Notes from 14/9–21/9

Blockchain

Bitcoin As An Investment Part 2

They assume that bitcoin’s past 10 years are a steady state. How can you be sure this is how things will continue?

Filecoin: Understanding the Complex Crypto System Meant to Rival AWS

Okay so basically it allows for much more nuanced usage of storage capacity, including CDN networks

A Developer’s Guide to Ethereum, Pt. 1

it’s in PYTHON?

Gitcoin’s grants

Incredible how this is done!

Build decentralized chat app with textile and ipfs

its practically as good as firebase?!

Career

From zero to IPO how growth needs to evolve at every stage

Don’t just ask “What did we do?” Chart your progress by also asking, “What did we learn?” Being driven by questions, rather than achievements, unlocks future impact and further learnings

“Build it and they will come” isn’t a growth strategy. Before you ship a new feature, fully understand how it will impact your customers. Drive value, and then the customers will come.

PHASE I: FINDING PRODUCT/MARKET FIT AND GAINING TRACTION

What you’re doing now: Earning critical first users as you iterate toward product/market fit.

Goal: Get to the point where you’re feeling pull into the market from your initial target users.

Potential pitfall: Focusing too much on growth before you have product/market fit and sufficient data.

Lay the data foundation, figure out what’s important

PHASE II: SCALING

What you’re doing now: Building the foundation of your business model, as well as your data and analytics.

Goals: Develop a growth model and growth loops, instill a growth mindset across the company.

Potential pitfalls: Not deeply knowing why you’re growing, dividing into functional silos.

“If you don’t have a deep understanding of why you’re growing, you’re closer than you think to not growing anymore

PHASE III: MAKING LARGER LEAPS AND BIGGER BETS

What you’re doing now: Scaling, challenging yourself to stretch beyond optimization.

Goal: Take bigger risks and reap greater rewards.

Potential pitfalls: Underestimating the work it takes to make a big leap.

Blueprint for product managers to communicate your quirks strategy

Feels more like a user guide

Work on what matters.

Hunter Walk recommends that folks avoid “snacking” when they prioritize work. If you’re in a well-run organization, at some point you’re going to run out of things that are both high-impact and easy. This leaves you with a choice between shifting right to hard and high-impact or shifting down to easy and low-impact. The later choice–easy and low-impact–is what Walk refers to as snacking.

Where “snacking” is the broad category of doing easy and low-impact work, there’s a particularly seductive subset of snacking that I call “preening.” Preening is doing low-impact, high-visibility work. Many companies conflate high-visibility and high-impact so strongly that they can’t distinguish between preening and impact, which is why it’s not uncommon to see some companies’ senior-most engineers spend the majority of their time doing work of dubious value but that is frequently recognized in company meetings.

Many folks would assume that companies, rational optimizers that they are, avoid spending much time on low-impact high-effort projects. Unfortunately that isn’t consistently the case. It’s surprisingly common for a new senior leader to join a company and immediately drive a strategy shift that fundamentally misunderstands the challenges at hand. The ghosts of their previous situation hold such a firm grasp on their understanding of the new company that they misjudge the familiar as the essential.

Companies operate in an eternal iterative elimination tournament, balancing future success against surviving until that future becomes the present. If you’re about to lose one of those rounds, then always focus there.

One area that’s often underinvested in (e.g. lots of room to work in) while also being highly leveraged is growing the team around you. Hiring has a lot of folks involved in it, usually in terms of optimizing the hiring funnel, but onboarding, mentoring and coaching are wholly neglected at many companies despite being at least as impactful as hiring to your company’s engineering velocity.

What should people in leadership roles actually be doing all week?

This is the path that needs to be traced, methinks:

• Define priorities: Most companies (even those that make tons of $$$) are bad at this. What are the priorities of the company? Usually the answer is “X-percent growth.” OK. So that’s the priority. Now we need …
• Some action steps: What are the plans/operational elements that will get us to the priority? And then we need …
• Task alignment: What are people and teams supposed to be working on towards this goal?
• Systems for shifting this: When goals, priorities, strategies, or tasks change … how is that getting communicated?

Coding Bootcamps vs Universities

Attaining a job right after bootcamp is not an easy task. A Stack Overflow study revealed that around 9% of graduates never found a software engineering job [2]. 22% of graduates said it took about a month or longer to get a job, and 7% said it took 6 months or longer.

The One-Page Rule

Point 1. Determine the most important thing you want to present.

Point 2. Keep excessive detail to yourself.

Point 3. On the one page, put the summarized information first and any support after.

Point 4. Maximize data by reducing outside margins rather than reducing interior white space.

Point 5. Utilize bold, underline, and different font size to replace white space.

Data

How to explain each machine learning model at interview

Short and sweet, useful

Tools

Introducing AutoScraper: A Smart, Fast and Lightweight Web Scraper For Python

This seems incredibly powerful