2019/1: When in doubt, start a newsletter
On starting a newsletter
This is the first issue of my newsletter and I'm not really sure what is going to be about. I guess I'll start with why I'm doing this.
I've been reading newsletters for a long time now. My philosophy is: when in doubt, subscribe. After all, unsubscribing is easy and you never know if you are not going to find some hidden gem. But the question is, why newsletters? Why not follow the person (or organization, but I prefer persons) in Twitter? Why not just read their page now and then?
Well, the second question is easier: because I'll probably forget to do it. The first sheds more light in the pros of newsletters:
- They are curated. That doesn't mean there aren't newsletters with a lot of content, or bad content, or both. But at the very least you know that whoever is doing them has to put a little thought on it.
- They have a "predictable" throughput. I mean, you know that you are going to receive them every day/week/whatever. Some newsletters don't have a schedule, but those tend to be sporadic, so the point remains that you are not going to be overwhelmed.
- They are persistent. Or at least it's easy to make them that way. Most newsletters I know have an archive and maybe a search feature.
It's not hard to argue that a Twitter feed doesn't have these qualities.
That explains the reading. Why writing one, though? The idea came to me after reading this article. There's a quote there (from some newsletter, of course) that says:
«I think any artist or scholar or person-in-the-world today, if they don’t have one already, needs to start an email list immediately».
And I thought, why only those people? Why not everyone? I know a lot of people from whom I would love to receive every week (or two weeks, or whatever) an email with a summary of what they are thinking and making.
And what about blogs? There are a lot of possible answers here, but for me personally the main advantage is this: the bar seems to be lower for newsletters. Maybe it's just an impression, and maybe a wrong impression. But I feel you can be less strict with the quality of "some mail with stuff I send every Saturday" than with a blog post, which feels more like an article.
This is getting too long, and I'll probably write about the subject again as I find out what I want to do with this thing (assuming I keep at it). But the bottom line is: when in doubt, start a newsletter.
Publishing a Scala package
This week I published my first Scala package, and I don't look forward to doing it again. My main experience with publishing libraries is from npm —where it's (in)famously easy to put something out there for the world to use— but I'm sure that the Scala experience would've also been dreadful if I had come from another language.
Apparently, there are two main ways of doing it. The first is to publish it in Sonatype, where you have to, and I'm not kidding here, open a Jira ticket to get a permission for synchronizing your project. Even for the JVM ecosystem this is ridiculous. The other one is to publish in Bintray, which I did, since it's supposed to be easier. Even there I had several issues, and when I registered a message of "29 days left on your free trial" appeared in the page header. Later I found out that it doesn't matter for OSS projects, but still.
Everything about the experience was bad, but the worst part is how few resources are out there about this. Again, coming from javascript, where the community is huge and the culture of sharing is strong, this is surprising. Javascript as a language has a lot of issues, as we all know, but I think these "ecosystem features" really make a difference and should be emulated.
From Beirut to Jerusalem
There's this thing I love to do: reading a book (a good one, with any luck) on a subject that I don't know anything. Nothing at all. I've done it before with evolution (The Selfish Gene), nuclear weapons (The Making of the Atomic Bomb), epistemology (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions), and several others.
This time it's the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the book is From Beirut to Jerusalem, which I had chosen it a long time ago. That's another thing I like to do: researching what's a good book on a given subject, even if I'm not going to read it immediately, or even for years. But choosing a book on this subject is much, much harder than with others.The Rhodes book, for example, is the go-to for learning about the history of nuclear weapons; I don't think there's a close second. But the middle orient is a hairy subject, and I remember it was close to impossible to pick a clear winner for best book to learn about it. I guess it has to do with the fact that is a very, very loaded subject. It's like climate change: whatever you say about it, it's going to be loaded with some political opinion, or at least it's going to be taken that way.
I just started it, and it's not actually a history on the subject as I thought. It's about the experience of a journalist that worked several years in Beirut, and after that moved to Jerusalem, where he lived several years more (hence the title). It's really good so far, and the introduction has a very short and accessible explanation of the historical context of the conflict (until 1979, that's when the main narrative of the book starts). I would probably recommend this first chapter to anyone interested in how this whole thing started.
The Umbrella Academy
On a much lighter note, this week I started watching The Umbrella Academy, that seems to be the new Netflix show everyone must talk about. But I got to say: if this is indeed the new mandatory subject of small talk conversation, at least I liked it a lot (I think it's undoubtedly better than Bird Box, 13 Reasons Why, and controversial opinion Stranger Things). I don't remember the last time I watched a pilot that set the ground for at least three seasons that you want to watch immediately.
And that's all for this week. See you next week, if this newsletter thing doesn't end up in the crammed drawer of abandoned ideas.