Oversimplified: Volume 134

Life as a solo developer, growth experimentation, and reverse job postings

Hey there 👋

Oversimplified is a digest of the best links I stumble upon each week, and any new posts from me. If this is your first issue, welcome! You can subscribe with the big blue button below:

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📚 One Year as a Solo Dev

I enjoyed this entertaining and candid review of working on open-source projects without funding. Sprinkles of both success and reality checks: “I decided to see how far I could get building an app I've wanted for years as a manager. Over the last 12 months, I've garnered over 4,000 Github stars across 4 tools, 6 libraries, and 5 benchmark repos.”

📚 Growth Engineering at Airtable

The format of this interview is a good one, and Wendy Lu’s answers are equally good. I particularly enjoyed her distinction between growth and product teams, and her approach to experimentation at B2B startups where sample size is limited.

📚 Examining the Data Consumer

It seems Tristan and dbt constantly churn out interesting content. The term “data consumer” never felt quite right to me, but I couldn’t put my finger clearly on why. This post guides that finger to a persuasive place.

📚 One Sentence per Line

Short and sweet: “Try writing one sentence per line. Not publishing one sentence per line, no. Write like this for your eyes only. Then combine them."

🔗 Reverse Job Postings

This idea from Andy Pressman is really cool. If you’re in the job market, get inspired and give it a try. Things like “What I’m looking for” and “Nice to haves” tend to be more implicit in hiring processes than they should. This could help.

🔗 Bionic Reading

Does this really work? I don’t know. But I haven’t seen it before elsewhere, and who knows, maybe it does. I plan on taking it for a spin sometime soon.

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Food for Thought

At every moment, I have access to some form of stimuli — something to read, something to see, something to listen to, etc. I can always defer solitude. I need never resort to keeping myself company. I fall out of the habit of thought. In this way, perhaps, I have unwittingly invited a certain form of loneliness that is engendered rather than dispelled by mere connection. From this perspective, rising rates of loneliness may reflect not only the inability to bond with others but the fact that we have become strangers to ourselves. — Trading Solitude for Loneliness

Until next time

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Until next time,

Conor