Weekly Review, 2021-01-03

Weekly reviews are where I aggregate the best of my week. I often highlight my own writing along with links to articles, podcasts, and books.

Table Of Contents

Open Source Coaching

Since this tweet, I've done a lot of thinking about [[open source coaching]]. I've convinced myself it is a great idea and something I want to start working on. In my last year of work, I've found two key components to a great learning environment

  • trust
  • high context
    • In this case, I mean a relationship where both people share a deep understanding of the same subject or project

Trust and high context create an endless flow of ideas and feedback at all stages of creation and work.

Open source projects are unique because of the easy availability of high context with many great engineers. Anyone is free to build their own understanding of the project that already has a group of great engineers who created and/or maintain it.

This means all they are missing is trust. There are many things holding people back from contributing to open source, but lack of trust plays a big part. They feel they aren't good enough or they don't know where to start or who to ask for help.

These limitations are a shame. They hinder the projects and the individuals.

[[open source coaching]] could help by providing a framework and community for the engineers held back by those limitations. With the right environment, open source projects can become a public training ground for engineers to collaborate on tools we share, while learning new patterns, concepts, and skills that allow more engineers to improve large code projects.

I have a few ideas simmering in my notes on how this could take shape. The best thing I can think to do is to start reaching out to more people to understand their point of view on the situation and if my thoughts line up with reality. I'll have more updates on this in the next few weeks.

Update on [[The Permissionless Apprentice]]

I've finished the course this week.

One of the case studies in the course is [[roamNerd]], which is a great story and very interesting idea for an application.

Jack does an interview with [[Igor Lenterman]] here. It is one of the few interviews I've watched where the visual adds a lot to the experience. Jack live illustrates Igor's timeline as he describes the path that led him to the creation of [[roamNerd]], which ultimately led to the creation of [[AtomicSearch]] - the new company Igor co-founded as a result of the RoamNerd project that raised $1mil in the matter of months.

[[balajis.com]]'s reaction to their initial project is here: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1309378835759026176?s=20

I think it is really unfortunate they decided to go against Balaji's suggestion to keep the project open source. One of the great aspects of the Roam community is all of the open collaboration that is happening in the plugin space and add-on tools. This would have been a great project the roam community would have loved to contribute to.

I think I want to spend some time this week creating a [[pypi]] package that allows you to download and transform your roam data into training data for a custom NER model that can be used on [[pocket]] articles.

Articles of the Week

I was really excited to share this with friends who have received voice memos as part of the [[Voice Memo Experiment]]. I've slowly found more and more benefits from recording audio and this article does a great job of laying out why it is so natural and beneficial.

Along with that, I've started using [[otter.ai]], which is a great app that creates transcriptions for recordings. It is fantastic and has really great initial limits on the free account (10 hours of audio per month, and a 40 minute max length on each recording).

I signed up for David Perrell's 50 days of writing newsletter. Day 15 was Find Your Shiny Dime. In this article. David describes a method for writing an essay: pick a single [[control tower]] the rest of the essay is based around.

Podcast of the Week

Trevor is arguably the best pitcher in the MLB, but that's not why he is so interesting. He takes an innovative approach to a game that is famously hard to change (think [[Moneyball]]) while sharing his life on youtube, working on an athlete driven media company, and building pitches in a lab. He is going to make big waves across the league in how players think about their own skill development and social influence.

Final Thoughts

And just like that 2020 came and went. Like I said last week, I'm working on my first ever annual review. It won't be ready for at least another week, so stay tuned!



My Linked Notes

One last thing

If you liked these notes, hit me on Twitter!