Week 50, 2019
Welcome to the first weekly issue of this newsletter. I couldn’t find a name for it yet, feel free to share your suggestions!
My pick for this week is the latest essay from Paul Graham. I feel like I’ve always been aligned with PG’s idea about school: you don’t need to focus on passing the tests, you need to focus on learning. This got me in trouble with my parents during high school but I believe it helped me a ton as I’ve started learning about programming at that time, without having the pressure to do so from school.
Entrepreneurship
Some people want to build side projects and say they lack ideas. Anne-Laure Le Cunff wrote 101 ideas of businesses that gives you no choice but to get started on these ideas.
Remote working
The General Catalyst VC firm wrote an article about the best practices and the challenges of remote working. With examples from Stripe, Gusto and GitLab, this article is true to the reality of remote working that I see: huge benefits and a couple of constraints to tackle. I enjoyed reading the points of view of these companies on splitting their team between co-located and remote teams.
The previous article contains a link to the GitLab’s handbook. It’s a massive resource on how GitLab operates. I peeked into this and was surprised to find that they livestream a lot of their meetings on their Youtube channel. I loved that they suggest to not send one message containing only greetings (like “hey” or “hello”) when you only have a quick question to ask. This is a good tip to limit distraction, and it’s only a small part of this handbook. Let me know if you learned anything interesting from it!
What I’ve been up to
My latest side-project is to solve all of the Advent of Code 2019 puzzles in javascript, and I’m uploading my solution walkthroughs on youtube.