Original link: http://catcoding.me/p/weekly-20/
Recently, I realized that the weekly magazine is getting longer and longer, and I want to show that I enjoy it for the best. I take the introduced things as the entry point of writing, and use my own experience and feelings to radiate and relate other content, such as the article Follow The Passion. It is also the content of the weekly magazine. Later, I saw that it was really too long and it became an independent article.
But the bad aspect may be that I am self-inflicted, and the length of the article is not necessarily good, too long may cause readers to read a lot of pressure. Therefore, I intend to control the length and save the reader’s time.
Side Project Guide
Many programmers have the passion to do Side Project, and some even have the small dream of making projects to support themselves. But the reality is very cruel, very few people can rely on amateur projects to achieve a certain income.
Even so, I still think that doing a Side Project is a good way for programmers to stay alive and creative. The ideal state of a programmer is a creator, who uses programming to construct a gadget, a small product, and a small world.
Some Side Projects are just for learning, and that’s fine. I have implemented many small projects for pure learning, proficient in various languages and postures of Hello World ?.
But in recent years, I have realized that learning alone is not very useful. There are too many fields of refinement in the computer industry. There is no end to continuous learning. The practice that is more focused and more likely to produce results is to find some problems, needs and directions, try to solve them with technical thinking, or learn related technologies in order to create a work, that is, result-oriented and on-demand learning.
I just saw this interview article by You Yuxi last week. You Yuxi’s works and awareness of works have always been the levers of his life, creating opportunities for him and amplifying benefits.
The author timqian is an independent developer, he wrote an article to record one year of independent development experience . This little guide is well written and covers how to evaluate your idea, how to implement it quickly, how to acquire users, and how to charge for it.
If you are doing a Side Project with the original intention of validating your idea, it is best to try it at the least cost:
- no code
- Write only front-end code (including DAPP)
- If there must be a back-end service, use the writing method that can be deployed in a serverless manner
- maintain a server
In short, for development, the goal of optimization should be to make your current and future work as little as possible. If you must write code to solve it, use the tools you are most familiar with.
Create a private search engine
Building Monocle, a universal personal search engine for life
The web browser as a tool of thought
Linus is an independent developer. From the perspective of self-introduction, he is mainly interested in knowledge management, efficiency, language and writing tools. He has done more than 100 various open source projects . His profile picture looks like a Chinese, but I looked at the resume and found that he was Korean.
I’m also very interested in these tools, analogous to my interest in pens when I was in school, collectively known as tool obsession.
As I mentioned before (probably the “pregnant woman effect”) , Orientals are more obsessed with this kind of tool products. For example, Markdown editors are mostly made by Orientals, and Notion, logseq, and Obsidian are made by Chinese. Yes, I found out some time ago that there is a Dendron (similar to foam) VS Code plug-in also initiated by a Chinese.
Returning to these two articles, Linus introduced a prototype he made, which aggregated a lot of his own data (blog, notes, Twitter, contact) into a data source, and made a self-made search engine to retrieve it. This is a search engine dedicated to his own cyberspace. After using it for a period of time, he thinks that the experience is very good, and anything he has written is very easy to find.
You can go and see this prototype he made, it still looks interesting.
The second article does some extended thinking. We usually switch between apps now. Although we can do some data synchronization to a certain extent, no single app can be my second brain .
Note-taking software helps us to recall quickly, but more importantly, generate new ideas:
We can take down information into apps like Roam Research or Notion and recall them easily later, but it’s an overstatement to call them tools for thought . Recollection is such a small, basic part of thinking! There is so much more to thinking than simply remembering something accurately. I think we can acknowledge the benefits these apps bring while also admitting that better tools for thought should help us do more with ideas than just remember and recall.
He believes that browsers can be used as thinking tools:
The vision of the web browser that excites me the most is one where the browser is a medium for creativity, learning, and thinking deeply that spans personal and public spheres of knowledge.
I think the second article has some good ideas, and there are many good articles on Linus’ personal blog that are worth reading.
But I still think that the browser is mainly a window for receiving information. The place where my information is aggregated is in Obsidian, and it is also a place where I process information and write.
As I mentioned before, since using the webpage annotation tool hypothes.is , it seems to have opened another door. The domestic product Cubox personal fragment knowledge base is somewhat similar. This week I discovered that there is also a recently open source implementation of betterRunner/context-note .
Ev Williams no longer as Medium CEO
Ev Williams gives up – by Casey Newton
Ev Williams is an American tech entrepreneur, few people have had such a profound impact on online social and media. He ushered in the era of blogging with the website he co-founded in 1999, Blogger, which was later sold to Google; he co-founded Twitter in 2006 and became Twitter CEO in 2008; and Medium in 2012, where he was until his departure last week.
In 2012, Ev Williams believed that sharing information on the Internet has become very convenient, and people are accustomed to sharing through short texts such as Twitter, but because of the profit model such as Ads, most of the content on the Internet is low-quality and eye-catching content.
We need a platform that focuses on the reading experience and high-quality content, so Medium means both “medium” and “medium” length content.
“Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding , while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?”
“A beautiful space for reading and writing — and little else, The words are central.”
In the past ten years, the development of Medium has not been completely bad. In fact, in the first few years after its creation, Medium has indeed been a clear stream for the Internet. It has achieved the ultimate in immersive “reading” and “writing”. Most of the above The articles are of high quality, and even attracted a large number of celebrities to write on it, and Obama still publishes content on it to this day.
From the beginning, Medium was the product of Ev Williams’ idealization, on which he was constantly experimenting with ideas. Even in 2016, when Medium was growing rapidly, Ev Williams would still reflect on whether the company’s direction was contrary to its original intention. Even if the advertising model was commercially successful, it was exactly what he hated. So Medium completely abandoned the advertising profit model and laid off 1/3 of its staff.
We believe people who write and share ideas should be rewarded on their ability to enlighten and inform, not simply their ability to attract a few seconds of attention.
Medium follows a content payment model. Users can choose to pay a monthly fee of $5 to browse the content of the entire site. These fees will be distributed to creators according to the algorithm, forming a closed loop of “consumption-production”. Many people scoff at this fee model, and it’s fair to say that Medium has taken a harder road.
This article mentions that Medium will have nearly 700,000 paying users in 2021, paying $5 a month. However, internal data shows that it is not high-quality content that brings users, but popular articles recommended by Google and Facebook’s algorithms that bring paying users. Making money through traffic is not what Medium expects.
I don’t think it’s a problem for incremental users to come through search engines. The problem is how to retain authors and paying users. Medium has been changing over the years, in order to stimulate the author in many ways:
- The creator is paid accumulatively based on the reading time of paying users
- Hire your own editors to create content
- Let the big Publisher customize the domain name
- Extra monthly bonuses to top creators
- ……..
I also shared before that in 2020, I started to practice English writing on Medium, and I gained a lot, so I have some feelings for Medium. But I see more and more authors stop posting on it, Why I’ve Stopped Writing On Medium .
With the rise of short videos and Newsletters in the past two years, Medium has clearly entered a bottleneck period. My feeling is that there are some areas that are difficult to balance.
Medium pays attention to the quality of content, so the platform’s algorithm tends to have large columns, which makes it difficult for individual authors to establish their own stable readership, and many followers are not very helpful for reading volume. If we want our articles to have more traffic, we have to distribute them through large columns, so we have to contribute to the column after writing. This will make writers who want to write for a long time feel resistant and insecure. They want to have stable readers, so many people go to Substack or collect readers’ emails to create Newsletters themselves.
Another reason is that with the development of the Internet today, there are only a few people who are willing to pay for content. Most people have handed over their information sources to algorithms. This is a general trend that cannot be changed.
The past few years are like a node. The high-quality medium and long text content on the Internet will further shrink, and the phenomenon of Chinese Internet is even more serious . Medium’s domestic clone products, such as Fifteen Words, did not come up at all, and Jianshu has basically sunk now. Zhihu, a community that focuses on high-quality answer content, also needs to dig for gold.
In the Chinese Internet, the WeChat ecosystem has divided up a lot of traffic, but the revision of the official account is also in the direction of traffic advertising and recommendation algorithms, and finally the content farm is repeated on the mobile terminal.
Why Newsletter is on the rise, obviously neither readers nor creators want to be dominated by platforms and algorithms . Although Substack is a platform, as long as the email list can be exported, creators can take readers away from the platform at any time. This is the difference from the official account. Another difference is that Substack does not have a recommendation algorithm.
Writing here, I thought of a former colleague who made a GeekNote. I was not optimistic about such websites at first. Most people have no motivation and interest to publish articles on a third-party platform, so I can see the data of the first anniversary of GeekNote . Very low, which may also be related to how it is operated and promoted.
Humor
Source Programmer’s Joke channel
This issue doesn’t look too short, so let’s do it first!
My weekly magazine has finally reached its 20th issue. In nearly half a year, there are nearly 2,500 official account readers, and some people subscribe to my blog through RSS.
This magnitude is of course not worth mentioning, but I am still relatively satisfied with this milestone, because it is all natural growth that brings readers. Thank you all for accompanying us along the way!
This article is reprinted from: http://catcoding.me/p/weekly-20/
This site is for inclusion only, and the copyright belongs to the original author.