Tuesday Letter #21 - Custom Magazines, Reading Guides and Side Projects
Hey, Happy Tuesday!
I’m back! I haven’t sent a letter since the end of October, which is 41 days. I hope to never have such a long break from sharing with you :)
Since my last letter, a few people have joined. Thank you to all those who are still here and to all those who joined me. I hope you enjoy this letter.
📜 Quote of the week
Be awesome to your customers and good things follow.
I wrote about this recently. You can get almost anything you want in life by being nice.
💡 Project Idea
A Custom Magazine with Saved Articles. Some people hoard articles in their Pocket or Instapaper. Imagine receiving a personalized magazine with the articles you have saved. The execution should not be too hard. All you have to do is to get a list of articles from users’ accounts, parse the text, and put it onto a pdf. That’s the technical part. The hardest part is finding a reasonable printing company that will do the printing and shipping for good prices.
I can’t work on this now, but would love to have something like this show up in my mailbox.
What do you think about this idea?
📚 The World of Reading
📰 Increment is a print and digital magazine about how teams build and operate software systems at scale. Beautiful and relevant to developers.
In the spirit of the Project Idea I talked about above, this journal receives many stars from me. The stars are for the appeal of course. The website and the magazine itself are well designed. The content is relevant for developers. I haven’t read any of the issues, unfortunately, so can’t comment on the content.
📝 How I read books: a guide on how to learn and the convo on HN
Instead of reading 100 books, it’s better to find one that really changes your life. That’s why I made the decision to be very particular about which books I’m reading, but once I pick one, I want to learn as much as possible from it.
I identify with this thought. Some people have a goal of reading 100s of books per year. Usually, this goal can be associated with people who are having trouble with reading. People who read a lot on the other hand often focus on quality vs. quantity. In fact, once such a person finds a quality book, he is likely to read twice, instead of looking for another book. The search for quality books is the reason behind sites like Read This Twice. The best way to search for good books is by going though the “Work Cited” section of the books you loved.
If we spend time reading a book and forgetting the concepts, that’s time wasted.
This makes me think about all those wonderful books I’ve read and forgot 99% of it. Sad. This is a powerful comment for people who read often. Once you realize the power you get from taking notes, you’ll do it all the time.
People who are on their journey to become voracious readers are in danger. When I was starting out with non-fiction literature, if someone told me that I also have to take note, it would deter me from reading a bit.
- If you are looking for short (less than 150 pages) and impactful reads, check out the responses to the tweet below. A lot of good suggestions there. I suggested “Economical Writing” by Deirdre McCloskey and “The Lessons of History” by Ariel & Will Durant.
What’s the best book you’ve read that’s 150 pages or shorter?
😁️ Person of the Week
Karlicoss - maybe Dima Gerasimov
This person is a character. He has an awesome website, where he shares a lot of programming thoughts, mostly Python. He has a lot of cool ideas about the software he would love to be created. He has a cool Exobrain / Digital Garden page where he shares a lot of his notes and parts of his brain.
🐔 Tweet of the week
My little side-project is now making around $2500/mo MRR 💵. Here’s: - what I learned - what went well - what didn’t go well …plus some bits of advice if you want to launch your own paid product. (thread) 👇 /cc @IndieHackers @levelsio @csallen @patio11
Stories like these are so inspirational. The coolest thing is that there will be so many similar stories in a few years. People are starting to realize that it is possible to earn a side income with small projects. People reading this newsletter are aware of this. So, the big lesson for all us is to start. The path won’t be easy but time will sort everything out.