The Swyx Mixtape

5 tips to improve your writing:NoveltyIntrigueStoriesAnalogiesExamplesAudio source: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/196-david-perell (35 mins)

Everything is copied - although Apple didn't copy as much from Xerox as most people say.Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJPERZDfyWc (the full 4 part documentary is an inspiring watch)

dbt is taking the data eng world by storm. this is the best 10 minutes i've heard on it, from Fishtown Analytics cofounder Drew Banin.Fun fact: Fishtown is a town in Philadelphia!Audio source: https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/dbt-data-analytics-episode-81/ (14 mins in)Fivetran CEO geeking out on dbt: https://medium.com/hashmapinc/the-origins-and-future-of-fivetran-with-george-fraser-1af8e7cb90aa (17 mins in)TranscriptTobias Macey: And also, we don't have this version repository of queries and reports and the ability to collaborate on it fairly easily, then you end up leaving everyone to write their own sequel, usually ad hoc, and they might have their own assumptions as to what an order is or what a customer is, or how to structure the query to join across different tables. And so everybody's going to have slightly different views of the data or slightly different outputs. And so definitely having the ability to have one location that everybody can look to. And one interface for everybody to collaborate on makes it much easier and more scalable to have more people working on building and interacting with these Analytics reports and these analytics pipelines.Drew Bannon: Absolutely, I think it's a great point, what we find is that in the process of building up these data models, what you're actually doing is generating knowledge about your organization. And you're saying here's exactly what an order is, or here's exactly how we calculate MRR. And to that end, dbt ships with auto generated documentation about your project, you can run dbt docs generate, to generate this single page app, have all of your models with all the tests on the columns and descriptions that you can populate for these different models. And so if you do have some consumer of the data that isn't using GBT, they have a great place that can go and see all the models that exist and all the columns and your pros about all of it. And so in that way, it's sort of a catalog of all the data that your organization commands and serve instructions for us toTobias Macey: Yeah, and I think that that is definitely very powerful, because particularly having the documentation be generated as part of the code as opposed to something that someone does after the fact or alongside the work that they're doing means that it's much more likely to stay fresh and actually be up David periodically, rather than somebody putting in the time and effort to write some prose once when they first build the overall reporting pipeline. And then it quickly grows stale and useless over time as new modifications are made. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And another interesting capability that dbt has is the idea of packaging, and being able to package up these different subsets or reports or transformations so that they're reusable across different teams and across different code bases. So can you talk a bit about how those packages are set up and implemented, and also maybe talk a bit about who the sort of primary drivers are for the different packages that are currently available? Sure.Drew Bannon: So when dbt runs, it will look in a couple different places for we will call it resources. And so an example of a resource is a model or a test of a model, or things like documentation, snippets, etc. And so one of the places that looks is your models directory, which are the models that you've created, but the other place it looks is a folder called dbt modules, which is sort of note inspired. And so what you can do is just drop whole dbt projects into that dbt modules folder. And they get picked up as though they're a natural part of your project. And all of these resources become available in the compilation context the dbt provides. And so there are basically two types of packages that that are produced. One is data set specific packages, and the other is sort of macro or utility packages. An example of a data set package is something like snowplow. And so we're huge fans of the snowplow event tracking system at Fishtown analytics, the big idea is that you can track events from all your different clients. And they flow directly into a big events table in your warehouse. And so this event table is like an immutable event log, it has the full history of you know, every interaction that you cared about to track in a single table, which is phenomenal. It's a great resource. But the problem is, it's difficult to plug a BI tool right into that, either because it's too much data or because the things you really care about are hard to analyze, like how many people had two different events in a single session. And so what we frequently find ourselves doing is rolling up these events into sessions using some code that was actually originally produced by the snow pub team called their web data model. And so what we can do is we can make a package of these transformations that go from bra events, to page views to sessions, all the way up to users. And then we encode these things as dbt models. And if you include this package into your dbt project, when you take dbt run, these models will automatically run you can also reference them from your own models. So if you want to do marketing attribution on top of session ization, that was provided by the snowplow package, you can absolutely do that. The other broad type of package that we make is maybe more focused on macros. And so the Jinja template engine supports something called macros, which are kind of functions that return text basically, in most cases, texts, we've actually been Kak them. So they return other things, which is pretty wild how we do it. And and so what you can do is if you find yourself writing the same type of code over and over again, what you can do is make a macro that accepts arguments and spits back out, usually the sequel that you need to encode that particular piece of logic. So here's a really good example that shows the full like force of the dbt compilation engine, we wrote a Actually, let me grab it, somebody contributed a pivot macro, that you could point to a table and a specific column. And you can say, pivot out the values into this column using this aggregate function. So you say, look at the Orders table, look at the, you know, have this better example. Look at the products table, look at the products color, and then pivot that pivot that out to like color red color blue color green, with a one if that's true, or zero, if it's not. And so this is probably something that a lot of people have written manually many times over. But when macros and the ability to sort of encapsulate logic plus packages, which is a distribution mechanism, we can write that thing once, and many, many people can benefit from it. So this is one example of a macro that was contributed by member of the dbt community. But really this this dbt utility package that contains the pivot macro has dozens of macros, many of which were contributed by dbt users. And the really cool thing is a lot of these people are in engineers by trade their analysts. And so for a lot of them, it's their first time contributing to an open source repository. And that's a pretty cool experience to be the benefactor of the the code that they wrote.

Audio source: https://www.3books.co/chapters/15 (14 mins in)Tuesdays with Morrie wikipedia entry

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. You can catch Weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4 in the previous weekend episodes. This is the cleaned up audio of the last of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end. Video version: https://youtu.be/emUfFWixQwETimestampsRecap of Last 4 Weeks [00:02:08]Shifting Perception to Sharing [00:03:07]IP's Personal Progress [00:09:38]How to Solve the Cold Start Problem [00:10:57] The Invisible Pipeline and the 1% Rule [00:14:00]Peer Group Progress [00:15:48]Course Recap: Convergence vs Divergence, CO vs DE [00:20:41] Your First Brain vs Your Second Brain [00:22:43] Project Kickoff Checklist [00:24:06]Favorite Quotes [00:25:26] Q&A: Denys on Learning in Public in YouTube [00:32:47] Q&A: Meryl Johnston on Learning in Public [00:43:34] The Resistance and Gratitude Journaling [00:46:04]Don't Just Write Essays: Remove Resistance [00:48:37]Three Strikes Rule [00:52:51]Guy Margalith on Fear and Your Second Brain [00:53:40]Organizing Files on your Mac [01:00:59]Swyx Twitter Journey [01:04:18]Tropical MBA and Balaji Srinivasan [01:09:05] Closing Remarks [01:10:20]Transcriptswyx: [00:00:00] Okay, so we're in week five. I didn't know what to call it. So I just called it finale week. I, at this point I feel like everyone knows each other even.But feel free to say hi, if you're new you're still totally woke up and to jump around and visit the each other's sessions. I'm also going to blast through the housekeeping just because there's not that much more housekeeping left to do. And I will also want it to shout out what I did for last week's.Events which well that's Swyx week app, which was essentially right up my own experience of intermediate packets. And I broke my own journey down into eight intermediate packets. So that's tweet, tweet, livestream, blog posts, conference, conference conference, a job interview. And this took place over the course of a year.So it, it shocked me because even though I went through it, you don't, you never really think about intermediate packets dripping out over a year. And the thing that I really wanted to get across was that I think the way that immediate packets, which was presented last time was very much of a top-down thing.Like I want to do something big, let me work backwards and break it down into intranet, small things that can ship. But it also equally works for bottom up where you have no idea what the end goal is, but you're just like. That's just ship of small things, and try to build up to something big if the interest is there. Glen G says, paddle reminds me of bubbling off events. Yep. That's a very WebDev analogy and that's fully true there. The two directions of bubbling. I forget what the opposite of bubbling is in the dumb, but that's beside the point anyway. I wanted to offer that as my own perspective on intermediate packets.Oh, yeah. Dave says he is bubbling up NIST insider today. Yeah, totally. Yeah. We are bubbling ideas. That's great. That title doesn't resonate with me. So I just went with bottom up, but feel free to write your own policy. And I think that's something that we should talk about as well.Who's written stuff as a result of this course. And what post ideas do you have to share? You can feel free to throw that in the chat as well. Housekeeping, we've covered this plenty of times, but stupid questions are welcome. Often beats. Perfect. And then this is the discussion and not a lecture.Recap of Last 4 Weeks [00:02:08]All right. So we've covered all these 12. I think it actually works out without the 12. So it's cohort 12 with 12 items. I think so. I grabbed this, I went back to lecture one and grab this slide. And actually  the last week changed quite a bit, I think, but  the first 3 have been relatively stable.And it's quite a bit of content if you walk back and think about it. So I just wanted to acknowledge and pause for a bit and say I think the last five weeks have been a real blast in terms of flights and just a lot of ideas, especially if you're new to them for the first time. But even for me going through them the second time I felt like I just had a lot more to think about each on each in each time, because I've lived through it and I've had a year to really sit with it. I think it'd be interesting to hear from you in in, in the chat or if you wanna, if you want to speak up, I'm just going to pause here and it's just go was there, was there a particular idea that really stuck out to you during this these this whole curriculum w what's your favorite sort of takeaway that you really liked?Shifting Perception to Sharing [00:03:07]Speaker 2: [00:03:07] The one thing that I found which wasn't actually to deal with lessons wasn't to do with systems and processes. It was his perception for me. It's just been a shift in perception, but that's been the benefit of building a second brain, but I've taken that and I've applied that to everything. And I'm looking at, whether it be a task or whether it be something I want to do, what is the perception that motivates me most?And I've realized from second brain that all I came in, they wanted to share more and I wanted an output and I think it came from a selfish point of view of, I just want to share, I want to share, I'm going to attract more people, get more business, be a thought leader, et cetera. What I realized when I was sharing that circle and sharing, and here I'm not having that going a backwards and forwards.I like helping people and I look at even day-to-day friendships. I have conversations, anything that goes to the people I'm interested in they're gold as well. And I've realized that the perception was wrong for me to just look at output in isolation and say, oh, you just want to help her instead of, Hey, how do we respond most positively to actually get output?And for me now, I realized that for helping other people I'm building connections, like even the last week I've been really lucky people that they messaging me, ask them to connect. I've had zoom calls with people. I'm emailing people and we're all having backwards and forwards dialogue, but that wouldn't have happened unless I output in the first place to share my opinion, to actually attract those like-minded people as well.So that's where I say now to perception is going to help me. And I'm going to look at any future problem rather than just looking at like it's a task or a project on big into kind of alleviate and willpower and not having this battle that you have to get up every day and you have to do something against your will to finally get to the end of a journey.And for me, if there's that kind of, if there's those breadcrumbs of emotion for me and breadcrumbs of connection with people, I'll get more addicted to it. I'll enjoy it more. It will be easier for me all the time. And I think it will become more and more natural to do. s...

I just watched the new In The Heights movie and had to mixtape my favorite moments!Samples from:Benny's Dispatch (Corey Hawkins)Paciencia y Fe (Olga Merediz)Breathe (Leslie Grace)96,000 (Cast)In The Heights on Wikipedia

How people unintentionally obstruct progress by asking for perfectly reasonable thingsAudio source: https://artofproductpodcast.com/episode-17310 Tricks to Appear Smart During MeetingsShreyas Twitter thread on Apple Pie PositionsJohn Cutler's response with more

Listen to Cloudflare's pitch when it was just 3 people at TechCrunch Disrupt. Would you have invested?Audio Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeKWeBw1R5AQwiki, winners of Disrupt that year: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/qwiki-techcrunch-disrupt-winner/

The extremes people go to in order to reinforce a personal brand.Audio Source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/my-first-million/182-how-an-astrology-app-mplvUweDHMA/My How To Market Yourself essay: https://www.swyx.io/marketing-yourself/#personal-branding

A short story with a message of hope for the future, recommended and read by a unique, brilliant mind.Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr7Yn3W8VQE&t=16555sStory source and comments: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/17/the-goddess-of-everything-else-2/They say only Good can create, whereas Evil is sterile. Think Tolkien, where Morgoth can’t make things himself, so perverts Elves to Orcs for his armies. But I think this gets it entirely backwards; it’s Good that just mutates and twists, and it’s Evil that teems with fecundity.Imagine two principles, here in poetic personification. The first is the Goddess of Cancer, the second the Goddess of Everything Else. If visual representations would help, you can think of the first with the claws of a crab, and the second a dress made of feathers of peacocks.The Goddess of Cancer reached out a clawed hand over mudflats and tidepools. She said pretty much what she always says, “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER.” Then everything burst into life, became miniature monsters engaged in a battle of all against all in their zeal to assuage their insatiable longings. And the swamps became orgies of hunger and fear and grew loud with the screams of a trillion amoebas.Then the Goddess of Everything Else trudged her way through the bog, till the mud almost totally dulled her bright colors and rainbows. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beauty of flowers, she showed them the oak tree majestic. The roar of the wind on the wings of the bird, and the swiftness and strength of the tiger. She showed them the joy of the dolphins abreast of the waves as the spray formed a rainbow around them, and all of them watched as she sang and they all sighed with longing.But they told her “Alas, what you show us is terribly lovely. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, and wholly her creatures. The only goals in us are KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. And though our hearts long for you, still we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.”The Goddess of Everything Else gave a smile and spoke in her sing-song voice saying: “I scarcely can blame you for being the way you were made, when your Maker so carefully yoked you. But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. So I do not ask you to swerve from your monomaniacal focus on breeding and conquest. But what if I show you a way that my words are aligned with the words of your Maker in spirit? For I say unto you even multiplication itself when pursued with devotion will lead to my service.”As soon as she spoke it was so, and the single-celled creatures were freed from their warfare. They joined hands in friendship, with this one becoming an eye and with that one becoming a neuron. Together they soared and took flight from the swamp and the muck that had birthed them, and flew to new islands all balmy and green and just ripe for the taking. And there they consumed and they multiplied far past the numbers of those who had stayed in the swampland. In this way the oath of the Goddess of Everything Else was not broken.The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and was not very happy. The things she had raised from the mud and exhorted to kill and compete had become all complacent in co-operation, a word which to her was anathema. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the birds and the beasts but to each cell within them, and many cells flocked to her call and divided, and flower and fishes and birds both alike bulged with tumors, and falcons fell out of the sky in their sickness. But others remembered the words of the Goddess of Everything Else and held fast, and as it is said in the Bible the light clearly shone through the dark, and the darkness did not overcome it.So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the birds and the beasts. And she said what she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”, and so they all did, and they set on each other in violence and hunger, their maws turning red with the blood of their victims, whole species and genera driven to total extinction. The Goddess of Cancer declared it was good and returned the the fire.Then came the Goddess of Everything Else from the waves like a siren, all flush with the sheen of the ocean. She stood on a rock and she sang them a dream of a different existence. She showed them the beehive all golden with honey, the anthill all cozy and cool in the soil. The soldiers and workers alike in their labors combining their skills for the good of the many. She showed them the pair-bond, the family, friendship. She showed these to shorebirds and pools full of fishes, and all those who saw them, their hearts broke with longing.But they told her “Your music is lovely and pleasant, and all that you show us we cannot but yearn for. But we are the daughters and sons of the Goddess of Cancer, her slaves and creatures. And all that we know is the single imperative KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER. Yes, once in the youth of the world you compelled us, but now things are different, we’re all individuals, no further change will the Goddess of Cancer allow us. So, much as we love you, alas – we are not yours to have, and your words have no power to move us. We wish it were otherwise, but it is not, and your words have no power to move us.”The Goddess of Everything Else only laughed at them, saying, “But I am the Goddess of Everything Else and my powers are devious and subtle. Your loyalty unto the Goddess your mother is much to your credit, nor yet shall I break it. Indeed, I fulfill it – return to your multiplication, but now having heard me, each meal that you kill and each child that you sire will bind yourself ever the more to my service.” She spoke, then dove back in the sea, and a coral reef bloomed where she vanished.As soon as she spoke it was so, and the animals all joined together. The wolves joined in packs, and in schools joined the fishes; the bees had their beehives, the ants had their anthills, and even the termites built big termite towers; the finches formed flocks and the magpies made murders, the hippos in herds and the swift swarming swallows. And even the humans put down their atlatls and formed little villages, loud with the shouting of children.The Goddess of Cancer came forth from the fire and saw things had only grown worse in her absence. The lean, lovely winnowing born out of pure competition and natural selection had somehow been softened. She stretched out her left hand and snapped its cruel pincer, and said what she always says: “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. She said these things not to the flocks or the tribes, but to each individual; many, on hearing took food from the communal pile, or stole from the weak, or accepted the presents of others but would not give back in their turn. Each wolf at the throats of the others in hopes to be alpha, each lion holding back during the hunt but partaking of meat that the others had killed. And the pride and the pack seemed to groan with the strain, but endured, for the works of the Goddess of Everything Else are not ever so easily vanquished.So the Goddess of Cancer now stretched out her right hand and spoke to the flocks and the tribes, saying much she always says “KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER”. And upon one another they set, pitting black ant on red ant, or chimps agai...