Read how a single coder can make $45K/mo
Learn about solopreneurship, getting caught up in being technically right at the expense of being effective, and celebrate AWS Lambda's 10th birthday!
I always wanted to build a small product/service that can generate small revenue per person but scale well. This week’s digest features two amazing entrepreneurship stories that will make you pull out that product idea that you never got around to doing and start coding it for the weekend.
My solopreneur story: zero to $45K/mo in 2 years (19 min)
Ok, this is a lengthy one. Have you ever wanted to build your app? And generate some revenue from your creativity and your coding? This article shares
‘s story, where he walks you through both his successes and failures in building small products that got him quite some money and quite some freedom.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn how to build products as a solopreneur
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐🌟
AWS Lambda Turns 10 (9 min)
In November last year, AWS Lambda turned 10 🥳 Somehow, this makes me feel old 👴🏻. This article pays respect to this serverless soon-to-be teenager by describing the motivation behind AWS building this paradigm-shifting service, describing its internal design and decade-long evolution.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about AWS Lambda
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Picking your battles when you are hyper-rational (5 min)
If you are reading this newsletter you are probably on the hyper-rational end of the mindset spectrum. You probably were in many conversations where you caught the person on the other end saying something that does not make sense, or perhaps even something completely wrong. You must have felt the strong urge to clarify or to correct them, to get things fully on the right track. This article will tell you why that is not always the best use of your rationality. Don’t win the battle at the cost of losing the war.
Audience: All professionals
Value: Learn to be more effective in your communication
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
The dumbest career hack that's worked 100% of the time 🍓 (2 min)
This one is not a tech article. I stumbled upon it and could not help but include it in the list. Perhaps it was
’s big smile on the photo at the beginning of the article that hacked my brain into doing it 🤷. Whatever it was, if you want to try out a zero-effort hack that is “…like finding a cheat code in a video game that makes you invincible… Except this one works in real life.“ read this one.Audience: Anyone really
Value: Learn a hack for advancing your career faster
ToT Rating: ⭐⭐
Applying the Core 4 framework (Part 2) (5 min)
led us through ways of collecting developer productivity metrics and shared a useful survey template for that. In this article, it gets more juicy as she shares how can you translate the numbers you established as your developer productivity baseline to business impact. This gives you a clear strategy for influencing your leaders into making DevEx investments.Audience: Engineering Managers/DevEx
Value: Learn to translate DevEx improvements into business impact
ToT Rating: ⭐
Building a best-selling game with a tiny team – with Jonas Tyroller (9 min read, 1h 30 min podcast)
This is another indiepreneur story. This time, it is about indie games, and in this one, Jonas Tyroller, the author of Thronefall, shares his amazing story of building a game that sold 1M copies in the first year.
Audience: Software Engineers
Value: Learn about indie game development
ToT Rating: ⭐
That’s all for today! Hope you enjoyed it and see you on Monday!
Jovan