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What happened to Digital Tech Trek Digest?

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I started 2024 with several goals. The first goal was to iterate over some weekend project ideas and actually deploy them. These were never designed to make money or have widespread value; they were an exercise in iterating over an idea in preparation for a larger project. This led to InstanceHunt, which turned out to be very useful, lead to a few interesting leads including MicroConf. I also have a number of future features on my todo list. I have always wanted to keep product configs so I dropped Configs Info the next month as a weekend project. Likewise, there are plenty of additional feature ideas.

A second goal was to read more outside my comfort zone. As part of keeping notes, I started publishing weekly the Digital Tech Trek Digest for the first three months of 2024. It was not part of the original goal to share the details; it just worked out that way. I still read many of my sources regularly including TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS, Micro Newsletter and more. I guess my draft of lucky #13 never made it to publication. However, my time of writing was in preparation toward my next goal of 2024.

My third goal for 2024 was to pursue taking an idea into an actual product and to look at making founder-led sales and have a goal of producing a product. I expected this would be most of 2024 before I had a deliverable. Of the 5-7 ideas I considered, I decided on one and started creating a POC, creating some slides, talking with people, and spending a lot of time on how I could market and sell my startup idea. On March 26, I decided to take my large startup idea and narrow the focus to a specific and immediate problem that could be solved; however, this is not the goal of my startup. That problem was helping customers stop paying the AWS tax of RDS Extended Support.

For the past two months, I’ve been striving to accelerate creating a SaaS solution, learning how to rewrite all my code on Go, thinking about how to identify my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), determine a Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) fixture, and talk with prospects and potential partners. All this also happening in May, which is surprisingly a month of way too many end-of-school events.

Stay tuned. News is coming soon.

Digital Tech Trek Digest [#Issue 2024.07]

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Everything you need to know about seed funding for startups

A recent call with a startup founder funded by TinySeed led me to learn about MicroConf and Rob Walling. (Thanks Tony for the info). This has led to a lot of great info in several new newsletters and videos including this video. A few very valuable tips I learned included the answer to Why should you raise funds at all? The 1-9-90 rule, and different types of funding including Indie funding. It was interesting to find out that the TinySeed accelerator is 1 year, and not 13 weeks, which is common in NY. Rather than sharing my notes, go watch the video.

5 Books That Paved My Path to Entrepreneurial Success

I have not heard of any of these books, and I have such a long list, perhaps I need to publish my list and elicit feedback on prioritizing. The list from this article is as follows:

    1. Mastering negotiations with never split the difference
  1. 2. Embracing risk with skin in the game
  2. 3. Building habit-forming products with Hook
  3. 4. The roadmap to a billion dollar app in How to Build a Billion Dollar App

Visualization

Last week I was at two events in Brussels. I chose to head to London to fly home. I found this map present in many tube stations (The tube is the London Metro Subway). It’s been a decade since I was in London, and over two decades since I lived in the UK. I found the new map great. When I mentioned it as a good visualization, I was surprised that locals of the London area thought it was horrible. I saw the value in the visualization, but perhaps others see it like art, “in the eyes of the beholder”. It could also be “habit”.
London Tube Map - 2024 presentation
Typical London Tube map

Cats and Dogs

How many *NIX `cat` memes can there be? Well, a lot cat is the most misused thing by programmers new to Linux. I cringe every time someone uses it wrong in a bash script. Thread below with proper uses of cat only.

Hey, dogs, you are in the count also with HTTP STATUS DOGS. My picks are 300 Multiple Choices, and 429 Too Many Requests for me.

Upcoming Events on my radar

About “Digital Tech Trek Digest”

I take some time early in the morning to scan my inbox newsletters, the news, LinkedIn, or other sources to read something new covering professional and personal topics of interest. Turning what I read into some actionable notes in a short, committed time window is a summary of what I learned, what I should learn and use, or what is of random interest. And thus my Digital Tech Trek.

Some of my regular sources include TLDR, Forbes Daily, ThoughWorks Podcasts, Daily Dose of Data Science and BoringCashCow. Also Scientific American Technology, Fareed’s Global Briefing, Software Design: Tidy First? by Kent Beck, Last Week in AWS to name a few.

Random

I shared with a colleague on Feb 9. “3 SQL databases walked into a NoSQL bar. A little while later, they walked out because they couldn’t find a table.”