The average of death is 73.7 years old Die with Zero is a book about using 100% of your money to maximize enjoyment before that day comes Here are 9 key concepts from the book that will change how you think about money:

9 key concepts from Die with zero: getting all you can from your money and your life

1. Consumption smoothing

Consume roughly the same amount of wealth across your life. This means transferring money to your poorer years (youth, retirement) via debt or savings, respectively. Save less in your youth if you expect to make more money as you get older

2. Life = sum of experiences

Experiences don't have to be a big thing, and it doesn't have to be expensive. Running a marathon, trying a new local restaurant, taking your son for a walk in the park: all of these are experiences

3. Memory dividends

When you enjoy experiences, you get to enjoy the memories of those experiences. Like compound interest, the earlier you have those experiences, the longer you get to reap the rewards of those memories

4. Seasons of life

Your life has different seasons, and different experiences are enjoyed more during some seasons. Some experiences are locked out of certain seasons. Seasons are also defined by big life choices, such as marriage, parenthood, and retirement.

5. Flows of time, money, and health

Seasons are defined by the flow of time, money, and health, and major life changes

• In youth, you have time & health, but little money
• In adulthood, you have health & money, little time
• In old age, you have money & time, but little health

6. Play all four quarters

It's possible to guesstimate when you are going to die, insurance companies do it all the time. Doing so helps you think about your life in a more holistic fashion. It also helps you make the most of time when you realize how much of it you have left

7. Gifts > inheritance

It's suboptimal to wait until you are dead to transfer your wealth. If you live to be 85, your child will be in their 50s. The best time to give your children is between the ages of 26 and 35

8. Decumulation

At some point, the net worth number has to go down instead of up. typically between the ages of 45 and 60. Lowering your net worth on purpose requires a huge psychological shift

9. Bold youth

Take more risks when you have less to lose, typically when you are younger. Learn to distinguish between actual risk and irrational fear. Don't wait on taking chances that can't cause much harm to you

Original Twitter thread

How did Mia Hamm become one of the GOATs? In her words:

"All my life I've been playing up, meaning I've challenged myself by competing with players older, bigger, more skillful, more experienced -- in short, better than me. When I was six, my big brother, Garrett, ran circles around me. At ten, I joined an eleven-year-old-boys' team and, eventually, led them in scoring. Seven years later I found myself playing for the number-one college team in America after becoming the youngest player ever to suit up for the U.S. Women's National Team." – Mia Hamm, Go For The Goal

This strategy isn't just for sports; It also works for your career.

Playing up is a powerful career tactic. By putting yourself in a position where you're underqualified, you'll grow your skills and advance quicker than you would by toiling away alone on study projects and online course content. I've gotten roles first, then grown into them.

Every significant move in my career, I made by playing up:

• First, I got a job at an agency when I barely knew web development.
• Then I moved into a larger corporation and eventually led a small team, with zero management experience (don't all managers start managing with zero experience at some point?).
• From there, I went out on my own as a freelancer, even though I didn't know shit about running my own business.
• Today, I work for a unicorn that requires a pristine design that I can only deliver by being at the absolute top of the frontend game, even though I was a 7/10 at best beforehand.

But, playing up doesn't come without risk and takes a lot of work. It's only for the ambitious and those who won't have an appetite for keeping work interesting.

How schooling screwed us (yes, again)

Academia teaches you to build a foundation of knowledge in the basics and build up skills from there. This method isn't effective. How much does what you do in your day-to-day work line up with what you were taught in school? Have you ever studied technology but felt like it didn't "click" until you were using it in a production-ready app?

Instead of studying for the test, you put yourself at the end. Work backward and leverage those stressors to adapt to your new situation. We are an adaptive species, after all. If you want to be a baker, get in the kitchen.

You've probably seen this in action already

Have you ever worked with someone and thought, "how did they get this job? They don't seem qualified at all!" That could be you! Live the dream!

Here's how you can pull it off. But first, some clarification on what playing up is and isn't.

Playing up is not beating impostor syndrome

Impostor syndrome is irrationally doubting your skills. Playing up is knowingly putting yourself in a spot where doubt is rational.

Impostor syndrome is common in the tech industry. We don't have a formal education and accreditation system like other industries. We don't have a rite of passage to tell us we've made it other than landing a job.

Impostor syndrome is a pattern of doubting your talents and abilities. It manifests as an irrational fear of being "found out."  That you shouldn't be where you are.

One way to manage this is by talking to your peers about your experiences. Chances are, you have been underrating yourself. You are not an impostor. You are exactly where you need to be.

In fact, playing up can be an antidote to impostor syndrome. You surprise yourself by doing something you thought you couldn't, proving to yourself you are qualified

Playing up is not "faking it until you make it"

Faking it works for mindsets and perspectives. You can't fake your way into competence(which takes deliberate practice.) But, you can fake yourself into a position where more competence is required.

Faking it is a strategy that helps you rewire your internal framing. For example, you can fake confidence, optimism, and even happiness, which generates more authentic versions of those feelings. "Faking it" isn't fake at all, instead, it's a flipping of the script: instead of letting your emotions influence your actions, you are using your efforts to influence your emotions.

To develop skills, you have to put in deliberate practice and work to improve those skills.

Get into situations where you aren't quite competent. Then get yourself to that level. Of course, it will require some faking it to get there, but that's only the first part of the story.

Why playing up works

One of the fastest ways to level up your skills is watching masters in action. Playing up allows you to learn from others more skilled than you. You can't get this at home. With online courses, you only see manicured, curated simulacrum of expertise.

When you are on a team, people have a vested interest in your success. Coworkers and bosses will help you.

You also learn more quickly when you play for stakes. Playing for stakes means working in an environment with some kind of reward if you succeed and risk if you fail.

Moving up before you are ready lets you move faster.

The Risks

You might lose your job

Worst case, you're fired. This happens when you play up but don't get good. Depending on your skill set, this may not be as catastrophic as you think. If you work in tech, there are plenty of remote job opportunities at various companies. All you have to do to find work is start applying to places besides the 10 companies everyone else is applying to.

Honestly, I think that if you don't get fired at least once, you aren't playing the career game aggressively enough.

You're going to have to work hard

You should know going into it that playing up takes work. Playing up is playing on hard mode, with all the benefits and costs. If you are someone who always wants to leave work and work and not think about it outside of 9 to 5, then this strategy isn't for you. Even with on-the-job learning, you'll likely need to invest extra time and resources into skilling up.

But if this is a challenge you want to take on, how can you get started?

How to play up

Start by applying for jobs (even if you like the one you have)

The easiest way to get started is to apply for jobs that are one degree higher than where you are. Job interviews aren't just a way to get hired to a new position, they are a tool you can use strategically for career growth. Don't feel guilty applying for jobs even with no intention of taking them. You can use these to test your mettle for new opportunities.

You probably can't move from a mid-level frontend engineer at an agency to a CTO of a unicorn startup. Instead, think about moving just enough to get uncomfortable in one of these directions:

• job title
• job role
• team size
• company size
• project impact

Applying for jobs way outside your comfort zone will not yield great results, but I believe in erring towards taking the opportunity

I often hear people say, "should I apply for this job? I don't know if I'm qualified or not." This mindset is the wrong approach. It's the interviewer's job to decide if you are qualified, not yours. Don't do their job for them.

If you don't get the job, and it's one you'd like to have one day, you've received feedback that will inform you where to go next.  You'll get feedback in your confidence and ability to answer questions and the responses and feedback you get in the interviews.

Build a narrative for the opportunity and cover

There's an old joke: How would you describe changing a lightbulb on your resume?

Single-handedly managed the successful upgrade and deployment of a new environmental illumination system with zero cost overruns and zero safety incidents.

No one is as happy as they seem on Facebook, as pretty as they look on Instagram, or as employed as they act on LinkedIn.

Before you can apply for jobs, you need to be able to tell a narrative about how you belong and why you are asking.

Update your LinkedIn for the job you want, not the job you have. This doesn't mean lying; it means being strategic. Your LinkedIn & resume are a highlight reel, so pick the highlights that position you where you want to be. For example, when I switched from being a full-stack engineer to a frontend engineer, I reworked my work history to focus on accomplishments with JavaScript and less on backend work.

A refrain I got from Josh Doody's guide to Salary Negotiation is: "I'm looking for an increase in both responsibility and salary." The question of why you are looking for something new will come up, and this is a solid stock response.

You can also reverse engineer job postings you're interested in. Look at what skills are required for the positions you want. If you have them, highlight them. If you don't, start getting them.

Take on new projects in your current role

This is the safest way. You can play up towards a promotion, or towards learning new skills. As an engineer, you could take on more managerial or strategic projects, examples include:

• Taking on training/mentorship responsibilities
• Contributing to documentation or coding standards that affect the whole team.
• Work with stakeholders to help with product decisions and roadmapping

The call to adventure

Over time, you will build both confidence and competence. You'll be able to deliver quality work without working tons of extra hours. You'll have enough knowledge that extra studying is not required. Careers go through narratives, you've slain the beast, and now it's time for a liminal break.

Until you decide to take on your next challenge.

A common refrain I hear from indie hackers is that "you should position yourself.” There’s riches in niches! There are whole books on the subject, like The Positioning Manual. Positioning is a powerful marketing tactic, but if misapplied it can be dangerous.

Positioning vs. specialization

First, I'd like to flesh out the difference between positioning and specialization.

Positioning is an act of communication, it’s how you tell people about what you can do for them.

Specialization is about your internal practice. Specialization is how you allocate your skill points as you level up.

Positioning is how you frame your resume, specialization is choosing what types of work you want to focus your energy on.

Positioning is changing the headline on your website from “freelance web development” to “web design for doctors.” Specialization is learning about the business of doctors, and how you can apply your skills to their specific problems.

Choosing one does not always mean choosing the other. You could position an offering today without changing your skills.

Positioning is a practice. You don’t just say you serve one kind of person and then go out and do it forever. You find niches within the niche; you refine your market; you become pickier as you grow. And you serve them in different ways, changing your offerings to adapt to shifts in technology, the world, and your customers & clients. Positioning is the act of bringing intentionality, focus, and clarity to the way you serve others.
– Nick Disabato

A positioning vs. specialization example

I’ve always been a full-stack developer. A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to transition to exclusively front-end work. Why? I wanted to move to a larger company (I’ve started to suspect that working for smaller companies is largely a bad move, but that’s a whole other post). At larger companies, developers tend to have more specialized roles. My previous job was 70/30 frontend/backend, so I could smoothly make the transition.

I positioned myself by updating my LinkedIn and resume. I branded the previous role “front-end developer”, focused on front-end keywords. I applied for frontend roles.  

Once I was there, I could start to specialize.

One fear of specialization is that it will get boring, and you won’t get to learn new things, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. When you specialize you learn new things by going deep not wide. I get to spend more time focusing on topics like accessibility, and the dark arts of the most arcane CSS.

But before that, when I was freelancing, trying to position cost me. Here's what they don't tell you about positioning

Every company has secret income streams

A company's website and it's balance sheet tell two different stories. Most businesses make money in ways they don’t talk about. Some examples:

• They serve off-brand clientele. There is a background check company that sells its services to companies looking to screen candidates. Their most profitable clientele is actually churches; Their website doesn't mention this offering.
• Large tech companies like Microsoft and Google fulfill government contracts.
• Indie hackers usually have multiple income streams, some combination of product, freelance, and affiliate marketing.
• Any agency that has lasted tends to have one legacy client, usually a government institution, that pays at least 50% of their bills.
  

One day, I’d love to talk to business owners and collect more examples like this. But for now, I want to warn people:

If you overspecialize, you miss out on these opportunities

The agency mentioned above has a pretty sweet setup: If 50% of your income is stable and you can survive on that, it gives you freedom in the rest of your business to pursue the kind of work you want to do.

However, some people will cut clients loose like this because they don’t fit into their desired “positioning” when what they really did is cut off their ability to explore!

Try this instead

Positioning needs to be kept solely as marketing, not practice. Until you have literally more work than you know what to do with, don’t turn down opportunities because they don’t fit your positioning.

Don’t let positioning stop you from exploring, experimenting, and iterating

Don’t let positioning keep you from learning skills that are outside of your lane.

Use positioning to hone your product and service offerings. It can help you clearly communicate the value you provide and find the people you want to serve.

Do what needs to be done, and remember you're not required to talk about it. 🤐

Ever feel stuck deciding where to go next? Do you either have too many ideas, or none at all?  How do you pick a new project to work on? How do you decide where to go next?

Similar to writing articles and naming things, I like to break creative blocks with systemization and combinatorics. Here's my current (work-in-progress) framework for choosing new projects.

The working identities model

This process gets inspiration from the book Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. In it, Hermania Ibarra lays out a model for exploring and creating your many different "possible selves":

• Your working identity is not a single internal entity. Instead, you have multiple possible future selves.
• The only way to discover these selves is by performing experiments that involve interaction with other people.
• At first, you will have several small possibilities. As some of them grow, they will begin to push out other identities. This could include your current self.
• Why take this approach? Because it removes the paralyzing fear of having one true career path for the one true self. It's easier and safer to make these decisions in an iterative fashion, where you can pick up tacit knowledge.

I love how this approach shatters the myth of finding "your true calling", and instead encourages exploration, experimentation, and play. Big decisions are scary, tiny trials are fun. The idea that you have one true job you are meant to do never rang true to me. How could I be destined to push buttons on machines that didn't exist when I was born? Did God know what JavaScript was back then?

Brainstorming identities

Blue Ocean! Go wide! Get weird! There's something freeing about thinking in multitudes. It's easier to come up with twenty or thirty ideas than it is one. If you haven't already, I recommend reading the story of the many pots:  (edited below for length)

A ceramics teacher divided the class into two groups. half would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, the other half on quality.

On the final day of class he would weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40  a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one perfect pot to get an “A”.

Well, come grading time a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

While the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Approach this exercise with the zeal of a six-year-old who wants to be an astronaut one day, with a backup plan of cowboy. Here's an example list I came up from this  exercise.

Even if you aren't looking to change your entire career, I find the "identity model" helpful. Everyone has multiple identities across different contexts. You are not your job title. Depending on who you ask, I am a software engineer, father, husband, or slowest guy at the Crossfit gym.

If it helps, you can think of the identities as paths, and then identifying projects among those paths.  

Explore your possible selves

Once you have some ideas, start fleshing out what these possible futures look like. If you can, find ways to step back. It's hard to see past the blinders of habit and daily routine when you are immersed in them.

Here are some questions I've been trying out:

• What would going down this path get you?
• What are some constraints that could stop you?
• What are the risks of going down this path? What could it cost you?
• What do you know that could help?
• Who do you know that could help?  
• What are some potential projects?
• What are some potential experiments?
• What questions do you have about this path?

Explore communities

By socializing with people outside your immediate world, you are able to gain knowledge and insight about other worlds you could not find anywhere else. What are some places you where could hang out with people one step away from where you are now, either online or off?  

You may find "communities of practice",  groups working on something, and "learning to be".

Most opportunities come from personal connections. To get a job in a new field, you'll need new connections.

Design experiments

If you aren't careful, you can get stuck in the "exploratory" phase forever. Well-designed experiments help prevent that. A use experiment:

• Is small as it can be, but no smaller. You want something that isn't intimidating to take on. Scale experiments with your commitment level. Commit two hours, if that works commit two days, if that works commit two weeks.
• Preferably involves interaction with other people. You'll gain a lot more knowledge from others than from "soul searching."
• Should have a discrete end and success criteria. How will you know when to stop, and if it worked. "How it made you feel" is a valid pass / fail metric.

10 Experiment examples

1. Write and share an article. Does it resonate with other people? Did you enjoy writing it?
2. Submit articles for guest posts and paid writing opportunities. This method has the bonus effect of additional feedback, exposure, and maybe enough money for a sandwich or two. In this scenario, gatekeepers become useful feedback sources.
3. Build a landing page, show it off and get feedback from potential customers. Writing it will give you internal feedback, and pitching it will give you external feedback.  
4. Have a service idea? Offer a "free 30-minute consultation" version to others. Alternatively, a paid but heavily discounted option.
5. Rewrite your resume aimed toward the job you want.
6. Apply for the job you want book interviews, even if you don't intend to take the job. (job interviews are a resource)
7. Joining communities counts as experimentation. Try to ask interesting questions, help others, and have a good reply game.
8. Ask someone who has done what you want to do about it. Have specific questions and things you want to learn so don't waste anyone's time. Use the "Who do you know that could help?" and "What questions do you have about this path?" from above to guide you.
9. Take on a bite-sized study project. If I was thinking about building a SaaS, I might try just setting up and hosting an instance of Bullet Train. Bonus points if you show it to others and get feedback.
10. Do some small, actionable learning, like a workshop or short course. Be wary of the wantrepreneur trap of reading & note-taking forever, tricking yourself into believing that's productive. Ideally, some work comes out of it and leads you back to #9.

What you could discover

When doing the experiments, here are some targets to shoot for (yes, another list, my brain is lists):

• Do you enjoy it? (if not, the next questions don't matter)
• Are you good at it? (or could you potentially / would you enjoy getting good at it?)
• Would I be able to make a living doing it? (you can skip this one if you are looking at identities for fun)
• Other findings (general fun facts you find as you go that may be useful in your journey)

As you do these experiments, drop identities once you feel you have enough negative signal, and double down on ones where it's positive.

Go forth and explore

Take some time to reflect, but not too much. Action produces information, and again, you want to avoid the trap of pontificating forever and never moving forward. What's something you've always wanted to do? Start thinking of possibilities, and ways to test them.

Treat it as an ongoing project. The list is never "done", you can come back and make changes over time. (As a new dad, I've had to adjust to the "small random bursts of work" mode over "long stretches of deep thought" mode.) The goal is to remove barriers. Get unstuck.

If you still get stuck feel free to hit me up on Twitter @GSto for help

Once you have some good experiments, start testing them. What did you learn? Where will you go? Who might you become?

You don't want to find the company where you're a good fit, you need to find the job that's a good fit for you. Here are ten tips to help you land your next gig:

1. Consider job titles

Only accept titles of 'senior' or higher. It doesn't matter if you graduated from codingbootcamp.biz six months ago. Some people get the same one year of experience ten times!

2. Pick the right technologies

Stick to cutting-edge technologies. Any framework more than thirty days old is legacy and therefore bad. For example, Ruby on Rails is dead so avoid sad sack companies such as  Bloomberg, Soundcloud, Zendesk, Basecamp, Shopify, Airbnb, Kickstarter, Twitch, GitHub, or Urban Dictionary.

3. Work on the best projects

Only work on projects you want to work on. Remember that doing work that isn't your favorite is a one-way path to burnout city!😫 Staying in your comfort zone hides your weaknesses and protects your personal brand.

4. Show initiative

Apply to jobs with unsolicited feedback and redesigns of their website. What you lack in context and restraints they had when working on it, you make up for in CSS animations you copy/pasted from Codepen that add pizazz.

5. Avoid coding puzzles

Click that "leave meeting" button when they ask you to code anything. If they want to judge your quality, they can read all of your blogs, review your sample projects from coding school, or take another gander at your resume. You even rated your skills on a 10 scale to make it easy to scan! Companies that don't read every piece of content by every applicant clearly have an understaffed recruiting department, and is that the kind of place you want to work?

6. Build a personal brand

Don't practice coding puzzles. You know what you know, you shouldn't have to "prepare" for an interview. Instead, tweet threads about how all those graph riddles aren't an accurate metric for evaluating you. You build a brand by sharing, not learning. All that engagement might get you leads! Besides, you wouldn't have dropped out of college if you wanted to study for quizzes.

7. Learn in public

After leaving a company, write a think piece explaining how you left a $100 billion company after five months because "there was nothing to learn there." Use that newfound free time to establish expertise by writing think pieces on how other people should be interviewing (#branding!). The comments Hacker News will surely validate your decision to walk away from a remote job with a six-figure salary.

8. Practice self-care

Quit jobs where they expect you to receive feedback. You're too stoic to be around that kind of negativity. Be sure to quit via text so you can post screenshots on /r/antiwork.

9. Stay up to date

Stay current via extreme onlineness. Follow people who work 45 minutes per week (never on Fridays!)  and make $245,000/year (plus benefits!) Keep up with people on round 13 of their interview process and can no longer even. Reflect on how everyone in the tech industry is so great (source: YouTube) and so horrible(source: Twitter) in parallel. Reflect on why you aren't doing as good as everyone else seems to be, if things will ever get better, or if you'll ever stop feeling like an impostor. Wonder if making career decisions attempting to make your reality match the filtered artifice you see online was maybe not be the correct tactic.

10. Start a Substack

Newsletters are the new self-actualization.

English class does a terrible job of preparing you to write on the internet. And since more jobs are remote and the internet runs on words, it pays to learn more practical methods.

In school writing assignments are singular and linear. You are given a topic, do some research, come up with an outline, write a draft, and finish your essay. Online writing is the opposite: multi-threaded and swerving.

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.
Gene Fowler

However, writing isn’t a linear process. It’s an exploratory process where you never know where you’ll end up. Now you aren't optimizing for a good grade, but for better knowledge.

Roam is the perfect tool for this. Roam allows you to create a knowledge graph, a sprawling database of random musings, Twitter threads, kindle highlights, & shower thoughts. Think of them as building blocks you'll use to construct articles, essays, emails, and Twitter threads. From this pile of interlinked chaos, you can perform some word algebra and construct articles. When you have a pile of thought blocks you can't get writer's block.

Here's what the knowledge-graph based process looks like:

The knowledge graph process:

1. capture thoughts and observations in daily notes
2. turn consumption productive by collecting notes from media
3. Refine ideas and work on multiple projects at once
4. article construction over bleeding on a blank page
   
   

Collecting Your Thoughts, Literally

Any note-taking system (if fact any knowledge system, including project management tools) has to solve for two problems: information capture and retrieval. If information is not easy to capture, people will not add information to the system. If information is hard to retrieve, people will not be able to get utility out of the system.

With a knowledge graph, we solve the capture problem with the daily notes page. By default, Roam will create a daily page that will display as the default editor. You can put anything on the daily journal page. This allows you to capture thoughts without having to go through the step of deciding where you are going to capture them.

Roam solves the retrieval problem by using wiki-style links. Here’s an example I pulled from my daily notes.

[[decision making]]- "easy decision model" - two types of easy decisions: arbitrary(heads or tails) and strictly better($100 or $10). make arbitrary decisions as effortless as possible, effort will not get more results. decisions are arbitrary when there is no right answer, or the answer is unknowable (restaurant A vs restaurant B). Making easy decisions faster gets you closer to [[action produces information]].

You can create a note and a link to that note by wrapping any phrase in double square bois. Now, this note links to and belongs to two other notes: “decision making” and “action produces information” in my graph. It also belongs to the day of the daily journal. One note already connects to three other places! You can see how this can quickly spiral into a serial-killer web of knowledge.

I also keep some notes publicly available. You can see examples of notes that’s been through a few iterations by clicking the two links in the paragraph above 👆.

If those nodes did not exist, they are created. Linking to nodes that don’t exist yet is a feature, not a bug. Do this a few times and you’ve created a useful note from nothing.  

Online conversations are another good source for notes. Did you say something useful or answer someone's question on Slack, Discord, Telegram, in your DMs? Track it as a note, and then your nugget of knowledge long after it's vertically scrolled away to the ether.

Writing isn’t necessarily work so much as it is a byproduct of your work. You can collect notes as you work, and if nothing else, create a reference you yourself can use later. As a knowledge worker, you can think of the nodes in your knowledge graph as your personal inventory you can invest in from current projects and reap the benefits in future work.

Turning Consumption Productive

Another source of ideas is research. I’m using the term research liberally here, to include anything from reading academic journals to eyeball-grabbing Twitter threads.

The optimal method is popularized by the book How to Take Smart Notes This book lays out a method called the Zettelkasten, a note-taking system pioneered by Conrad Gassner in the 1500s.

3 Heuristics for Taking Good Notes

• Notes are atomic. A single note should cover a single idea.
• Notes are written for someone else. That someone else is probably you six months from now. It could also be someone reading your article in the future.
• Notes are in your own words. Translating ideas into your own words increases understanding and retention. It's one of the main benefits of this process.
  

Cheating With Computers

Luckily, unlike Conrad, we don’t have to do everything by hand, and keep our notes in boxes of index cards, organized by a numbering system that would by Mr. Dewey Decimal himself proud.

Most of our content is digital, and we can more easily link, cut, copy, and paste.

Here's where I deviate from the traditional note-taking a bit. I do keep notes on articles, books, courses, videos, and even Twitter threads. For shorter pieces of media, I keep notes on them in the daily notes. For longer ones, They get their own page. I created a template page in Roam that looks like this:

Metadata:

URL:

Tags:

Author:

Status:

About The Author

Key Takeaways

Highlights

Status - is either "needs reading, reading, needs processing, done".

Exporting Notes from Kindle Books

While there are some books I prefer to read in dead-tree format, you can’t deny the convenience of books that are delivered in 30 seconds & give your indecisive self the ability to take 300 books with you on your next flight to San Fran.

I use bookcision to export highlights from kindle books into Roam. This is a bit of a cheat on the smart notes system. Ideally, I would rewrite notes in my own words, but I also like having specific quotes with links to locations so I can cite them later if needed. Highlight chapter headings help preserve the structure. When that's done, do a form of progressive summarization: format notes, add your own thoughts, add in chapter headings. Link and tag parts of the book.

In fact, this process of refining notes is something you think about doing all the time.

Reworking, Refining, and Improving Notes

You should think of your notes as being as evergreen as possible.  This helps lay out the linking strategy that will build the knowledge graph over time. Notes are not a writing project where one day you are “done”, they are constantly growing and evolving.

Think of your notes as a garden that you tend to or a code base you manage. (Your graph of notes is a database, after all). Mosey through your digital garden with a boy scout’s mindest, aiming to leave the place a little better than you found it.

6 Ways to Enhance a Note

1. Notes should be linked densely and in context. Favor adding links instead of not. Bias toward including links in the context of notes instead of loosely tying notes together with 'tags'. Links can be to other notes and to external sources.
2. Include a further reading or appendix section This gives the reader additional resources to research the work further.
3. add media - images, Youtube videos, Twitter threads, code samples, etc. all add to the richness of the note.
4. Add more formatting to help with organization (bullet points, bolding, italics, highlights, emojis).
5. If a note is getting too large and no longer feels atomic, branch off part of the note into a smaller, more atomic notes.
6. Review current links and thoughts, and cut items that are no longer relevant.
   

Constructing Articles Out of Your Idea Blocks

Once you have an idea for Roam (ideas you can be collecting in your daily notes, #article ideas), I start a new page with the tag #working article to denote it's an article currently in process. One of the tricks of writing consistently is to have several articles in various states of the process. That way if you get stuck on one you aren't screwed for the week.

1. Collect your notes. I start by adding tags I think might be relevant, including any books or articles I think are relevant.
2. Start sketching out an outline
3. Shift+click to open the notes in the sidebar, then option-click to drag quotes into the main article.  You can also shift+click 2nd-degree connections if they look interesting.
4. Keep adding and refining to your outline. If your notes are original writings, it's like you've pulled off a time travel trick: you wrote your articles before you even started!
5. Keep rewriting, refining, reshaping notes into an article.
   

Putting it all together

One of the secrets to improving writing is to write the same idea more than once. It's how you refine an idea, sharpen your thinking. And creativity is all about remixing; nothing is original, everything is a remix.

There is no rule saying you can't use a block more than once. As Venkatesh Rao lays out in his essay The Calculus of Grit, reusing, remixing, and referencing your existing work is one of the keys to getting more done with less effort.

By capturing notes prolifically, you have more to reuse, rewrite, reference, remix, more and ultimately, more to release. Good note-taking gives you a personal Wikipedia, hell, a personal interweb to pull from to create new and better work.

It's pandemic summer. I'm isolated, I'm bored. I decide to leverage my broadcast experience (former host of AM radio show Classic Country and also reading the weather & eulogies, coming to you live from the internet) and start a podcast: Production Ready.

I want it to be conversational and fun. It's counterintuitive, but adding a bit of structure to the process improved the flow.  Constraints breed creativity and can also breed conversation.

No structure is scary. You could find yourself caught speechless (the cardinal sin of radio is dead air), and your guests may act guarded and anxious if they don't know what's coming.

To alleviate this, I used two templates:

1. A pre-interview email, to help us both prepare and set expectations.
2. An interview question bank. I tweaked it for each episode. I didn't read each question verbatim, instead, I used it as a loose guide to help me get started, and pick up the interview if I got stuck.

A friend asked me how I conducted interviews, so I'm sharing these for him and for anyone else who might find them useful.

The Pre-Interview Email To Put Your Guest At Ease

(I fill in part of these if I had a previous conversation with the guest.  Make it as easy as possible for the guest!

Hey {{future guest}}!

Excited to have you on the show! Here's a Calendly link to book a time:
{{ calendly link }}
If none of those work, let me know what does and we can set something up.


0. Talking points

1. Introduce Yourself! - Please provide a brief 2-3 sentence intro I can use to introduce you.


2. Links - What links would like me to include in the show notes? For example your site, your company's site, and your socials.


3. Out-of-bounds - Is there any topic that's off-limits and you'd like me to avoid?

4. Promotion - Is there anything you'd like me to highlight? If so, let me know here and I'll do my best to organically include it in our talks as well as include links in the show notes.


5. Recommendations?  - Do you know anyone else I should consider talking to? If so, do any topics spring to mind when you think of this person?

Recording Day Notes:

Profanity is allowed, but don't go crazy with it.

Recording won't start until I tell you that it has. Talk before and after the episode is off the record.

Episodes tend to run around 30ish minutes which requires about 35-40 minutes of raw audio, but it's not a hard deadline.

This podcast is more 'conversations with internet friends' and less business venture. I don't take it seriously and neither should you. Have fun with it!

An Interview Question Bank To Prevent Getting Stuck

I aim to keep the conversation flowing. If you listen to the episodes, you can hear that I achieved this 100% of the time, and definitely didn't cut any stumbles or awkward pauses using Descript.

Replace ____ below with the episode topic or guest's area of expertise.

How would your parents describe what you do?

Why is ____ so important?

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve encountered with ___

What are some of the challenges you see people encounter with ___

What are some of the biggest surprises you’ve encountered with ___

What’s next for you?

Have you read any books, articles, or watched any videos that changed how you view ___ ?

If you could give one piece of advice to the listener, what would you tell them?

Follow up questions:
When the guest is excited about what they're talking about, you've found a thread worth pulling. Here are some ideas to help you dig deeper.

‘Tell me more about that.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘Do you think that's because [purposefully wrong opinon]’ (sometimes playing dumb is a good technique to get people to talk. Try it on the internet!)

Now, go forth & cast 🧙‍♂

As of this writing, my podcast is on ice. While I loved doing it I don't have the time to do it well. This means there is a gap in the market for... whatever it was I was doing. Hopefully, these templates can give you a good starting point. If you end up using these, please let me know, I'd love to hear how it turns out.

Want to read more about the show? Check out the season 1 post mortem, where I break down what I learned about writing, community, and getting used to the sound of your own voice.

Earlier in the year, I decided to write and publish 100 notes in a public notebook. Here are the key takeaways from that experiment. This kind of prolific creation habit can help you clarify your thinking and do better work.

I set out to do this inspired by Visa's "do 100 thing" blog post.

Here are 8 lessons from this challenge about writing, creativity, and disciple.

Lesson #1: Work begets work

The first 20 or so notes were easy. 21-80 were a slough. Then, magic: it got way easier to throw together notes. I was able to get through the last 20 easily.

​
​
​Lesson #2: Systems come from work

Patterns that work evolve from work that worked. I didn’t start with a note-taking framework, one to evolve over time. What I ended up with was a mix of Andy Matuschak ’s take on evergreen notes + collecting links/quotes

​
​
​Lesson #3: Ideas come from work​

Your work is smarter than you. Creating and sharing more is how you get to improve. Creating more helps you see where've you been, so that you may better see where to go next. Feeling stuck?

Do

The

Work.

​

Lesson #4: Break free from the ‘essay trap’

notes = shorter idea -> publish cycle.

Articles require extra work to get the idea out: structure, banner image, SEO, calls to action, etc. I love having a space between ‘private scribbles’ and ‘refined essay.’

​

Lesson #5: Release, rework, refine

Only start from scratch once.

Build on existing work.

By taking private notes and reworking them into a state they could be useable by someone else, I refined my thinking. Picked this one up from Venkatesh Rao's Calculus of Grit​

Treat your writing like a codebase. Notes need occasional refactoring and maintenance.

​

Lesson #6: Don't get distracted

Notes are markdown files in 11ty (specifically @binyamingreen ’s digital garden implementation) There’s a lot I can do with ‘notes as code’ - But I put all of that aside so I could focus on finishing the 100 notes I set out to do.

Every project comes with plenty of work it’s better to not do.

​
​Lesson #7: Have Fun

Creativity requires play. To be more prolific, you have to give yourself permission to write junk. Not everything is going to be good, and that's ok.

Work that doesn't succeed teaches.

​
​browse the garden 🌻 ​

If you're looking for a particular place to jump in, some of the richer notes are about working identities, web3, and prolific creation.

I've been dipping my toes into Decentralized Finance(DeFi). In my opinion, the gains are real but temporary. I've been trying to map out the easiest path to roll your own high-yield savings account.

Here's what I came up with:

How To Set Your High-Yield Savings Account

1.  Set up an Account on Coinbase

You'll use Coinbase to convert your money into crypto. You'll hold what is called a "stablecoin", a form of cryptocurrency where 1 token = $1 USD in value.

2. Get a Phantom Wallet

A wallet is both a place to store tokens and your ID card on crypto applications. Note the passphrase you get and keep a copy in a secure place. You'll be using the Solana blockchain, which the Phantom wallet uses.

Add Phantom to Chrome

3. Buy Some Solana on Coinbase

As much as you feel comfortable with. You won't be holding this for long and soon you'll be converting it into stablecoin. You will incur a small fee. You can pay a smaller fee by using Coinbase Pro but it's a bit more complicated.

4. Transfer your Solana to your Phantom Wallet

Copy the address from your wallet and paste it into Coinbase's send/receive feature.

5. Convert Your Solana to stablecoin (USDC-SL)

You can do this using the swap feature in your wallet. This is the 'stablecoin' that will keep your money in. This way you're protected from the fluctuations of the frothy crypto market.

6. Lend your stablecoin on tulip.garden

Go to https://tulip.garden, let's lend some money! · log in with your wallet · go to lending and deposit your stable coin. As of this writing, you can get 16% APY as of this writing, but be aware the rates are highly variable.

When you're ready to withdraw

Same process as above, in reverse.

• withdraw your loan
• convert to USDC -> SOL
• send SOL -> Coinbase
• withdraw into your bank account

What are the risks?

Cryptocurrency accounts are not insured, so if something were to happen to your account you're out of luck. You need to be careful with your wallet, to ensure that you, and only you, maintain access to it. There's always a chance something could happen to Tulip Garden or the Solana chain, making it difficult or impossible to liquidate your position.

Having said that, I do this with some of my own money and have trust in the companies and technologies involved here. But do your own research before investing any of your own money.

How are rates this high?

You might be wondering, how are these rates possible? The short answer is that there is a lot of capital pouring into the space & new exchanges and apps offer rewards to incentivize adoption.

How did Uber get started? paying drivers a big fee, and giving away free rides Think of the current state of DeFi like that. Early Uber drivers could make bank. The same holds true for early DeFi adopters.

Here's Nat Eliason's take on "how are yields so high?"

In almost all cases, they're coming from "incentivized liquidity pools." A method of launching new tokens that can be done with a conservative long-term plan, or with a "live fast and die young" hyper-aggressive schedule where they're praying the demand outpaces their insane inflation rate.

Other investors do something called 'leverage farming' where they invest tokens, borrow against them, re-invest what they borrow, etc. This practice causes the high yields from incentivized liquidity pools to flow down to simpler financial instruments, like private lending.

(By the way, I got my start in Decentralized Finance (DeFi) with Nat's course, I highly recommend it: DeFi Orientation)

Or, if you have any questions about this kind of thing, feel free to hit me via email or on Twitter

This post is not investment advice and is for entertainment and informational purposes only.

Do your own research.

wagmi

I've been studying Decentralized Finance(DeFi) for two months, playing board games since I was six. So here's Liquidity Pooling in  explained with Settlers of Catan:

"Wood for Sheep?"

Catan has a liquidity problem. Settlers had trouble bartering for what they needed. No one can build infrastructure. economic progress stagnantes.

First, Tokenized Resources

The different values of resources are a problem. Settlers create coins representing divisible resources. "1.6 WoodCoin for 1 BrickCoin." Trade increases.

Finding like buyers is another challenge. Two settlers have to have matching needs and wants.  Today, the only solution is to pay exorbitant conversion rates:  3:1 to traders or 4:1 to bankers.

Then, SettlerCoin Emerges

The settlers have another idea: an exchange market where settlers can trade any coin for any other. The exchange can take a small fee in exchange for convenience.

The settlers want to share in the exchange's ownership and have a common currency for fees and incentives. SettlerCoin ($SET) is created. pairs including $SET appear on the exchange.

For this to work, the exchange would need a pool of all coins that could fulfill trades. But on one settler is rich enough front enough resources. So instead, the exchange offers a cut of the fees collected in exchange for lending their resources.

Next, Liquidity Pooling

Now settlers can trade anything for anything without paying outrageous prices. In addition, Settlers can earn from resources while holding onto them. To keep the market balanced, the exchange asks for people to lend in pairs.

There's a pair where the market is short. They are having trouble meeting the demand of people who want to trade BrickCoin for SheepCoin.

The market decides to offer additional incentives for people to lend BrickCoin/SheepCoin pairs. To increase the liquidity of $SET, it may also incentivize pairs that include it.

In the old days, a settler who had excess grain and wanted ore, but couldn't find another settler, would have to lose wealth trading with merchants and banks.

Today?

The New Catan Financial System

that settler could go to the market and exchange his WoodCoin for SheepCoin, OR: that settler takes his WoodCoin, swaps some for $SET, and stakes a WoodCoin/$SET pair. The settler then buys Sheep with the $SET he earns.

The second step is more complicated, but all the settlers end up wealthier with no merchants or bankers taking massive cuts.

That is, until someone rolls a 7.

In The Real World

There are systems that exist like this in the cryptocurrency space. Sites like Alchemix and Tulip Garden allow you to loan pairs of coins, and receive rewards in return. It's not without risks, but if you are looking for a way to further leverage your cryptocurrency, it's worth investigating.

Website performance affects your users' experience, SEO, and conversion rates.

Users are happier with a site that loads quickly. Google rewards sites that provide that experience with higher search engine rankings. And having a site that loads fast is easier to use for people in areas with low-quality connections.

In this post, you'll learn:

• how to audit and measure your site’s performance
• identify some of the biggest wins you can achieve to improve website performance.

Exactly How Browsers Render Web Pages

It helps to understand what’s going on under the hood before you begin optimizing. Once you enter a URL into your browser, it sends a request to a server, and the server sends back a response in the form of an HTML document. Once your browser receives this, it starts parsing the file from top to bottom. The moment when the browser begins rendering visible content is known as first paint. It’s the very first impression your users get with your site.

When the browser is rendering the page, it works from top to bottom. While doing so, it loads other resources as they come up: images, style sheets, and scripts. These additional requests mean the browser loads more data into memory and makes more round trips to the server. These scripts are executed. The moment when all of the initial scripts are finished running and your users can start using the page is called first interaction.

You get the biggest wins in website performance by reducing the time it takes the user to get to first paint and interaction. And you can achieve this by reducing one or more of:

• the size of requests
• the number of requests
• the speed at which they execute.

How to Audit Your Website's Performance

There are several tools available to measure your website performance and get started. You can use tools like Google Chrome’s built-in Lighthouse tools or Raygun’s Real User Monitoring insights tool. Google’s Lighthouse tools can give you a holistic look at your website’s performance, whereas more advanced tools such as Raygun can help you drill down further with specific, actionable advice.

To get started with Google’s tools, all you have to do is open the Chrome developer tools, navigate to the audits tab, configure your settings for what metrics you’d like to see and for which platform, and click “generate report.”

With these tools, you can start to identify potential areas for improvement. Once you look at the report, you’ll see some information about some of the critical factors that play a role in web performance.

Here are some other ways you can improve your website’s performance.

Optimize Your Images

If you’re not careful, images could be one of the largest parts of the size of your page. There are several ways you can improve the load time of your images:

• Right-size your images. Make sure your images are the right size. You don’t need to load a picture that’s 2,400 pixels wide for a space that won’t render larger than 400 pixels.
• Optimize your images. You can use tools such as ImageOptim or SVGOMG to reduce the size of your images.
• Use modern, efficient image formats. Ensure you're using the correct image format. Use SVGs for icons or simple drawings and JPEGs when you need photographic quality. A recent addition to the web is WebP images, which can provide even better performance.
• Avoid decorative images. Don’t use images for stylistic elements when you could achieve the same effect with HTML and CSS.
• Defer image loading. You can improve the time to first paint by deferring the loading of images until they're needed—for example, not loading images that are off the screen on the initial page load.

If you want to optimize your site, images are often an excellent place to start. You can optimize images and significantly reduce your page weight without changing any other functionality to your site. But once you move past that, there are other ways you can reduce the overall size of your web page.

Minimize Page Weight

Here are some ways you can minimize the weight of your page.

• Minify your JavaScript and CSS. Your files should be served in a single file and bundled as small as possible. There are many tools to help with this, such as Uglifier.
• Be wary of fonts. Fonts are another source of requests that affect not only actual performance but perceived performance as well. Don’t load fonts or font weights you aren’t using, and be sure that you have fallbacks that work in all browsers.

Besides page weight, another factor in your page’s performance is the number of requests that you make and how you make them.

Reduce Request Count

Another way to improve website performance is to reduce request count. Here are some strategies to do that:

• Combine scripts into a single file. You shouldn’t be loading multiple JavaScript or style sheet files if you can help it. Each one adds to your load time, and if you aren’t actively monitoring them, these things can add up. Combine your scripts before sending them over the wire.
• Remove unneeded plugins. If you're using a site builder tool such as WordPress or Shopify, you should be wary of how these can affect performance. Audit your plugins and ensure that you aren’t using any that aren't needed. They could be adding additional files, increasing the number of requests, or doing more work on the back end, causing slower initial load times.
• Combine third-party scripts with a tag manager. Similar to plugins, tracking scripts add additional requests, and thus loading time, to your site. Remove libraries you aren’t using, and combine the rest using tools like Google Tag Manager.
• Inline JavaScript and CSS. Another option is to reduce requests by bundling them into a single one. Instead of storing your JavaScript and CSS in separate files, you can inline the code into the HTML files from your server, further cutting down on the number of requests.

Load and Execute Scripts Intelligently

Besides the number of requests, you can also improve website performance by controlling when those scripts load. You have two tools at your disposal: where you place the scripts and using async and defer tags.

Web pages load from top to bottom, and scripts that are inside the <head> tag load before scripts in the footer of your file, before the end of the <body> tag. As a general rule, you’ll want to keep scripts at the bottom of your file unless there is a compelling reason not to. One example is affiliate tracking, where you want to ensure as much accuracy as possible.

The other way to control when script tags execute is using the attributes async and defer on your <script> tags. By default, the browser blocks render when they run into a <script> tag and wait for it to finish. When you add an async attribute to the <script> tag, instead, the browser fetches the JavaScript and continues rendering the page, executing the JavaScript whenever it's received. When you add a defer attribute, the browser waits to execute the code in that script until after the initial render of the page.

Shorten Server Response Time

Before the browser does any of this work, your server has to get these resources to the browser. Sometimes the most valuable optimization you can make is to shorten the time to get to the browser. Complex code on the server-side or expensive database queries can be causes of slow page load times. Another common culprit is when you're waiting on third-party scripts.

Distance between the server and the origin of the request affects load time as well. If your server is in Virginia and a user from Egypt requests your site, that request takes more time to complete than if they were one county over. What do you do when the limiting factor for performance is the speed of light? You can create copies of your site using a CDN.

Another option is caching. You can save stuff so that you don’t have to recompute it every time. Caching could take the form of caching pages, similar to what WordPress’s Jetpack engine does, or caching expensive database queries on the server-side.

Optimize Slow-Running Code

Another culprit could be that your JavaScript code is running slowly. What are some common features of inefficient JavaScript code?

• Order of complexity. Are you looping through large data sets? This can cause slowness in your application.
• Interacting with the DOM too much. Manipulating the HTML structure of your page requires the browser to re-render the page. Doing this too frequently can cause performance issues.
• Reduce DOM complexity. The more complicated the structure of your page, the longer it takes to update and re-render it. Remove excess elements whenever you can.
• Inefficient event handlers. There are two main culprits when it comes to event handlers. The first is executing complicated code in event handlers that run frequently. An onMouseMove attribute, for example, can run hundreds of times per second. The second is attaching event listeners without removing them when you remove the element they're attached to, which can cause memory leaks.

To improve website performance, be sure to optimize slow-running code.

How to Start Your Optimization Journey

Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas on how to improve website performance. Knowing what the issues are in the first place is often more difficult than fixing them.

Interviewing for a technical position is stressful. It burns out and breaks down many a developer. But with the right mindset, you can use the process to improve your interviewing skills and become a better developer.

When it comes to interviewing, you need to be more antifragile.

In this article, You'll learn how to adjust your mindset with interviewing. You can change interviews from something that breaks you down into something that builds you up.  

What is "Antifragility"?

Antifragility is anything that loves randomness or uncertainty. Systems and people that gain from disorder and chaos are considered antifragile. People, systems, and items that break under stress are fragile. The term comes from Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.

Note that this is different from being robust; A robust system doesn't care about stress or disorder one way or another.

Interviews are stressful and random.

Interviewing is an exhausting experience. Bad hires are expensive, so companies would rather have false negatives (disqualifying a well-qualified candidate) than false positives (hiring someone ineffective). Interviews start from a place of distrust.

From the interviewee's perspective, interviews are variant and random. Any interview could consist of one or more exercises:

• online quizzes
• pair programming
• take-home assignments
• whiteboarding (virtual or in-person)
• big-picture questions
• architecture questions
• behavioral questions  

And on and on. You might have to do hours of unpaid labor before actually getting to talk to an interviewer.

All of the above considerations give the hiring party the benefit of the doubt in being thoughtful about their hiring process. Unfortunately, that just isn’t always going to be the case. I also don't give companies the benefit of the doubt here. If you are interviewing for a company that has a small team or where engineering is not the primary value driver of the business, it's more likely that they will have put little thought into their process.

Often the person interviewing you will be a developer. They may not __want __to be interviewing candidates and would much rather be working on whatever feature they have due at the end of their current sprint. They may not have spent time practicing their interviewing skills and are winging it. Sturgeon’s law is very much in effect.

ninety percent of everything is crap – Sturgeon's Law

So, how can you turn this process into a good thing for you?

Build an Antifragile process

Like any other deliberate practice, any interview is a repetition you can use to improve your skills. You may be frustrated that you have to learn skills that seem irrelevant to the job you are trying to get, but that's part of the game. The sooner you can make peace with this, the better.

Think of interviewing skills as an investment in yourself. You are helping yourself get better opportunities. The same goes for puzzle algorithms. So now, let's look at how you can take your interviewer's questions and use them for your personal benefit.

Build a Question Collection

Take note of questions that you are asked frequently or ones that trip you up. Afterward, take some time to write out answers. Don't show up to an interview and reading from a script, but the act of writing will help you think through your answers and do better next time.

If you don't prepare, interviewers only get to hear your first draft. First drafts aren't representative of anyone's best work.

Treat interviews as a feedback loop. If you are failing at certain points, that's a signal of a weakness you can work upon.

If you're brave (and remote), record yourself.  

When interviewing via Zoom, you have the ability to record the call. I wouldn't tell the interview you are doing this, and I wouldn't share it with anyone else. An interviewer may not take kindly to you sharing their questions.  Watch it yourself and see how you come across. I know, it's uncomfortable, but if you can get used to it, you can get some insight into how you come across to others.

Learn to accept rejection

You’ll deal with rejection during your interviewing process. Interviewing is a numbers game, and that makes it inevitable. Sometimes it won't be your fault. Realizing this is the first step to making peace with it. You’ll need to be able to handle rejections to bounce back, put on a smile, and jump back into your next interview.

Let interviews build you up, not break you down.

You could think of interviews like gym sessions: painful at the moment, but they make you stronger. Or think of it like iterative software development; You tested your interview system, got feedback, then you add features and fixed bugs.

As an additional benefit, you'll be more confident and at ease in your interviews when you're less stressed. That makes you a more attractive hire.

Interviewing is a numbers game on your side also. If you keep interviewing and improving, you will find your next role eventually.

I've recently implemented a change to my LinkedIn profile, one that helps me filter out automated recruiter spam. I call it "The Wolf Test"

Here's how it works:

1. Replace your first name with an emoji of your choice. I went with the Wolf 🐺.
2. Fill in the last name field with your first and last name.
3. Enjoy the hilarious salutations from automated messages:

As of this writing, Recruiters have a 1-16 record.

Why the Wolf Test?

I shouldn't have to do this. No one should. But the job market for developers is in a weird place and LinkedIn only exacerbates the weirdness. There's more demand than supply for senior-level engineering talent. Recruiters play a numbers game and reach out to as many developers as possible. The shift towards remote work has increased the volume; an increasing number of remote developers and remote positions equals more noise in the job market.  

Like most technical solutions, the recruiting tools LinkedIn sells don't solve a problem, they just make a process faster.

It's not easy for hiring managers to vet all of these candidates. Hiring is expensive and hiring mistakes even more so. False negatives are acceptable in the process,  but false positives are costly.

These factors combine to create a low-trust environment for developers. More recruiting and positions mean not only more interviews for developers but interviews of increasing time and rigor.

I call this the recruitment meat grinder. As a developer, you go through interview after interview, with people looking for reasons why you aren't good enough.

I understand this is a first-world problem. Woe is me with all of these job interviews and opportunities. I'm grateful for all the opportunity I have, but to be forced into a market of lemons to get it. It's exhausting.

Quality over quantity

After spending three months in the meat grinder, I decided I'm never doing it again. Instead, I'm focusing on quality over quantity. If I need new opportunities I am primarily focusing on what's available through my current network and meager audience. As for recruiters, I'll only consider talking to recruiters who will take the time to read my name on a profile.

They have to pass the wolf test.

Maybe if enough people do it, it'll decrease the effectiveness of recruiter spam and help eliminate it entirely.

We are legion

Why not come join us?