The Swyx Mixtape

Ed Sheeran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpMNJbt3QDECharlie Puth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU8BEMi8UyM

Source: https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/02/16-18-poetry-and-the-fantastic/“The first words that are read by seekers of enlightenment in the secret, gong-banging, yeti-haunted valleys near the hub of the world, are when they look into The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised.The first question they ask is: 'Why was he eternally surprised?'And they are told: 'Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.'The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Ankh-Morpork were: 'Rooms For Rent, Very Reasonable.' And he was glad of it.”― Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time

Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/05/21/999062490/policygenius-jennifer-fitzgerald

Audio source: https://share.transistor.fm/s/63fb35d1NotesInterviewing People Good Writing = Engine + Drag + LiftEngine: The core idea. "Why am I here in the first place?"Drag: Writing problems, eg jargon,  run-on sentencesLift: Stylistic points — jokes, fun tone, deep insight"Trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work""Write pieces that put their finger on things that people have been thinking a lot, but don't have the words for"hit on timely topics, but have something to say that is new and interesting"you almost need to have your finger on the pulse of what people are publishing... but once you start doing that, once you start like looking at what everyone else is doing, like you, you lose whatever that is that can get people interested in what you're doing, because you're no longer original."Reading things that other people aren't necessarily readingTranscriptDan Shipper: I think especially when you're starting out, the thing to do is just make good stuff, especially in media, because that's, the idea is if you write something really good, it's going to spread. So another thing that we've done.[00:00:09] Over time is the model that I started with super organizers, which is interviewing people. So when you do an interview with someone and you write it up and you do a good job and they like it, they share it with their audience. So if you can write really good interviews and get people who have successfully more and more followers, every time you publish.[00:00:25] You, you get exposed to their audience and you can recruit their audience to be your audience. And then that means you can get someone even more famous next time. It doesn't fully work exactly like that all the time. Like sometimes the fans, people don't share it. Honestly, you have to mix in people who are not famous.[00:00:38] Cause sometimes famous people are just, aren't very good interviews. Have these bits that they just give you, but they given it to a hundred people before. So it's feels like raw other things that we've done right now. Something that we're experimenting with is just like during cross-promote with other newsletters, we have someone who's doing growth with us and he's just setting up different cost promos with newsletters that, that we're a fan of.[00:00:59]And that has been actually fairly successful so far. But yeah, I think we're just at the very earliest stages of figuring out like how to grow beyond. Yeah. Just writing stuff that, that people really like. [00:01:10] Nathan Baschez: Yeah. And I think all the other stuff depends on that first core layer of just the writing being really good.[00:01:17] So it's like we focus way more time on editing pieces and like figuring out what makes a good piece on that kind of stuff. Then we do. Doing cross promo or whatever else, we're just now starting to do some cross promo, but it's like the cross promo wouldn't work. If the pieces weren't that good.[00:01:30] And if the pieces are good, you don't need cross promo that bad. Cause people just share it on Twitter. So it's like really the higher order bit is just editorial focus, basically. [00:01:39] Courtland Allen: Yeah. There's nothing more shareable than basically articles online. We've got a URL. Every single social network is formatted to allow you to share links and blow it up into the cool little expanded version with a picture and stuff.[00:01:48]If you write good content, people will share it. What have you learned?  [00:01:52] Nathan Baschez: Writing good content. We're developing some like frameworks around this one is engine drag and lift. So three interesting things. Lift is a new one that Rachel Jepson, our executive editor came up with that. I love, but so the engine of the piece is like the core idea of like, why am I here in the first place?[00:02:08]It's just oh you're going to if you're here, it's oh, you're going to learn how to start a new media company. Or at least how these people did it. And. Whatever, like you're going to learn a bunch of like random other bits about this kind of world along the way. Like maybe co-founder relationships, whatever.[00:02:20] That's like the engine of this podcast interview that we're doing drag is like, Okay. Maybe you have a really strong engine, but just the way you wrote it, like the sentences don't make sense. They're not they don't logically flow from each other. You start to feel lost, and so I think about it like a car.[00:02:35] This is funny. This is before I got into formula, now that I'm into formula one, I'm like way into this analogy. But it's if you have a car that has really terrible aerodynamics, no matter how strong the engine is, people are going to fall off, but. It's really hard as an editor to fix an engine.[00:02:48] That's just not there. Like sometimes the engine is just weak or oh, it only appeals to a really tiny subset of people. And it's this is very specific. Like maybe you might want to make it a little bit more broad or something like that, but you know, the engine is like the core reason why you're there.[00:03:01] The drag is like anything in the way that it's written, that gets in the way of accessing the power of that engine. And then Lyft is just funny little things like. Or jokes or tone that kind of keep you sticking around. It's like when someone makes you chuckle in the middle of writing or someone just points out something that's really insightful.[00:03:17] Even if it's besides the point of the engine, you're just re-upped for another, like two minutes, at least of reading, cause like something good may be around the corner. And so that little lift, those little nice those kinds of help too. But yeah, I don't know that's like our overall framework.[00:03:30]Dan. You've got a lot of other stuff on this too though. Yeah. I mean, I [00:03:33] Dan Shipper: think that there's a lot of things within that. What makes a good engine and also like, how do you get the best out of writers? So like one, one lesson that we keep learning over and over again is like writers.[00:03:42] The best pieces are written by writers who care about those pieces and wanna write. Yeah. And trying to make a writer do something that they don't want to do is like not going to really work. So it's like a lot of the best pieces come from writers digging into their own with soul on what they're interested in.[00:03:56] If they're interested in it, then it would probably do well for people who are like them. And so, or interested in the same things as they are. And so that's reflected in our model like Nathan and I don't go to writers and be like, Hey, you should write about this week. Like we're like each publication inside of.[00:04:13] Yeah. Each newsletter is its own publication with its own writer who has the voice and vision of the newsletter. And is the one who has the finger on the pulse of the audience and gets to say this is what I'm into. And this is where I want to lead the audience, within certain bounds obviously.[00:04:26] And our job is to help them do that better, to bring that out and bring more of them out into their pieces rather than being th...

Audio source: https://www.brainspodcast.com/episode/internet-creators-2JulianResearch top ranked posts of all time (HN Algolia, Twitter like filters, Indiehackers top posts) and find the patternsThreads are useful because they show "meat" - "proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages"Julian's post on Content Marketing: Novelty and UsefulnessCategories of novelty:Counterintuitive — "I had no idea" or "I would have never thought that's how the world worked".Elegant sentence — "It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head."Shock and awe — "holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened. Thanks for sharing that news." Actionable: "Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do". "Here are the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward." "Actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well."Aella"Aella has all these polls on Twitter and they're almost always asking people like these super controversial things.""What I did is I went through all of the polls. I've been doing polls for like pretty steadily for about three years. I have around 1500 and I put them all on a spreadsheet. And then I sorted them all by like the amounts of likes and retweets. And like, I weighted them differently. And then I sorted it by ones that are most divisive. So like the answers tend to be like roughly 50, 50. And then I selected from there in different categories. And I had people like vote on them. So Twitter is a proving grounds."https://www.askhole.io/Sam"I know how to use the written word to get people to do what I want them to do."Copywork"the best way to get good is I found people who I admired and who were best in their field. And then I would write their workout by hand." "So for example, there was a handful of long-form copywriters that are considered the best. And I spent six months writing it out by hand copying each of their ads." "Then I wanted to learn a little bit about writing, uh, like books. So I took JD Salinger's book and I wrote that up by hand.""if you want to learn how to become a good script writer for like comedy, for movies, you to go and find a Judd Apatow script or Woody Allen script and write it up by hand""I see the commonalities between all these cause I've been copying them. Now I know how to put my texture on this because I've learned the combination of what the people I like do. And I'm gonna make a little bit of my own, add my own flair to that.""You actually have to feel the rhythm like a great writer. You can have one short sentence and then a really long sentence and you can feel these rhythms by writing it up by hand. And it's because when you write it out by hand, it forces you to acknowledge every single syllable, every single comma, every single period."Three step process: Copy, Internalize, and Make It Your Own.Transcriptswyx: Usually the topics are a little bit unpredictable on the show. So I'm going to try something a little different this week. This week, we're going to focus on writing how to write better, how to write more engaging, uh, and get more readers. So the first feature today is Julian Shapiro. Julian, very interesting system as a creator from writing Twitter threads that convert into his blog posts and from his blog posts converting into email subscribers.[00:00:28] Julian Shapiro: So this gets us to the topic of how do you optimize for growing as quickly as possible on these channels? The way I start is I think, how do I get my hands on all of the top ranked posts of all time? And then if I can see what those are, can I then find the patterns?[00:00:43] So they're really, the only trick here is find a tool that lets you measure or lets you identify. All of those top ranked posts. So for hacker news, you can use, Algolia like the search feature. And then for Twitter, you can actually use tweet, deck tweet, deck dot, twitter.com. And you can rank things essentially, but you can filter the middle east by how many likes do they have?[00:01:03] So if I filter by 10,000 likes or more, I start looking for the patterns among these high-performing pieces. Content. [00:01:09] Courtland Allen: Do you, nobody does this because like on hack, like on any hackers on like, I literally on the homepage, I'm like, here are the best posts of all time. Here are the best posts every month.[00:01:17] You're the best post every week. And I'm hoping people will go back and look at the best posts and make more posts like that because I want them to, and they never do. They just make kind of crappy posts and they complain like, why is nobody liking my posts? I'm like, the answers are literally right in front of you.[00:01:31] Like, it could not make it easy, easier to find what works. Right. Right. Okay. So we were talking about Twitter earlier. What are you seeing that works well? [00:01:39] Julian Shapiro: So you want to tweet threads for the most part, if you're trying to get retweets and retweets are what bring followers. And so the reason threads are useful is because it shows so much meat.[00:01:50] It's like, here's all this content. It's not just a single tweet. It's a bunch of glued together, which proves that you can sustain how interesting you are across multiple messages. So you're a de-risked person to follow. You can keep giving people the goods and when you're tweeting threads or tweeting single tweets, usually you want to think.[00:02:09] A two-part framework that I write about on my website, which is novelty and actionable. So novelty means you're sharing something new that wouldn't have been easy to figure out on your own and it makes you think, wow. So there's a few categories of novelty. One is counterintuitive like, oh, I had no idea or I would have never thought that's how the world worked.[00:02:29] Another category of novelty would be elegant sentence. It's where you capture something, people know, but you say it so beautifully. They think I couldn't have said that better. Or you took the words right out of my head. Right. And the last category is shock and awe it's like, holy crap. I cannot believe that just happened.[00:02:47] Thanks for sharing that news. And then actionable is this thing you tack on at the end, where it's like, Hey, now that you know this novel piece of information, here's what you can do, right. Here, like the steps, here's how this would now affect how you navigate the world going forward. So actionable and novel in like a thread form tends to perform exceptionally well.[00:03:08] Courtland Allen: have you seen Aella's account? Like as far as I can tell, you're just asking like the most controversial, provocative questions and polls you possibly can that no one else would do because we're all afraid of getting canceled. [00:03...

Slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1GQjhDBiQ4raGcn4M7eXXuoJ_9VOGSgpd3RcIQ2dyXJ4/edit?usp=sharingVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2X-RsCVRasTimestamps[00:00:00] Prepared presentation on Coding Careers[00:21:46] If you've worked with junior developers, what's the biggest mistake you see them making and how would you go about solving it if you were in their shoes?[00:24:03] What should be the aim when job hunting big companies or startups?[00:26:06] Can you expand more on the differences between being a junior software engineer in finance Two Sigma versus tech?[00:26:43] If you don't have contacts, do you have any advice in terms of contacting real people or companies to show yourself in the best light possible?[00:28:31] How easy or hard is it to change your field?[00:29:52] What do you think about product management and how would the graduate set of career path aim towards that?[00:33:13] What's the best or correct way of approaching a recruiter slash employee to get a referral?[00:34:28] When hiring someone and looking at OSS contributions, how would you rate it from very different projects are more well-known? [00:36:29] What's the benefit of a random employee spending the time on you for referral or talk about their job? I feel like it's one sided for the student.[00:37:44] How do you ask developers for conversations about their job or guidance?[00:38:45] how do I approach about the referral at the end of the conversation though? [00:39:52] do you prepare for data structure and algorithms for job interviews? Is there a fun way for that? Transcriptswyx: I can just get going with my prepared slides. It's going to take me like half an hour ish and then we can do half an hour of questions. Does that sound good? And then, yeah, just like, feel free to pause me if there's any technical difficulties or anything.[00:00:13]This is something that I never thought I would. Write about or specializing. It essentially was an R com of my blogging and like people really responding to some of this stuff that I've written for them.[00:00:25]And it's essentially like the meta code stuff around code. Yeah. You've learned as you go along, that nobody teaches you. Like w when you tend to think about coding careers, like your career as a software developer as just about code, when really like it's maybe 25% about code. And there's a lot of other stuff around that.[00:00:44] So this is what I ended up doing in between jobs. Like I wrote essentially like a list of essays that became a book. And that's the whole idea. And I was invited to it. To do a talk with you guys about it. So I'm going to share what I have right now. And I'd love to go into further detail because there's just too much to go into it with you in 30 minutes.[00:01:00]So I'm, Swyx I also go by Shawn. I used to use to have a career in finance change careers in 2017, did a boot camp instead of like a proper season.  When did you to Sigma? Netlify and now I just recently joined AWS. And we already talked about the other stuff. One of the, I guess, one of my other roles, if you're into front end development at all is that I may react R slash react or Jess subreddit moderator.[00:01:24] And I think we're about to hit 200,000 subscribers tomorrow. So that's pretty exciting as well. So. What, this is what this attempt is. I just want to situate them this among the other advice that the other books that you've heard about as seen a lot of books are very sort of pointed point in time solutions, essentially like their target, like learn to code or.[00:01:43] Crack the coding interview or like, solve the algorithm design or like, do you do a great resume or, write about clean. And so these are like just very point in time solutions, but they don't really help you with the transition steps. And so what I essentially tried to do with this book was essentially layout things which Principles, which are basically like always on default decisions, strategies, which are like, which helped to help you decide.[00:02:09] And based on one-off big uncertain irreversible decisions and in tactics, which are things that you use frequently throughout your career. So that's the way that we're gonna break it. And and yeah, so, so basically like there's four parts to what we so how do I, how I break it down.[00:02:23] And the first is the career guide. And one of my obsessions is the OSI layer. I think if you're doing a lot of tech interviewing, I think that's one of the first models that used to be. Come across from essentially like the network layer, I'll be out to applications.[00:02:36] And I don't remember what the other five layers, but I was always thinking like, what if there's an OSI layer for humans as well? So instead of just protocols and and data, we can also talk about how humans form a chain of value from machines all the way to end users. So we have here the entire universe of coding careers going from, I guess, people who work the closest with hardware.[00:02:57]Operating system devs or embedded or IOT devs all the way up to people who don't actually code technically traditionally, if you think about that, they're they might be considered no-code low-code they might micro settings, which have some sort of conditional logic, whatever.[00:03:12] Yeah. These are, that's the mental framework. Most of us developers are actually, we're going to live around here between applications for the front end and services for the backend. If you are, if you aspire to be more of a, like an infrastructure cloud person, you might work in the lower layer on the product and the sort of platform level.[00:03:27]And that's how I split things. You may have a different split. It's good to have a mental model because the way that you interview or a plan your career for each of these levels is very different from each other. So I think that's an also interesting mental model to have when you approach these things.[00:03:41]Next this is more about the job jobs searching thing. Quite frankly, if since all of you are in the MLH fellowship I don't think this applies to you at all because you're going to sail through your job hunting task. But I think I recommend this book was from  where he talks about like the mathematics of job hunting and it's essentially the same.[00:04:00] As the birthday problem where you don't actually need 365 people in the room to have a good chance of two people having the same birthday you actually need. Cause because the probabilities compound same reason, same reasoning for applications. And because you only need a one job offer out of all the applications that you send out.[00:04:18] So that's kind of job hunting advice. Well, I know it's very simple numbers matter. Right. The other thing I think to think about when it comes to, when it comes to job hunting, especially for new grads and people who are just like, getting their first experiences without a network is that you can choose a wide range of strategies between narrow and I guess, wide.

Sources:Masked Singer Monster all Performances & Reveal | Season 1T-Pain: NPR Music Tiny Desk ConcertT-Pain - Mashup (To The Beat with Kurt Hugo Schneider)T-Pain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-Pain

Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/intelligence-squared/the-sunday-debate-brave-new-usI2DpLUHQ0/ (10 mins in)Full debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZwPart 1 here: https://swyx.transistor.fm/episodes/1984-vs-brave-new-world-pt-1-intelligence-squared

Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/intelligence-squared/the-sunday-debate-brave-new-usI2DpLUHQ0/ (55 mins in)Full debate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31CcclqEiZwPart 2 is next: https://swyx.transistor.fm/episodes/1984-vs-brave-new-world-pt-2-intelligence-squaredLoki vs 1984: https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1419128271799656449Aldous Huxley's comments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldous_Huxley

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tffX3VljTtI (11 mins in)Warren Spector's 6 + 2 + 1:What's the core idea?Why do this game? Commercial hit? No choice?What are the dev challenges? Hard is ok, impossible not goodIs this idea well-suited to games? Games are about DOING, not BEINGWhat's the fantasy? If no fantasy, bad ideaWhat are the verbs? Games are about DoingHas anyone done this before? If no - could be a bad idea, or good, just be carefulWhat's the ONE thing? ONE new thing that hasn't been done beforeDo you have something to say? An issue/theme to explore