The Swyx Mixtape

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, and 3 in the previous 2 weekend episodes.The 4th week had significant Internet issues and the audio was lost, so this is an audio essay to replace that.You can read the full blogpost here: https://www.swyx.io/bottom-up-ideas — there are plenty of links to original tweets and video embeds for those keen to dig further.

This is the story of the Thong Song, told by Vice.Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0S1buCBwGI

The theoretical foundation of Chaos Engineering.Audio source: Gremlin Podcast https://www.gremlin.com/blog/podcast-break-things-on-purpose-ep-9-kolton-andrus-ceo-and-co-founder-at-gremlin/ (33 mins in)ReadingLineage Driven Fault Injection - Paper, ReviewFailure Injection Testing at NetflixChAP: Chaos Automation Platform at NetflixTranscriptRich Burroughs: Hey, so to shift gears a little bit Kolton, so you're one of the authors of a paper about Lineage Driven Fault Injection or LDFI. And I tried to read that paper and it was a bit over my head. So, I'm hoping you can explain to me and the listeners like we're five years old what LDFI is.Kolton Andrus: Yes, it's both a mouthful and as an academic paper, it can be a little hard to digest. There is the Netflix tech blog where we try to show some pictures and simplify it for folks that may be about to follow along at home. So the idea behind Lineage Driven Fault Injection is systems really stay up because there's some amount of redundancy. Whether it's hardware redundancy, a host failed, we had another host to take its place, or it's a logical redundancy. We had a bit of code and it failed, but we have some other way to fill that data or to have a fallback for that data.Kolton Andrus: And so the key idea was, if we have some way to walk the system, we have some way to graph it, think like tracing, and we can see how the pieces fit together, so we can see the dependencies, then we could start to reason about, if one of these dependencies failed, could something else take its place? And so at its heart, it's an experiment, it's really we're walking this graph, and we're failing a node, and then we're checking to see what the user response was. So this is a key part. You have to build a measure did the failure manifest to the user or was the user able to continue doing what they wanted to do?Kolton Andrus: And that sounds easy. It's like, oh, just check if the service returned a 200, or a 500. But in reality, you have to go all the way back to the user experience and measure that ala real user monitoring to see if the user had a good experience or not because the server could return a 200, and then the device that received that response could find that inside that 200 is a JSON payload that said error, everything failed. It happened. That's not a hypothetical. That was a learning from the process.Kolton Andrus: So, we build this service graph, we walk it, we fail at something, and then we rerun that request, or we look for another one of the same type of request. And we see if something else popped up and took its place or if that request failed. And then the other computer sciencey piece is, in the end, these service graphs are something that we can put into a satisfiability, a SAT solver. And so we can basically reduce it down to a bunch of ORs and ANDs. Hey, we've got this tree, obviously, if we cut off one of the root nodes of that tree, we're going to lose all of the children and all of those branches. And so we don't have to search all of those if we find a failure higher up because we can be intelligent that we'll never get to those.Kolton Andrus: So at its root, it's build a graph in steady state, build a formula that tells us what things are most valuable for us to fail first, on subsequent or retried requests, fail those things and see if the system either has redundancy that we find, that the request succeeds, or if the request fails. And then as we go, we're getting into more and more complicated scenarios where we start failing two, or three, or four things at the same time.Rich Burroughs: Oh, wow. Yeah, we actually just had Haley Tucker from Netflix on our last episode and I think that we talked about some of this and I didn't realize that we were talking about LDFI, so thank you for that explanation.Kolton Andrus: Yes, I mean, there's a lot of cool things. Building FIT at Netflix really enabled LDFI because we needed that framework to cause the failure very precisely to run the experiments. It enabled CHAP, so the chaos automation platform is entirely built on FIT, where it's essentially routing traffic to canary and control clusters, and then causing failures with FIT to see how they respond and how they behave. And then I believe, Haley and her team are continuing that forward and even looking at other ways to do more of this A/B Canary style testing around failure.Rich Burroughs: Yes, she mentioned that they're adding in load testing along with the Chaos Engineering in that scenario, which I think is super cool. I love that idea of doing that A/B testing and doing the actual statistical analysis on what's going on.Jacob Plicque: Yes, I think it's interesting too because I feel like we're seeing a lot of the different pieces come together. Obviously, things like continuous chaos within a CI/CD pipeline is typically where we're first start with that more automated chaos. So of course you have your build or the canary cluster like you mentioned, but adding the load testing in front of that to help drive a steady state metric before you even kick it off makes a lot of sense. 

What do you do if you are down to your last $25,000 and had one last shot to launch a dating app?Justin McLeod figured it out — just barely.Audio Source: https://www.npr.org/2021/03/19/979188827/hinge-justin-mcleod

Want to hack into a Nuclear Plant? Good luck.Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQchwJV-lJ8Scott Tolinski pick: https://syntax.fm/show/268/potluck-beating-procrastination-rollup-vs-webpack-leadership-code-planning-styled-components-more

Cal Newport on why Time Block Planning beats Todo Lists, and why you should do it on *paper*.Audio source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrJcHp0Ocm8My tweet thread on Your Calendar As Todo List (and previous episode with Nir Eyal)Cal's Time Block Planner

I am a mentor for the Notion Advanced track of Tiago Forte's Building a Second Brain, Cohort 12. This is the cleaned up audio of the third of 5 mentorship sessions with Q&A at the end. You can catch Week 1 and 2 in the previous 2 weekend episodes. This week we cut out the intro and just go straight into content. For visuals you can follow along the Week 3 Slide Deck and the recorded video (don't share this!)There are 2 weeks left in this series and I'll write a recap blogpost at the end of it.ReferencesWeek 3 Slide DeckAlex West's Part Time Creator storyEugene Yan's Guide to ZettelkastenFriendcatchers10 Years of Professional BloggingTwo WordsVisualizing Adam Grant vs Scott KaufmannThree Strikes Rule for BloggingGuy Margalith's Mindfulness EngineWhy You Should PresellTimestampsWeek 3 Recap - Distill [00:00:00]Q&A: Calendar as Todo List [00:09:10]Q&A: Zettlekasten vs PARA [00:12:55]Q&A: Time Blocking [00:16:05]Visual Structure in Notes [00:24:12]Producing in Reverse [00:26:44]Two Words [00:29:07] Forcing Function [00:30:45]Q&A: Two Hours A Day [00:34:02]Three Strikes Rule [00:35:35] Guy Takes Over [00:38:39]Once a week Newsletter [00:50:51]Q&A: Publication Approval Process [00:56:55] Q&A: Publishing on Big Platforms vs Building your own [01:00:05]TranscriptWeek 3 Recap - Distill [00:00:00]swyx: [00:00:00] So this week was about distilling. I thought this was one of the more interesting slides. Cause I think Tiago just likes the cooking metaphors. last week he also used the cooking metaphor. Basically your notes should be about getting the best ingredients for you to cook with when your, the time comes to eventually produce.And it's not so much about how you rearrange your kitchen. It's not so much about the hierarchy of the notes. It's just about getting the best quality ingredients each time. And they just really nailing the quality of the ingredient. So that's the way that I interpret his emphasis on note first knowledge management.So he also had this really interesting duality. Let me turn off my discord because this is really distracting right now. Give me one second. I have this beeping in the background, which I always have tuned out, but I know it's distracting on zoom. Okay. So most people notes are like this, but our notes are going to be like this.And the difference is the gradients, right? In, in understanding like where we are pretty shallow on and where we're pretty deep on, if you'd advert the mountain metaphor in terms of the amount of work that we've done and being able to see in a single glance, like the highs and the lows.Stepping away from an undifferentiated mass with just random notes towards putting different degrees of work based on how often we use them, how well we use them. So that's kinda how I pitch the importance of this progressive summarization approach. He used to actually have a much uglier chart than this in the previous cohorts, but I like this metaphor.Okay. This is a example that I thought was really helpful. The perfect note taking that he exemplifies where we really use some structure. Seven habits is easily breaks yourself down bolding heightened and just a really light sprinkled highlighting. The key is to be able to zoom in and out.While preserving the same context of the notes which you were connected to. Okay. You gave, he also gave 4 guidelines. I think, I don't think I did a very good job with these slides. I just took some screenshots. I don't know. So the first one is used resonance. So literally notes are very personal.I think every one of us should be able to look at the same documents and come away with different notes because it really just matters what resonates with you. Not about trying to produce something objective right answer what it means. The second one is to really be very sparing in terms of how we, how much we highlight To keep it glanceable as they say, really.I think I liked his metric of being able to grasp what you summarized in 30 seconds. I think that's a really nice hard limit. And there's only so much you can fit in 30 seconds cause that's how you make your notes consumable in the future like that your notes are only as useful as they are consumable in the future.The dial-in number three is spending as only as much attention as it's needed. So your notes don't have to be the same length or same level of detail every single time you can come back and expand upon it if you need to. And sometimes if it's just like a, one-off a couple of sentences here that's okay, too.And then the last guideline is that you should distill when you have an use of mine. So sometimes if you don't even have a use case, you can just leave them notes in raw capture form, like this without all the, with all of the bolding and highlighting. And that's totally fine. When you have a use case, it's much better to have a purpose.That's what the projects in the areas of for and to me, a lot of that use cases just blogging. Like how will this show up in a future blog posts that I need to do or talk, okay. We also finally talked about the convergence and divergence process. The divergence is something that we're all trained to do very well.Because we love exploring ideas and there's an infinite number of different, interesting ideas, but convergence is what we essentially get paid to do. Or the it's the final output that people actually see. So we need to practice this more. The way I also think about it is that this line between divergence and convergence is moveable.And a lot of us for a lot of us, the divert this line is all the way up here. And sometimes it's beyond the delivery point to the point that we never ship. So we need to move it back. We need to move this divergence convergence line back all the way towards something closer here so that we just force ourselves to produce more.I think that's something that motivates a lot of people. Okay. I also like this table because it compares and contrasts attitude, focus, approach principles. It's really weird because you have to be the same person. But these qualities are super different and you have to do that switch and almost inhabit a different personality when you approach convergence.And that's what we are starting to be about today. We're going to continue this next week, but I think it's a skill that we have to train and get good at because it's so fun to diverge, but Hey we need to make converg...

One of the most impactful film composers of our time.Audio sources: The Making Of “Wakanda” With Ludwig GöranssonChildish Gambino - This Is AmericaThe Mandalorian OST - Main Theme

Thanks for 100 episodes! You can read the blogpost in full on my site.My ideas for future episodes: http://simp.ly/publish/BQJJ5bMain points covered:Personal Podcast SuperpowersInfinite GameHot MediumIndependenceCompletionismSuperfansScheduling and Creative ControlWhy MixtapesGiving ValueCurationBrevityDownsidesAudio EditingDiscoverabilityAnalyticsDepthFeedback

Making $400k by punishing robocallers automatically. Genius!Audio source: https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/the-pomp-podcast/557-joshua-browder-on-p8id7SOsmCD/ (41 mins in)See more: https://donotpay.com/