It’s hard to run out of ideas to write about, but it’s easy to run out of ideas worth writing about. At a certain point, the object of your writing becomes less fixated on producing content, and more focused on producing content which pushes your brand. I can write about everything, but I can’t write about just anything.
As you plumb the depths of a topic, you hit a wall where your understanding isn’t high enough to progress. The less you know, the harder it is to learn quickly. You walk in a spiral out away from the base of understanding, with each cycle getting longer and longer. The road gets rougher and the path is less well trodden the further you go. …
Tech work can be safely reproducible, or dangerously repetitive depending on your personality and where you are in your career. It’s as easy to land in a cushy position as it is to find yourself pigeonholed if you don’t expand your skill set. The pigeonholes are a lot more common though. It’s also easy to be made redundant if the primary technology (or technologies) you support fall to the wayside.
Technology moves rapidly and for every technology which has lasted decades, there are dozens which didn’t. Let’s learn how to stay ahead of the curve and how to stay educated in IT. …
Edge computing is one of the biggest paradigm shifts for cloud computing in recent years. The concept of edge computing boils down to reducing “distance” between devices by moving them closer to the “edge” of their networks. This term can be confusing because the “edge” really doesn’t have a solid definition. The overall goal is to reduce long-distance communication between devices so that latency is reduced and the process is more efficient. You pull out the easy pieces which can be done on the hardware available on the edge. …
My career exists and has thrived simply because I try to always find ways to add value to what I’m doing. I think of every problem as if I were a business trying to solve it. This impacts my approach to career, side jobs, hustles, and more. An entrepreneurial approach to most work problems can only improve the odds of success if tempered with an understanding of why the problem needs to be solved and how the business functions.
I used to think the secret to entrepreneurial success was to solve a problem and to be original when doing so. While solving the problem is definitely going to make it easier to succeed, being a unicorn isn’t always the right answer. Just look at how much Slack sold for to see how something which is the same (on the surface) as any other equivalent product can surpass any and all expectations. …
The majority of my programming job involves working with data. While CRUD (Create Retrieve Update Delete) can be enough for many processes, sometimes the data you get isn’t the data that your users want. The biggest obstacle facing data scientists at all levels is how to get data and make it useful. What you get isn’t always what you need, and companies want data they can actually act on.
Data needs to be actionable to be useful outside of an academic sense. There’s a difference between knowing a work contains 253 of a specific character, and knowing that this means it’s the most common word and it’s used for 4.77% of the text. …
Apple hasn’t seen changes to its lineup like this since the move from PowerPC to Intel, or when iPods turned into iPhones. This single move from Intel to Apple’s own ARM chip is going to change everything for Apple. This shift will unify iOS and MacOS for all intents and purposes. That being said, the change isn’t without its complications.
If you’re reading this, you probably aren’t on the fence about using a Mac or not; you want to know whether the new M1 Macs are worth the jump. The M1 is a new architecture with new challenges, but also with new advantages. …
I’ve worked as a freelancer for over a decade in various capacities. I hustled before it was really a thing. It wasn’t so much a desire as it was a necessity. While I’ve done many different freelance jobs, none of them have delivered so many harsh lessons as rapidly as the world of ghostwriting.
Almost every job has its skeletons in the closet, but ghostwriting feels like a boneyard by comparison. Sometimes you’re just writing mind-numbing filler content, other times you’re helping someone commit plagiarism. You become the dirty little secret to a client or business for producing their content.
Ghostwriting taught me the pain and power of branding, the full difference in needs for the client and the audience, how different each publication is, how this type of work impacts career prospects, and what ethical considerations there are. Some of these may seem tepid, but their implications and impact are major. …
A new platform isn’t just a way to be heard, it’s a way to represent a new voice for yourself. I don’t just write for money, I write because I love to do so. That being said, I still need money to live.
Each platform and distribution method is going to have a different audience and a different niche. Everything from the user base to the management is going to impact the profitability and success of the platform for you and in general. Some platforms nail the formula, others don’t nail anything but registering a domain.
Not all platforms are created equally. Reddit is a different landscape than Slashdot, and the news is different than a forum. As you begin to branch out and explore platforms, you’ll find that even though the grass is greener, it isn’t always better. Let’s look at what to look for in a platform, how to measure success (without doubling down each time), and how to split time to make the best of each platform. …
I love learning new languages. There’s just something about working on a new way to communicate and explore the human condition. I also strive to make my life more efficient so I can do more of what I love. I’ve bought multiple copies of a book to avoid not having access to it on the go, but that’s not even close to as far as I’ll go. Some things work out, others don’t.
We spend almost a third of our lives asleep, but science is a bit on the fence about learning in your sleep. Whether it works or not, there’s something about the way learn in your sleep materials are made. …
Like every overachiever in high school, I had always wondered if there was some way to use sleep for something productive. You spend a third of your life asleep, is there some way to get an edge from it? The idea of learning in your sleep via dreams is ancient, but how much of the real world actually bleeds over?
Pretty much everyone has a memory of “learning” something in their sleep and recalling it later. Anecdote doesn’t really prove anything though, and science has struggled to get close. Jung’s theories on the unconscious included the idea that dreams were the integration of conscious and unconscious ideas. Dreams communicate what the unconscious interprets, but also what it observes. …
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