jjude

Typing prompts isn't even close to as difficult to baking bread

Depending on how good you are at this task. If typing prompts was that easy, there won't be so many tutorials, blog posts, and framework (Act as ... etc)

But there is a difference though. You can ask LLM for "how to write a prompt for ... to prompt you". You can't do that with bread.

Apparently, I am "in the weights". Kimi gets it correctly: https://www.intheweights.com/p/joseph-jude

I am working on two things:

- SophAI (https://www.sophai.app/): an app to connect the dots across cross-domain. As a CTO, I read across multiple domains (tech, design, business, e-com) and often have to connect the dots. I am building this primarily for myself. It is basically a rss parser with a big AI prompt to connect the dots across the blog posts. As I type this, I'm working on adding podcasts to the app.

- CTO field notes (https://www.ctofieldnotes.com/): collection of essays growing out of my 30 years in IT services. One essay every Tuesday.

Building ThoughtSnaps (https://www.thoughtsnaps.app/), a minimal tool that turns short-form writing into social cards, and longer thoughts into SnapEssays: visual documents you can share natively instead of linking to a blog post the algorithm will bury.

Pick a color theme, pick a template, export. No drag-and-drop, no layers, no fuss. I built it to scratch my own itch.

Stack is SvelteKit on the frontend, Go/Fiber on the back. Built oAuth, some templates.

Building primarily using prompts & cursor + agy. Currently building an MCP server (why not ;-) ) for it so AI assistants can generate and export cards directly.

In social media the algorithm determines what you see. On forum boards, everyone sees the same set of posts.

Isn't there an algorithm on HN to boost and downvote? It might be a different algo but there is one.

We have been homeschooling our kids. Homeschooling in India is not that widespread. So when a national newspaper covered our experiment, I got lot of questions around what we were doing. For a while I wrote blog posts answering them.

Now I've written quite a few posts (and given talks), I thought of writing a book. Just wrote two chapters. The draft lives here: https://www.jjude.com/books/hs/

A CEO answered on Twitter:

Mine runs my auto parts company.. tracks 395K products on Amazon, manages 3 warehouses, scrapes competitor pricing, handles email, posts to social media

https://x.com/BrianRoyBarber/status/2023389093648884000

Been using tachyons.css

Would love to take this for a test if it is available for public use

Remember blackhat SEO? This is the new blackhat AEO

Doesn't bsky support rss: profile_url/rss ?

For example: This is rss for Simon Willison: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/rss

I use predictions to prepare rather than to plan.

Planing depends on deterministic view of the future. I used to plan (esp annual plans) until about 5 years. Now I scan for trends and prepare myself for different scenarios that can come in the future. Even if you get it approximately right, you stand apart.

For tech trends, I read Simon, Benedict Evans, Mary Meeker etc. Simon is in a better position make these predictions than anyone else having closely analyzed these trends over the last few years.

Here I wrote about my approach: https://www.jjude.com/shape-the-future/

I want to get good at "taste"

I am a software engineer and I have trained to think logically and structurally. In that processes, I have lost "taste". I don't have any design (user facing) capability. I bet in the near future, developing apps and hosting will become so easy that we will soon see "substack for apps" [1].

If I'm right, the thing that will set me still apart (I'm currently a CTO with 30 years of experience) will be taste and not engineering. Or putting it differently, taste + engineering will set me apart than just engineering.

I don't know what that will look like yet. But that is what I want to learn in 2026.

[1] https://jjude.com/substack-for-apps/

I love the design and content. Keep writing Nicolas

What service(s) are you using now? What did you move to?

I blog using 11ty and host with netlify. No cost. There are gitlab pages, github pages and so many different options to blog for free.

I have been blogging since 2003. My reasons,learning, and rewards and why I still blog:

- It is a personal blog = 1st audience is me. Best self-improvement investment I made - I blog for my present self: I blog about what I read, what I'm thinking about a topic, what I learned etc. But also I blog for my future self: the trends I'm noticing, how I should prepare and I am preparing - Since it is a personal blog, sometimes I blog about books I read, sermons I preach, technical notes. All mixed up. - This year got about 40k YTD traffic, which is not bad for a personal blog. Highest traffic came for my post on openwebui.

Benefits I've seen: - I am not selling anything or running ads. So there are no first order monetization - Since I blog about topics that matter to me (career, tech trends), I already have a clear thinking on those topics. So when they come up for discussions, I am able to speak clearly and with depth. That has landed me in promotions, faster career growth, coaching opportunities, and more - People share my blog post when certain topics come up for discussion. This has increased my influence and their respect towards me.

If you are interested to see how my blog has changed over time, I have kept a changelog: https://www.jjude.com/changelog/

Having a daily routine. It helps you start your day well. But to have this routine, you need to get a lot of other stuff well too (ex: if you want to get up fresh, you need to go to bed on time. If you have to go to bed on time, you need to finish your work at least 30 min prior and so on). I wrote about my morning routine here: https://www.jjude.com/morning-routine/

As Ed Throp says, there are offense & defense mechanism to longevity (which includes mental health). He says,

The goal is to have a long life that’s also a healthy, productive one. As opposed to being in assisted living somewhere.

defense: minimize chances of bad outcomes which includes regular check-ups offense: exercise + diet

His full interview is here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-04-10/anti-agin...

My summary is here: https://www.jjude.com/cpn/edward-thorp-on-longevity/

Read the book Smartcuts and see if you can use one of the 9 ideas the author talks about to move to a new situation (review here: https://www.jjude.com/smartcuts/)

Since you have work experience in backend (doesn't matter java / c#), and AWS certifications, leverage them. I would advice against going to front-end at this moment. FE is comparatively a different beast.

Without knowing lot of your details (your domain, residence etc), here are some options that I could think of (some of which I have done in 30 years of experience).

- move to a company that uses the same tech but in a different domain (say logistics to finance) and then jump from there to a company that uses a modern tech (finance legacy tech to fintech company using rust or go) - within the same domain can you create a portfolio of side projects which are all aligned in some way - say if you are in retail, can you create projects on teraform scripts to deploy .net projects to multi-cloud (gcp, aws, azure); or for supporting blue-green deployment; idea is to use your "modern" knowledge within legacy but creating public portfolio to showcase your "modern" knowledge. - find a local leader that you admire (if you go to city-wide tech conferences or something like that you can find some like this), and ask them if you can help them with something as a side-hustle. They don't have to pay but they have to write a recommendation on LinkedIn for your work. Most tech leaders who talk have some projects going on and they struggle with their time. You can help while building a good portfolio - combination of some of the above

Do a combination of content creation (git projects, video streaming of coding, writing on LinkedIn ...), building a network, and obtaining social proof (recommendations). This will help you get good jobs.

For long term, this is the roadmap I would encourage: https://www.jjude.com/learn-next/

I also wrote about how the jobs are evolving: https://www.jjude.com/future-of-jobs/

Mimic Marketer is useful. Sharing with my marketing friends

I am working on something similar but with a different view. I like to get random essay to read whenever I am bored or in-between tasks. So I developed this: https://read2reflect.com/

I have added only about 35 essays for now. Might pick up some from your list too.

Over the years, I've read countless books. I started documenting one idea that shaped my thinking from each of these books. This idea may or may not be the core theme of the book.

Hope to document 100 ideas. Wish me luck.

https://www.jjude.com/100-ideas-from-books/

If you don't read news, you are uninformed. If you read news, you are misinformed

All mental models are wrong. But some are more useful than others. Religion falls in this category.

I think values, goals, and constraints are all valuable, but it's a hierarchy. We should create constraints that help us become more aligned with our values.

Thank you for saying it so well.

I have found difficulty in finding my values. Writing my obituary helped: https://www.jjude.com/my-obituary/. I wrote that almost 16 years back (published only in 2020). It helped me choose my pursuits well.

I don't live in the biggest house in town, or own a sports car. But I work for 3 days a week, homeschool two kids, have breakfast and dinner together as a family, we either workout at home or swim as a family, preach in two churches, and enjoy my work. I consistently feel, I am living in a dream.

isn't the top book recommended by everyone the most

Agreed. everyone's context is different and hence the books are different; even the lesson gained for the same book will be different.

- In the blog post I linked to the "best business books" by "Personal MBA": https://personalmba.com/best-business-books/

- I talked about 3 letters to shareholders

- And talked about the Bible

- I talked about books by Alan Weiss & Derek Sivers

Having read hundreds of books over 25 years, here’s what I think about business books:

- To understand some domain you need knowledge + insights + discernment. Books give you knowledge. Only when you apply you will get discernment. When you apply you will get specific questions which then triggers seeking more knowledge.

- Every book is a map. It leaves out a lot so readers can understand the domain. If your interest align with that map, you'll find the book useful. Otherwise it turns out to be a fluff

- Most books could be a tweet (directive). Once you understand something, it could be expressed as a directive. Until then, you need stories, explanations, and nuance.

- Jesus' command: love God and love others is a short directive of Ten commandments, which in themselves are condensed directives of the Bible. When we hear only the directive, we lose the context and we misunderstand. That's where stories come into play. Tim Ferriss' "4 hour week" makes sense when you read all the stories (playbooks, delegations etc). You leave all of that out, "4 hour week" is a (misunderstood) crap.

- Don't read recently published books. wait at least until 5 years. Let it be looked at it from all angles. Then read it.

- If you want to learn emerging topic (like GenAI), don't read books. Join communities and learn from them. Like Perplexity community for GenAI.

- Read practicing philosophers. When you want to learn swimming, learn from swimmers turned coach, not someone who stood by poolside and watched 10000 swimmers (like Jim Collins did)

- Read annual letters to shareholders (by Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Biglari ...). They have more signal than noise.

I started writing a reply and it became lot bigger than I intended. So I blogged here: https://www.jjude.com/read-biz-books/

This is what then PM Nawaz Sharif said about Kargil war:

After the war, Nawaz Sharif, Prime Minister of Pakistan during the Kargil conflict, claimed that he was unaware of the plans, and that he first learned about the situation when he received an urgent phone call from Atal Bihari Vajpayee, his counterpart in India. Sharif attributed the plan to Musharraf and "just two or three of his cronies", a view shared by some Pakistani writers who have stated that only four generals, including Musharraf, knew of the plan.

Possible he was lying. But this is an accepted view even in the Pakistan.

Pakistan is not economically strong enough to participate in a war,

Pakistan has nothing to lose. So there are lots of incentives for Pakistan army to go rogue.

Pope John Paul II was also extremely popular across the world.