sucks. Let me list a few things: - Hot desks - People laughing and constantly talking while you are trying to focus - Unstable temperature making you freeze or boil - Uncomfortable and unhealthy desks/chairs - Often lack of proper screens/equipment - Getting squeezed in trains to commute - spending at best an extra hour per day - Unhealthy and expensive dietary options around work - Contamination of diseases - Useless meetings and team activities that usually produce zero value Not to mention how bad this is for the environment. And no, a ping-pong or foosball table doesn't make the office cool. It's like adding chocolate syrup on a rotten fruit to make it edible.

This is the biggest misconception about remote work

Remote work isn't work from home

Home isn't best place to work for most/many

Find a coworking or private office

Being in control of the temperature where you work is critical. When you’re cold you can at least wear more layers, but you don’t have any options when it’s too warm.

“Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.” — Guindon

A small part of every day should be planning and working towards what you want your life to be like in 5 years.

Start that side project.
Start eating healthier.
Start moving more.
Start saving more.
Start learning more.
Start shipping more.

A little every day goes a long way.

Someone with half your IQ is making 10x as you because they aren't smart enough to doubt themselves.

#PhpStorm #Git Tip: View the history for a selection without using the terminal.

1. Make a selection
2. Right-click the selection
3. Click "Git"
4. Click "Show History for Selection"

If you have young children, 5AM is one of the only times you can get deep work done. No one is awake, and it’s silent. And no notifications from family/friends.

Is 5AM a requirement for success? No, but that’s when I get my best work done every day.

Instead of studying how Bezos made his billions, it's much more useful to learn how someone like you is making $10K/mo.

The minute you launch your startup you're more successful than 99.99% of other entrepreneurs because most people never get that far.

Don't set your deadlines for Monday. Don't agree to deadlines for Mondays. Respect yourself, your time, and your family/friends enough to remove all temptation to work on weekends.

Your teams are getting nothing done because they are trying to get everything done.

Don't spend time talking about whether you think something will work. Test it.

Don't spend time asking people what they want. Create it and validate.

Don't spend time asking people what they like. Look at what they use.

Edgy opinions that will be mainstream within 10 years:

• places where people live should be car free
• life shouldn't be about mostly working
• cities aren't a healthy, happy or good place to live
• home ownership isn't the smartest investment for most
• air quality is important

Life is a series of obstacles and tests. Those who learn to be resilient, persistent, and optimistic have the upper hand. Let’s get after it relentlessly today 🔥

People don't trust faceless organizations.

Add your face to your brand. A little overlap between personal and professional brand can make all the difference.

Be a human being in a world where people are looking for genuine and honest connections. Show your true and unique self.

Became a VC, but for your own ideas. Invest your time, instead of other people’s money. Treat your projects like cattle, not like pets.

Your children shouldn't remember you as always tired after work, too exhausted to play with them.

If you want “failure to be cheap” you can’t spend 6 months on a project before bringing it to market.

We don’t have a lot of 6 month periods in our lifetime.

My best advice to first-time creators: Start with a super tiny product.

A few reasons why software projects get delayed:

• Unclear ownership

• Insufficient scope that gets changed mid-project

• Lack of planning for bottlenecks/dependencies

• Bad communication of blockers & questions

• Too small team vs too big scope

Genius Execution > Genius Strategy

“Our job is to find a few intelligent things to do, not keep up with every damn thing in the world.” —Charlie Munger

Focus is the way.

Leadership tip of the week

Everyone works better with structure, so don’t be afraid to give deadlines, define goals, or set processes. Constraints allow people to do their best work.

You can have the best design in the world.

The best product. The most innovative features.

But if your copywriting sucks...you suck.

It's like having the world's best restaurant with a moldy, unreadable sign and front door that opens the wrong way...

Your product should focus on solving just one problem extremely well, not 50.

If you want a smarter kid, teach your child to read as early as possible and instill in them a love for books. Because as soon as they can read, they can teach themselves.

90% know what to do. 10% actually go and do it. 1% continue for long enough to win.

Не можу думати, сидячи перед ноутбуком. Literally. Треба вставати і кудись йти, просто щоб почали з’являтись цікаві думки.

Adults who stay well-hydrated appear to be healthier, develop fewer chronic conditions, such as heart and lung disease, and live longer than those who may not get sufficient fluids

People with executive assistants:

What are your productivity hacks?

What apps do you use?

What unexpected things does your assistant do that makes your life less stressful?

For me: All my emails go into Front, are fully triaged, and I only get the emails that I need to.

Been testing a simple productivity "hack".

Each AM, I pick todos. For each, I write an expected completion time + a total for the day.

As I go, I cross-ref predictions & actuals.

Been surprisingly motivating to try meeting the forecast and surfaces where time is being wasted.

In an 8-hour day, the average worker is productive for 2 hours and 53 minutes. Why are we all pretending to work?

There plenty of great books on strategy but they won’t help if you can’t ship

A little trick I use for all my photos on my iPhone. Push down exposure to -0.7. In this case, all images look way better (not so over HDR-ish) Also, you can preserve the settings, and it will keep them permanently.

If your expectations grow faster than your income you’ll never be happy with your money no matter how much you accumulate.

My desk setup to stay motivated building a startup for 4 years.

Most overnight successes have been a decade in the making.

Imagine having 4 cofounders at a VC funded startup 🥹

Selling for $100M

Diluted to 10% ownership by VCs

Tax takes 50%

Go home with $1.25M cash after 6 years working 7 days a week 12 hours per day or $47/hour

Many people on Upwork make more than that!

I'm working with a SPA that has a dedicated backend composed of over a dozen microservices.

Each service has its own repo, and its own DB, even though all services are built and maintained by one team.

I do not recommend this.

🚩Can't do atomic commits 🚩Lots of friction jumping between repos and DB's 🚩Hard to configure CI, or to manage cross-repo breaking changes 🚩Repeated code between repos 🚩Hard to maintain data integrity between DBs 🚩Requires many HTTP calls to load a page (there's no BFF) 🚩No easy way to search/navigate between repos 🚩Complex cross-service transactions 🚩Doesn't honor Conway's law

As a solo founder, my number 1 job is not improving the product, or being there for my team, or fixing bugs, or even talking to customers.

My number 1 job is protecting my time so that I can do all of the above.

In this episode of "your website doesn't need to be perfect"

Introducing: Rock Auto.

SimilarWeb estimates it gets 19m visits/month and $50-70m in revenue.

Саме час активно вчитись створювати свої продукти.

Some people wake up every morning looking for something to be upset about

“The real insight about managing people is that, ultimately, you don’t. The best performers are people who know enough and care enough to manage themselves.”

Start writing today.

The most mind-blowing result of having written a weekly blog post for 200 weeks is that there's a pretty high chance I can answer almost any question with an article of mine.

Being able to share my thoughts explained in detail with just a URL is POWERFUL

🤝

GPT-4 strikes again. 🔥

I managed to automatize one of the most annoying things Laravel developers have to do.

Internationalizing a project by wrapping up strings in the __() helper across dozens of Blade templates.

What a relief! 😮‍💨

Did you ever read „requirements“ written down by business people? It is pretty rare that they are precise enough to be coded down. Hardest part in IT is to understand what business really needs.

GPT-4 just localized my entire app

ChatGPT is the ultimate travel planner.

No more sifting through endless personal stories and annoying ads. Just straightforward planning.

truth developers don't want to accept:

• staging and production will never be identical

• production is unpredictable and all states cannot be captured by your testing suite

• problems that you really care about only happen in production

• testing in production works

My yoga teacher always starts class with this line:

"Congrats. The hardest part is over. You showed up."

I feel like that mindset applies to most other things.

Worrying about a task often is far worse than the task itself. Starting is the hardest part.

Everyone I know successfully generating passive income are the least passive people you'll ever meet

Steve Jobs was into deep work and hands-on management before it was cool. What a memo from 1986

A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.

If hard work leads to success, the donkey would own the farm.

There is usually a block of time each day when you are at your best—​peak energy, peak enthusiasm. Let's say it's 2 hours per day. How do you spend those 2 hours? Who or what gets your best time?

Don’t let a large corporation suck the life out of you

Every company should have a page like this that every employee can reference

Take your web app UX to the next level with this one revolutionary technique:

make the back button actually go back

I hate calls. They kill my workflow.

That’s why I have a "zero-tolerance no meeting policy."

If we can’t complete a project without “hopping on a quick call”, we aren’t a fit.

Surprised by how many companies are cool with this.

The inexorable decrease in kids' ranges.

“You can have two ‘Big Things’ in your life, but not three.”

https://longform.asmartbear.com/two-big-things/

Признавайтесь, хто? Чий workflow?

20 years from now, the only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids.

A few of the responses:

“The graveyard is full of ‘irreplaceable’ and ‘important’ people.”

“I don’t remember what I was working on, I can’t tell you why it was important. But I can tell you how my not being there made my kids feel.”

Really makes you think about tradeoffs.

I deleted all productivity apps a while ago and I couldn’t be happier.

Using several apps to become more productive actually makes you unproductive. You waste valuable time that you could use for work.

Take a pen and a paper or simple note app, write down your tasks, and cross them when you finish. Simple and effective.

Noise is a secret destroyer of productivity.

It is secret because it impacts cognition, not effort, so we don’t notice, but a 10db noise increase (from a dishwasher to a vacuum) lowers productivity by 5%. Noise is also greater in poorer neighborhoods... https://joshuatdean.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/NoiseCognitiveFunctionandWorkerProductivity.pdf

I don't really understand why we keep trying to "estimate" how much time building software would take

engineers know it's bollocks tech leads know they are useless PMs know it's finger the air estimations

yet so many teams still do this silly dance

Let's just get rid of the damn sprints entirely! When you're done with the current thing, pull the next thing. The entire team works on one story at a time. It takes as long as it takes.

More high-performers will view one-person internet businesses as a viable alternative to traditional work.

More flexibility, high-income potential, 100% ownership, & the chance to be present for their family.

We're just getting started.

My response to any customer who needs docs or meetings for their compliance / infosec team is that they need to go to a bigger provider.

1 meeting and the inevitable followups just sucks all the profit out of a $99 / mo subscription.

It just doesn't make business sense.

You cannot have a "forever company" as a solopreneur in tech.

One day, your product will be come a free feature, or the platform you're building on will disappear.

Build, iterate, grow, exit. Repeat.

Because it's not about the money, it's about arbitrary goals to make a man wake up in the morning

A man without a goal is nothing

I am very low cash, like 0.1%

Everything is locked up and I can’t touch it

Market index ETFs outperform real estate on average

And ETFs have 100x less headaches than dealing with leaking water pipes and shoddy construction of 10 real estate properties you manage

Vanguard ETFs never have leaking water pipes

"Don't learn to code. Soon GUIs will do it all for you." - 1985

"Don't learn to code. Soon that will all be done offshore for pennies." - 2003

"Don't learn to code. Soon nocode tools will do it all for you." - 2015

"Don't learn to code. Soon AI will do it all for you." - 2023

You can build a sustainable business on the internet by selling a product on a website that gets 100-200 relevant clicks per day. Two questions:

What will you build and sell? How will you get 100-200 relevant clicks per day?

It’s hard to believe but more competitors in your market generally means more money for you as their marketing helps grow the entire pie

If your product stays good, that is

Society has become so lazy that a 20 minute walk is now considered exercise.

The best investment advice I’ve ever heard was: maximize your salary.

Don’t manage projects, coordinate people. They’ll take care of the project just fine.

How to productize yourself:

1. Have conversations that help people.
2. Create content that helps people.
3. Build a product that helps people.

You → conversations → insights → content → audience → product.

Щоб не "застрягнути" на $5,500* назавжди робіть свій стартап або йдіть працювати в існуючий що злітає.

(*) мова про Україну, цифри від Djinni https://t.me/djinni_official/1022

99% of “scratch your own itch” projects make $0.

The lesson learned here should probably be: try dozens of small projects, build on what works, and throw away the rest.

In my 25 years writing on the internet, I’ve been wrong about all sorts of things. This one wouldn’t even make the top 5. The fear of being seen as wrong is one of the key factors holding people back from trying new things, new thoughts, and, crucially, changing their mind.

290 days to take the original iPod from just an idea to stocked on the retail shelf. Mental.

https://patrickcollison.com/fast