This week’s newsletter is out! (2023-08-23)
In this week’s edition:
Everyone has been going on about circles and circular economies recently. I’m not so convinced. Circles can be vicious, mindblowing is the new super easy peasy. Lots of great podcasts this week.
Issue details:
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AI activity boosters - I wonder how long until it will be until all entrepreneurs will have AI assistants. Building a business is such a complicated activity, and AIs have such strong pattern matching capabilities, you've got to imagine they would be very good at matching company building activities and personal outside work activities so that one boosts the other. Finding activities that have the same general shape, or complimentary. It wouldn't be without dangers though, tech like that could really get in the way if it wasn't done right. #
Niche down on action style workflows - There have been quite a lot of companies the past few years doing database SaaS products similar to Salesforce but focussed on a very specific niche. Airtable is a good example. I'm a big user of Github Actions, and I wonder whether there's potential to do something similar. Basically to bring file repository based automated workflows to very specific niche areas. The underlying mechanics would be very similar and familiar to developers, but the UI users interacted with during workflow execution would be very different. #
I wish there was a Markdown editor that was also an outliner, to have the power of an outliner but when you are editing markdown files. You would be able to output markdown files, but you could also output OPML files. It would make it easy to work with both formats side by side. It would support yaml frontmatter and have a plugin system so you could add support for different flavors of markdown. It would have an easy to use mobile app. #
Today’s links:
GitHub Actions could be so much better - The linked article is quite good, but the HN discussion is great. Lots of useful tips and practical examples for writting better Github Actions, mixed in with a healthy amount of complaints and positivity. Reminds you that there are other programmers out there struggling with the very same issues you are day in day out. news.ycombinator.com #
Get All That Network Activity Under Control with Priority Hints - Browsers have a lot of functionality these days. Some pretty straight forward improvements to your site's pageload times possible using these techniques, but I'd be careful trying to use them on everything because I could see debugging priority issues could be a challenge. Always have a base you can fall back to in case it doesn't function as you expected. www.macarthur.me #
🚀 Latest Newsletter: Beware Of Circularity (Issue #133)markjgsmith.com #
Swup - "Versatile and extensible page transition library for server-rendered websites. It manages the complete page load lifecycle and smoothly animates between the current and next page." swup.js.org #
WebKit Features in Safari 17.0 - Lots of new HTML, CSS, javascript and developer tool improvements. webkit.org #
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