markjgsmith

2024/04/18 #

• I saw a bloke a couple of days ago who had mounted a big speaker on the back of his motorbike. Microphone in hand, he was driving around seranading everyone with his singing. I'm guessing where he lives the people don't like him practicing so this was his compromise solution. You see some weird things here sometimes. #

• Things are shaping up to be rather dire here. I’m not sure the world is going to allow me to finish my interleaved homepage feature. It’s the same old story. It happens almost everytime I am nearly finished a major feature. Suddenly everything becomes super difficult. Things that you thought couldn’t possibly get worse, get even worse. It’s like clockwork.

  Well it’s happening again, so I'm noting it here. #

• Dave Rupert: "People don’t know. […] Everyone’s too busy to care. You have to constantly be sharing the cool things about your thing. Your blog, your framework, your whatever. Keep advocating for the things you like […] If you like something you should talk about it. Then other people will know about it. And then it will get picked up." Shop Talk Show Ep#611. #

• cat << EOF > Promoting your own stuff is okay

  Wiser and much more experienced bloggers than me have said this many times before. In a way, it's so obvious but it's worth repeating just to remind yourself. One of the reasons I'm writing this here post. To be very honest, I'm still not very good at it, even after all these years. The truth is it's difficult to get the balance right.

  Your blog is your own personal advertising platform, for yourself.

  That's one of the biggest reasons for not running ads on your blog. If you run ads you are competing against yourself. Every situation is different of course, but I'd say that for most people, most run of the mill normal blogs, running ads just isn't worth it.

  Much better is to try and gather a loyal audience that like to read your content, so that when you do other projects they will likely be more than happy to help promote it. If your content is good enough this will be effortless, because they'll want to talk about it anyway.

  There are lots of angles to take. Talk about your past experiences, your current projects, topics areas that you want to highlight in your CV, hobbies you are getting into, problems you are debugging and solving. When someone visits your site, they'll be able quite quickly to get a sense for who you are.

  Dave Rupert from Shop Talk Show Ep#611:

  People don’t know. […] Everyone’s too busy to care. You have to constantly be sharing the cool things about your thing. Your blog, your framework, your whatever. Keep advocating for the things you like […] If you like something you should talk about it. Then other people will know about it. And then it will get picked up.

  The tricky part is to not make it sound like you are lecturing. I think in the world of brand marketing it's called something like 'native advertising'. Instead of specific spots where ads are inserted, the content actually is the ad. One way to do this is to talk about current events, but use it as an opportunity to remember relevant pieces of your past.

  We are all learning after all, most of us actually like to hear relevant points of view with interesting stories.

  If you are just starting out then focus more on linking to things you find interesting and why. Your point of view is valuable too. Over time you'll build up a collection of stories and you'll find a way to integrate these into your content.

  I wouldn't say I'm particulary good at doing this. I definitely haven't found the right balance yet. But as you read and listen to others you'll realise those that succeed aren't afraid of talking about what they do. But they are much better at doing it than others. They have often thought about it a lot and distilled out the most valuable pieces of information.

  Figuring out where your value is, amoung all your knowledge, is key. That, I think is how you go about building an audience for the long term.

  EOF

• Nat Friedman - previously CEO at Github: "AI helps with activation energy and momentum, getting started, the blank slate problem. Projects are easier to get started on." Techmeme Ride Home Podcast. #

Today’s links:

• OpenJS: "XZ Utils Cyberattack Likely Not an Isolated Incident" - The team at socket currently catch around 100 similar supply chain attacks per month. It's a really tough problem because you have to be on the one hand welcoming to new legitimate contributers while at the same time block malicious entities, and the communities are already pretty unwelcoming in my experience. There's a general feeling that the open source infrastructure is a bit behind the times. At some point we need to realise it's a common good, much like "clean water, roads and bridges, and healthy capital markets". If you look around the world in most places there are major issues funding all of these things. socket.dev #

• The Many, Confusing File System APIs - Great bit of work and writeup by Scott Vandehey. I had an incling that this was a bit of a mess, but I had no idea it was so unbelievably bad. We really should prioritise to get this fixed, there's just no way web applications can ever compete if something so core as reading and writing files is a nightmare. We might as well all stop being web developers now. Is it any wonder that local first apps are having a hard time taking off? cloudfour.com #

• Trip report: Node.js collaboration summit (2024 London) - Another great writeup, this time by Joyee Cheung. There are so many awesome things being investigated and worked on in nodejs. From web servers to cool new cli features, from package manager version management to scheduling and memory management, from nodejs release tooling to general governance, collaboration and information sharing. And ecmascript modules and interop, TC39 standards, there's so much going on. However I feel like all this swirling progress could do with a bit of direction, so it feels more cohesive, lest we end up with core parts that are a real mess. The various file system web APIs are an example of what could happen if the garden isn't pruned and refactored well. nodejs.org #

• BTC ETF Fund Flow - Tracks the Bitcoin ETFs inflow / outflow to the Bitcoin blockchain. Nice looking graph with live data for each vendor's ETF. You can get a sense of the overall flow. It's weird that Greyscale looks totally different to others, apparently because their initial ETF cost was way higher than others so there's a lot of outflow as their customer move to other providers. btcetffundflow.com #

• New Post: Promoting your own stuff is okay markjgsmith.com #