Tuesday Letter #9 - Web Design, Software Engineering, AI and Habit Tracking
Hi all, Happy Tuesday!
I hope all is good in your life, and you are not depressing through the quarantine. What are some ways you entertain yourself during the week?
I hope you enjoy this week's "Tuesday Letter" :)
📜 Quote of the week
What would you do if there were no way you could fail? If you were 10 times smarter than the rest of the world? Create two timelines—6 months and 12 months—and list up to five things you dream of having (including, but not limited to, material wants: house, car, clothing, etc.), being (be a great cook, be fluent in Chinese, etc.), and doing (visiting Thailand, tracing your roots overseas, racing ostriches, etc.) in that order.
First, let’s focus on those critical first steps. Define three steps for each dream that will get you closer to its actualization. Set actions—simple, well-defined actions—for now, tomorrow (complete before 11 A.M.) and the day after (again completed before 11 A.M.)
This is a classic. I'm pretty sure I've quoted it before. I got these quotes in my Readwise email this week. They were so crucial to shaking me up and getting myself back in the game. I found that making lists, as Tim mentioned in the book, is very motivational for me. I have been very unproductive and down recently. Making a few simple lists of things I want gave me a good motivation to continue working and, more importantly, prioritizing the work I do.
I think I am starting to understand one more thing that kept me down over the last few weeks—that thing is habit tracking. Any of you had a feeling you are tired of keeping up with those things? It is not 100% confirmed, but I think without those, life is much simpler. I have removed all time and habit trackers from my life for some time and want to see how this goes. I will surely report back to you on how this experiment went. For now, I will focus on doing things that feel right at the moment.
🛠️ Personal Projects
Thanks to Cory Zue, I was finally able to implement Stripe payments on my website. Not only does that mean I can finally accept payments in my projects. That also means that I have increased my understanding of Django, Javascript, and how they interact with each other.
Furthermore, I finally got a grasp on how Webpack works. This was hard and confusing, but I managed to do this. I will be writing a post on how to implement Django, Tailwind, Stimulusjs (or Vue), using webpack. Hopefully, people will find this useful.
🖼️ Web Design & Software Engineering
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Web Design Museum - Discover Forgotten Trends in Web Design. This Web Design Museum exhibits over 1,600 carefully selected and sorted web sites that show web design trends between the years 1991 and 2006. It is a highly educational site, providing you with great design examples. It also shows how design involves. You don't need to have a perfect design from the beginning. You can evolve.
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published a video on "How to get a job as a Python developer in 2020". Below are my notes:
- Writing and Communication
- Spell and grammar check your resume (sounds silly, but crucial)
- Join local language groups to improve spoken word
- For a video interview, make sure there is no background noise
- If you offered to reschedule because of an issue like that, take them up on that offer
- Look presentable on video interview
- Make sure background is presentable
- Public Persona
- Sometimes employers look at social profiles
- Quality of Code
- PEP8 Compliant code
Use tools like black and pylint to make it easier to adhere to the standard
- Make sure your code is secure \
- Things like fields = "all" in Django is not good
- You want to display the history of code by using commits
- There needs to be many of them; otherwise it may seem as code is not yours
- Messages need to be at least half-decent
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remotefit - Find a remote job with a great culture fit. There is a simple quiz on the main page that will help you find a perfect company for you.
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This code snippet saved me a lot of time. If you think you have an Nginx error, run this:
sudo nginx -t -c /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
😁️ Person of the Week
I've been following Cory Zue's work for some time now. I discovered him as one of the first Django developers on the indiehackers community. He currently writes about Django and runs the following products:
- SaaS Pegasus - Django SaaS Template
- Place Card Me - The best way to make printable place cards online
- Chat Stats - Explore the data behind your favorite group chats
His work is very inspiring and motivating. Also, Cory is very kind and helpful. I reached out to him for some help with his Stripe guide, and he agreed to do a quick phone call to help me resolve my issues. We ended up solving all the problems. I am very grateful for his help and for people like Cory.
🐔 Tweet of the week
https://twitter.com/sharifshameem/status/1284095222939451393
GPT-3 made the rounds this week. This example is freaking incredible. This is astonishing and scary at the same time. This might mean that computers will be able to write apps in the future. And that future might not be that far. Still, I think it is more amazing than scary. The level of advancement that OpenAI achieved is incredible.