rasulkireev

if you don't know Derek's story you are in for a treat...

i don't want to speak for everyone, but to me he is such a huge inspiration, not only business wise, but also personality wise.

On getting un-burned-out.

https://www.rasulkireev.com/

I use django-allauth and it hasn't failed me once.

FINISHED:

- Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (it's ok)

- A Skill Called Luck by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)

- Unf*ck Your Sales by Jakob Greenfeld (very good)

- Books by Alex West (very good)

- How to Live by Derek Sivers (very very good)

- Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown (really enjoyed it)

- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (it's okay)

- The Narrow Road by Felix Dennis (it's okay)

- Oh Crap! Potty Training by Jamie Glowacki (success)

- Вишнёвый Сад Чехов Антон Павлович (did not like it at all)

- Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift (liked it)

- Hunt, Gather, Parent Michaeleen Doucleff (this book is a game changer, strong recommend for every parent)

- MAKE by Pieter Levels

- Main Street Millionaire by Codie Sanchez

- Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling

- The Sweaty Startup by Nick Huber

- The Last Templar by Raymond Khoury (did not like it at all)

- Чем Люди Живы Лев Николаевич Толстой (nice)

- 80/20 Sales and Marketing by Perry Marshall (pretty good)

- Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (eye opening)

- Growth Levers and How to Find Them by Matt Lerner (meh)

- Alexander Pushking Stories (very nice. crazy how he makes rhymes yet the whole thing makes sense)

IN_PROGRESS:

- War and Piece (I'm shocked at how much I'm liking it)

- Scaling Fast by Swizec Teller (really good, about to finish)

- Unreasonable Hospitality (it alright)

- Mom Test (it's good, but for some reason I keep failing to finish it)

- Marcus Aurelius Meditations (reading it slowly as inspiration strikes)

- Seneca Dialogues

- Ultimate Guide to Link Building by Garrett French

STARTED, BUT DID NOT FINISH (That's a big add list):

- Michel de Montaigne "Essays"

- Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (feels to hard to tackle right now)

- Seeking Wisdom

- Product Led Growth

- Demand Side Sales

- Odyssey by Homer

- Full Stack Tao by Alex Kondov

- Logic for Programmers

- The Story of Philosophy

- The Story of Civilization Vol 1

- The Communist Manifesto Karl Marx

- Economic Facts and Fallacies Thomas Sowell

- The Beginning of Infinity David Deutsch

- Obviously Awesome by April Dunford

- SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome Mary Beard

- American Kingpin by Nick Bilton (it's good, just felt irrelevant, will revisit)

- Indexing Beyond the Basics by Tobias Petry (only read it when necessary)

- The Mind Illuminated by John Yates (can't keep meditations to stick)

Note:

- I keep notes on books I finished on my site, but need to bring it up to date: https://www.rasulkireev.com/book-notes/

Working in TuxSEO (https://tuxseo.com/). The product is good, but no paying customers. I'm working on setting up a cold email campaign to hopefully diversify my outreach.

So in other words, since I'm an introvert developer, i'm trying to grow some balls to start reaching out to people.

Django is a life-changer

I didn't expect this, but I'm really enjoying War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.

Working on generation reliability for TuxSEO. The product is good, but needs to be more reliable. Once that is done, I will move onto the link exchange program. https://tuxseo.com/

This looks amazing, but... I have one worry. Granted I have not yet kick started a project with keel, so I might be wrong. I'm speaking from experience of building my own boilerplate.

Giving so many options, makes the boilerplate very fragile. I recently starter removing optional bits from my boilerplate, cause it became much harder to manage and made the generation very fragile.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Honestly i barely use it, just started to give it a try by adding types where it makes most sense and running with pre-commit. No issues so far. But, again, I'm a very light user.

This looks interesting. But I decided to go with ty in my projects, for the incremental approach.

I'm working alone on an Open Source Blog Automation tool: - https://tuxseo.com/ - https://github.com/rasulkireev/TuxSEO

Built a ton of side projects in the last 5 years with none of them going anywhere. Realized the distribution is a problem. So after reading a bunch of marketing books, I decided to give SEO a try. And after some playing around realized there is potential there and decided to automate this process for all my projects.

Keep struggling with moving away from building more features and focusing on marketing.

Recorded a demo today, will start cold-emailing and reaching out to people who hhopefully will find it useful.

this is amazing! thanks for doing this!

Awesome, thanks for writing this!

As I use AI more and more in my project, i'm starting to explore the possibility of letting it run in a sandbox environment. Will check it out.

I'm still working on Marketing Agents (marketingagents.net) in my free time. Trying to make an open source, self hostable app that will allow founders scale their marketing efforts.

Thinking about future monetization efforts and found myself liking Posthog approach for that.

Host for large companies looking to automate marketing, yet leaving it free (self hostable) for smaller companies that can't pay.

Readwise Reader

Definitely Readwise Reader https://readwise.io/read

I'm lucky that I learn to self host stuff. Once i get tired of working on a thing I can just stop... knowing that it will run without any intervention. don't have to worry about switching providers for anything, since I do all the infrastructure myself

I got tired of all my projects going nowhere due to lack of promotion, so I decided to build a tool for myself to help me do that[0]. It's still early, and I can't work on it full time, but... it's working and i'm liking it.

[0] https://marketingagents.net/

At this point, it is hilarious the speed at which the AI industry is moving forward... Claude 4, really?

i was the same, but then slowly converted to Gemini. Still not sure how that happened tbh

I rely almost fully on Readwise for this. I read, I highlight and I just know that all of the things that were important to me will be there forever.

For extra security I export everything to Obsidian. I also use obsidian to keep a daily log of the things I did and thought.

One last tool, for extra piece of mind if Raindrop. Anything cool I encountered on the web, I just save to Raindrop via quick save.

That's it. All these things fit in very naturally in my flow and don't create unnecessary work for me.

fixed

damn, should use https://getfullyear.com/

I got the job of my dream at the company of my dream by sending an 1 min improvised introduction video + a lengthy cover letter answering all the questions in the job description.

That's the first time I ever tried it and will likely be the last one (since i don't want to go to a different company).

Caveat: this will prob work for a smaller company, not Google-like.

Wrote a small post about it: https://gettjalerts.com/blog/tech-job-video-intro

done: https://github.com/rasulkireev/marketing-agents/blob/main/LI...

https://marketingagents.net - Marketing Automation for Founders who Suck at Marketing. Open Source and Self Hostable

Building this for myself mainly, but hoping others might find it useful. Still very early and building out the bear essentials, but then the hope is to keep reading marketing books and use that to improve the platform.

Add it to built with django!

https://builtwithdjango.com