Newsletter - Contrarian Thinking https://contrarianthinking.co/

Podcast - Open Source Startup Podcast https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ossstartuppodcast

Most of the time it's a combination of reviews, awards, and recommendations that give the book some social value before I trust it. Sometimes, I'll like an author and buy whatever they write. Other times, I'll see a subject I know nothing about that will spike my curiosity and I'll read the book, whether it sucks or not because I still learn something I didn't know before.

One idea is to moderate the intensity of your weekend activities and keep track of metrics. A few things to measure might be how much sleep, what you're eating, what you're drinking, and the duration of the activity. e.g. What if you prioritized more sleep before partying and/or leaving the party earlier (vary the times) to see what effect that had. Another might be to keep track of what you're drinking such as water, beer, or whiskey and vary that to see how it affects you. BTW, being well hydrated (water) is always good. Another thing to keep in mind is priorities in how you balance your life and how you will feel 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years down the road for the success/failure of your startup based on how you managed your time/activities during that journey. Also, what effect will that have on the commitments you've made and the people who believe, rely on, and are rooting for you.

OpenStax has some free Physics text books: https://openstax.org/

Running that query "whats best website for deploying a decentralized site", I observed the web sites that it was referencing. There are a couple of ideas here:

1. One of the sites was dev.to, meaning that is one of the sites that it is crawling. You could write an article there, linking back to your site for more info. Just make sure the article is substantive in case they have an intelligent quality filter. Also, announce the article in social media and in your own circles to bring traffic, which might make it easier for the crawler to find, rather than pass over an article that's at the bottom of the stack because of less interest. Do this for any other sites that show up as references and let you post, though you should write unique articles because you don't want to spam the crawler.

2. Look for any sites that might have link lists. This might be old school, but when everyone was doing their own web sites, we had categorized link lists for related sites. Swapping links was good for everyone's traffic and good for the community.

Also, you might want to put an allow in your robots.txt to ensure you're explicitly inviting the crawler. Here's the details on ChatGPT, though you can learn more about other LLMs by visiting their site:

https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

Essentially, do the research to find sites that are being crawled and try to figure out how to build paths for the crawler to find you in the link graph.

They're currently rolling out Grok, which is the Xai LLM. It's just getting started and might have weaknesses compared to other LLMs out there today. It does have a "Fun Mode" with a different communication style.

There are probably different interpretations of what "culture" means to different people. From a perspective of how people interact to the work done, I (listen for) ask questions about their process, like this:

1. What type of development process do you use. e.g. agile, interative, or waterfall?

Some shops don't have processes at all, which is often a red flag. Be prepared to dig in a little. e.g. if they're agile, you might want to ask if they're Scrum or Kanban, have a backlog, sprints, standups. A lot of places say they do standups, but not much else. If they have a process that they think is working, they're often proud to discuss it.

2. Do you do unit testing?

There are various approaches and you might be able to dig in to find out if they do BDD, TDD, or afterwards. If they don't, it could indicate design issues from non-testable code, strong coupling, hard to find bugs.

3. What are your code reviews like?

Code reviews (properly done) can be a great way to help other people on the team, share info, and generally improve the quality of the code. Lack of code reviews, is a possible red flag that people aren't helping each other on the team and building a common team standard.

4. How good are application requirements and how are they communicated to me?

This could be good or bad, depending on how you look at it. It might be telling if you feel a negative vibe out of the response. That said, it's rare to have developers comfortable with a certain level of ambiguity. It's mostly a data point to see how the interviewers react to an often-contentious subject and gauging how you feel about the response.

Also, be prepared to discuss your experience in any area you bring up because it's common for an interviewer to aim the question back at you.

Maybe reach out to a recruiter or two that might be able to find something. She seems to have a good idea of what she wants, which would be helpful. She might want to avoid the larger firms or ones that are out of country because they're mostly interested in numbers. Smaller local firms and individuals often care about meeting people and finding a good fit.

It's a tough market for developers right now. One of things he can do is to peruse job boards, like Indeed, to get a feel for what types of jobs companies are hiring for right now. Another thing is to reach out to recruiting firms to see what type of jobs they're recruiting for too and get any tips on how to prepare.

Also, if that's his dream - he shouldn't give up because today's programming positions are sparse. It could change dramatically in some amount of time. In the past, there have even been weirder anomalies in the market where programmer jobs were plentiful, while other jobs were sparse. The silver lining might be that by identifying where his passion is, he'll have time to be more prepared when the market is ready for him.