Alex's Notes

A term of art describing a non-developer that takes the initiative to solve a business problem, often hacking together a set of tools to make it work.

A category of products and tools that enable users to create things that previously required developers to do.

An exponential plot where the 80% of Y comes from 20% of X.

Venture capitalists and institutional investors need big returns and therefore they fund companies pursuing a big market (investor returns follow a power law).

This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note The Gervais Principle There are three groups of people within an organization: Sociopaths (tend to be at the top running the company, characterized by self-interest and need to control), Clueless (tend to be middle management, characterized by misplaced loyalty to the organization), and Losers (tend to be at the bottom, characterized by striking a bad economic bargain).

A theory of management in which employees in a company are promoted until they are at a level of incompetence.

A compilation target for executing in a virtual machine supported by web browsers and servers (via tools like wasmtime).

There are three groups of people within an organization: Sociopaths (tend to be at the top running the company, characterized by self-interest and need to control), Clueless (tend to be middle management, characterized by misplaced loyalty to the organization), and Losers (tend to be at the bottom, characterized by striking a bad economic bargain).

Building a business of any size takes substantial effort and is stressful.

At it’s heart, a company is a way of abstracting IP (the things or process of what you create), capital (investment, contributions, bank accounts), liability (separation from owners and employees), and ownership (how much does each person own on what terms).

The way TypeScript adds incidental complexity to using libraries undermines the two most important values of using TypeScript and JavaScript.

Inter-operating with libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem from TypeScript introduces incidental complexity due to packaging and types.

A role at a VC firm where you get paid to work on your next startup and help vet deals or give advice to portfolio companies.

Below is a list of tools for networked thought I’ve come across:

In traditional media, writers write and readers read. On the internet, publishing is nearly free and readers can easily respond in comments, forums, blogs, and so on.

In Shape of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut discusses story arcs as peaks and valleys from good to bad.

A lecture from Kurt Vonnegut about how to analyze and critique fictional stories.

This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note We Don’t Know What the Good News Is and What the Bad News Is In Shape of Stories, Kurt Vonnegut discusses story arcs as peaks and valleys from good to bad.

Good magic just works. It’s invisible and you quickly forget that it’s there.

The airplane test measures the (often binary) ability to write code in a specified programming language while secluded on an airplane with no internet access.

Modern websites rely on strict hierarchy of pages to help users navigate.

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You can run queries directly on the org-roam database (it’s just a sqlite database) to get interesting stats about your Zettelkasten.

The majority of websites of the ‘old web’ (1990’s) were hand crafted, highly customized places where creators acted more as librarians—carefully maintaining a table of contents and some evergreen content.

I’ve now written 500 notes and roughly 84,000 words since May 25, 2020 in my Zettelkasten.

Due to the consumerist nature of the modern web, we expect a perpetual stream of activity from web content.

Adding dates to content like a blog post provides value when the content can best be understood by the relationship with when the content was created.

Streams are a metaphor for the majority of the Internet we interact with today characterized by time-ordered events that require context to understand.

Since I started publishing my Zettelkasten notes, I’ve noticed a large change in overall search engine traffic.

Digital gardening is a superset of Zettelkasten principles applied to public content.

Examples of digital gardens I’ve come across: Maggie Appleton’s digital garden Tom Critchlow’s digital garden Neil Mather’s digital garden Links to this note The Garden and the Stream Streams are a metaphor for the majority of the Internet we interact with today characterized by time-ordered events that require context to understand.

This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note Digital Gardening Is a Grander Vision of Zettelkasten Digital gardening is a superset of Zettelkasten principles applied to public content.

You can achieve better compression ratios resulting in significantly smaller file sizes by pre-compressing files as part of the deployment process.

Brotli is a compression algorithm developed by Google that is supported by all modern browsers.

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