I noticed the courses are tied to a language, any reason behind that design choice vs keeping it language agnostic and letting users choose their preferred language?
Another frustrating thing that has emerged from this is where managers “vibe code” half-baked ideas for a couple of hours and then hand it off as if they’ve meaningfully contributed to the implementation. Suddenly you’re expected to reverse engineer incoherent prompts, inconsistent code, and random abstractions that nobody fully understands.
In their mind they’ve already done the “architectural heavy lifting” and accelerated the team.
More often than not it just adds cognitive overhead where you spend more time deciphering and cleaning up garbage than actually building the thing properly from scratch.
While this is a legitimate set of rules to follow for maintaining code sanity and a solid mental model of how a codebase may grow, it’s always challenging to stick to them in a workplace where expectations around delivery speed have changed drastically with the onset of AI. The sweet spot lies in striking a balance between staying connected to the codebase and not becoming a limiting factor for the team at the same time.
It gives you clean text summaries of YouTube videos. There are obviously other tools that do this, but I wanted something that is aligned with actual principles of learning and retention, not just quick TLDRs.
Also added a feature called Related Videos. It extracts the key themes from a video and recommends the top 3 related videos, essentially creating a small “knowledge web” of sorts around the topic. Similar to youtube recommendations, but you don't watch you click and read.
You can do YouTube search directly inside the product. When you click a video, it generates a summary. So you’re still browsing YouTube, but click turns a video into something you can actually consume. Personally found it better way to consume youtube, quicker for me to get through the content I want to consume than have those 10+ Youtube tabs sitting in my browser forever.
There’s also a public library feature I added where you can make your summary public. It’s kind of fun to see what other people are learning.
Still early, but iterating on it, scratching my own itch.
Searching for what to solve becomes far more important than how to solve it. Which niche you serve, how underserved the problem is, how quickly you build a solution, and how fast you iterate based on user feedback become the real differentiators. As a problem gains popularity, competitors will enter at an increasing pace, and the product’s price will be competed down to the bare minimum. At that point, the only real advantage for a builder is to be a serial builder for deep niches, spotting them faster than others and delivering quality product to users before anyone else.
Excellence in anything is a byproduct of having fun. Fun is a byproduct of understanding. Understanding is a byproduct of going slow. Going slow is a byproduct of curiosity. Curiosity is a byproduct of saying "I don’t know," of shunning beliefs and attending to what is in front, with zero baggage or impositions of your own—shunning the ego in the moment, moment by moment. Excellence comes when each piece is as equal as any other, when preference is shunned, when space is created to allow what is in the moment, without resistance, without insistence.
This book has stayed with me for years. It's a quiet, deeply reflective journey about self-discovery, the search for meaning. What resonated most was this idea that true understanding can't be taught—it must be lived and experienced.
It’s a short read, but one that invites you to slow down. Each time I return to it, I take away something new depending on where I am in life.
I'm a Product Manager turned Coder, I had a strong stint as a PM for 7+ years, at my last company (YC S21) I scaled the DAU from 10k to 250k+ & MAU to 1 million+.
Now I'm looking to get to the fundamentals of building. That's why I have been learning backend development for the past 1 year, you can view my resume for more details on my coding projects and my achievements from 7+ years of PM career.
Can bring a good balance of user centric mindset to feature development. Since I'm sort of rebooting my career here, I'm looking at SD-1 level roles at the moment. Would love to chat about this.
Start by questioning every aspect of your life, your actions, your intentions, your thoughts - why are they the way they are? Books and mental models are mere tools that won't get you anywhere, they just add to the conditioning and the "burden" of knowledge. To find your own philosophy of life you have to start by unconditioning your mind so you can become sensitive to the reality as it is and not what the world around you has taught you.
Just finished it last week, it made me revisit the idea of "What it means to have meaning in life?" and how personal that is, and have a wholesome view of my personality without any prejudice.
If you can, try getting a Sales/Partnership role for an early stage B2B startup. Pitching to CXOs of different bossinesses would push you to be coherent, concise, and confident about what's coming out of your mouth.
Just be ultra honest about the point you want to make with supporting evidence/arguments without being disrespectful. The way you speak to your manager doesn't necessarily have to the same you speak to your CEO, because their motivations may differ (usually do). Speaking to CEO, you should try to be aligned with the company goals, whatever you're speaking about try to connect with company's goals. At the end of the day, that is all CEO cares about. However, manager might have ulterior motives, politics etc. So here you formulate your points without causing too much trouble or insecurity to their position.
1) Find the equivalent of Schaum's in any domain, a book of problems with worked answers.
2) Grind through a bunch of representative problems without studying. Just give it your best shot, you might be able to figure it out.
3) Check your answers and use this as a form of placement test to identify deficiencies.
4) Specifically, if you're getting the complex questions right, you understand the domain. If not, go back to the source material and read it. You'll have a new focus in reading it as you know exactly what you got wrong and you know what points to fix.
Doing it this way is (IMO) the most efficient way of spending your learning time. First do problems with worked answers to find out what you don't know, then fill the gap with focused effort.