Notes from 19/10–26/10

Career

Advice to my young self: to succeed in your career, forget side projects and focus on your job

Shallow side projects are useful to develop a first opinion about a technology that will need to be confirmed with a more elaborate project. I’d compare them to school.
When I was a teenager, I remember what we were saying about it: it will never help us in our future job. After all, how teachings about antiderivatives, Rimbaud’s poetry or Napoleonic wars could be useful for our future adult life? We were right. Most of what we learned is pretty useless today, whether you are a cook, a hairdresser or a developer.
But this formed a complete package that infuses our adult life. Junior school is great because you don’t learn to find a job. You’re at school to grow as a citizen, not to prepare to your future life, and actually you’re better not to think about your future if you don’t want to question yourself about the meaning of your existence. This is the same thing for side projects. See them as a way to discover a new topic and enlarge your horizon, not as something that you could action in your current position or to find a new job. Otherwise, you expose yourself to severe disillusions.

Don’t create a project just to prove that you know Vue.js, but use this weird technology that you saw yesterday on Hacker News and that intrigues you. Don’t think about what are the best (and boring) blog post topics that could expand your personal branding, but write poetry or a review of the last movie you saw. Create the apps, services, websites, or video games you want to use. These side-projects are truly great. They may not make your portfolio or your public image convincing for the next recruiter you’ll meet, but this is how you will be able to express all that you have in you and end up affirming yourself. At least, you should end having something meaningful to show, something to be proud about.

You want to feel free and have time for your projects? Focus your efforts on joining a great company. This will make your career considerably easier and will make you as free as you wanted to be initially. The link you’ll develop with your company will be a source of discomfort sometimes, but it will protect you from the never-ending competition on the job market. The satisfaction of seeing your career flourishing while you will use all your free time to do what you like (including… side projects) will give you a valuable peace of mind.

How to answer questions in a helpful way

Often beginners don’t ask clear questions, or ask questions that don’t have the necessary information to answer the questions. Here are some strategies you can use to help them clarify.

• Rephrase a more specific question back at them (“Are you asking X?”)
• Ask them for more specific information they didn’t provide (“are you using IPv6?”)
• Ask what prompted their question. For example, sometimes people come into my team’s channel with questions about how our service discovery works. Usually this is because they’re trying to set up/reconfigure a service. In that case it’s helpful to ask “which service are you working with? Can I see the pull request you’re working on?”

Figuring out what your question-asker knows already is important because they may be confused about fundamental concepts (“What’s Redux?”), or they may be an expert who’s getting at a subtle corner case. An answer building on concepts they don’t know is confusing, and an answer that recaps things they know is tedious.

1. Immediately write documentation
2. Point the person to the new documentation we just wrote
3. Celebrate!

It’s good to pause and wait after asking this because often people need a minute or two to know whether or not they’ve figured out the answer. I especially find this extra “did this answer your questions?” step helpful after writing documentation! Often when writing documentation about something I know well I’ll leave out something very important without realizing it.

This one’s a rule from the Recurse Center: no feigning surprise. Here’s a relatively common scenario

• Human 1: “what’s the Linux kernel?”
• Human 2: “you don’t know what the LINUX KERNEL is?!!!!?!!!???”

Human 2’s reaction (regardless of whether they’re actually surprised or not) is not very helpful. It mostly just serves to make Human 1 feel bad that they don’t know what the Linux kernel is.

Data

Build an awesome data science (or any) portfolio in no time with these tools

Webflow, netlify, gatsby, notion, jovian

Development

Designing ML Orchestration Systems for Startups

The final toolset we ended up with was:

• Version controlled SQL scripts underpinning source dataset extraction
• Preprocessing code abstracted by a Python runner script executed within a Docker container, accessing checkpointed data at rest within the data lake.
• Model training code abstracted within a Python model class that self-contained functions for loading data, artifact serialization/deserialization, training code, and prediction logic.
• Boilerplate Flask API endpoint wrappers for performing health checks and returning inference requests.

Product Backlog — Assessment and Recommendation

Every team manages some shape or form of a backlog, whether agile or waterfall or a combination of both — an agile-fall. Key is to understand where you currently stand on your backlog maturity level so you can set realistic improvement expectation.

Organisations

The Anatomy of a Startup Organisation

The right organisation is one that aligns with your business strategy. CEOs need to carefully decide where they place their resources in order to create a competitive edge and choose strong leaders that can manage and execute on their own plans.

Product’s objective is to understand customer needs and translate them into valuable, usable, and feasible product requirements. On a product team, you might find customer researchers, rapid prototypers, designers, data analysts, and product owners forming part of a scrum team.

Technology, also called engineering, is focused on developing a reliable, scalable, and high-quality tech-based product. You might find front-end engineers, back-end engineers, data scientists, system architects, and dev-ops on this team. Quality assurance (QA) is often found here too, although some companies put this role in the product org.

Product

The Building Blocks of Tech

• Low Code is designed to serve both everyday users and professional developers. It’s more powerful and customizable than No Code.
• No Code is built for everyday users — so-called “citizen developers” — who don’t have any coding knowledge. Platforms typically use a visual application system, like drag-and-drop, to make it intuitive.

Membership Guide

Written by people who like writing, extreeeemely wordy

Underpinning all of MPP’s research is the question of how membership models address their audience members’ needs for affiliation, connection, and sense of belonging to a cause bigger than themselves. The cornerstone of any membership program should be a value proposition that articulates how the experience of membership provides value to members.

Without audience research, questions about who the audience is and what it “wants” tend to be answered based on hierarchy or power within your organization, or based on assumptions about who your audience is. That isn’t good enough in an organization that is dependent on audience revenue and participation to survive and fulfill its mission.

Engaged journalism is not inherently one-off projects, but this is what it looks like in most places right now. That’s why this section will focus on memberful routines: workflows that connect audience members to journalism and the people producing it on a consistent basis.

How to assess your effectiveness at creating value for your members. Your membership value proposition is the North Star for your membership strategy. The research team will explain how to translate the components of your membership value proposition into objectives, and identify the right metrics and markers to measure your progress. Assessing your effectiveness at creating value also involves tracking your retention of members.

How to assess your effectiveness at cultivating and converting loyal readers into members. This includes tracking the growth of your loyal audience and the conversion of your loyal audience into members.

How to assess your effectiveness at balancing the costs and benefits of delivering the program. This includes assessing the monetary and as well as non-monetary contributions of members, and understanding your business model for membership.

Contextualizing your membership program. MPP has created a survey that will benchmark the goals and key performance indicators of member-driven newsrooms across the globe. So far we have collected data from 40 newsrooms. In the final parts of this section, we will present the early results from the survey that illustrate the range of membership efforts in newsrooms across the globe. Use these results to inform your own objectives, metrics, and markers. Want to help? MPP will be opening up the survey again later this fall. If you’d like us to let you know when that happens, email the research team at ideas@membershippuzzle.org.

Retention begins with a strong relationship between a supporter and a newsroom. All relationship-building work is grounded in having a solid understanding of your membership value proposition, and delivering on it consistently. (Jump to “Discovering your value proposition”)

Tools

Shift — productivity by unifying your workstation

I just use multiple open browsers