A very light list this week, as I’m mostly away for a family event. Hope you’ve all gotten a little R&R this summer! Onto the links!
Reads #
- Human Touch: From the tweet that brought this article to me: “Behind every successful AI system lies…a network of low-cost human labor that laboriously label the data.” Fascinating story.
- Are you an Elite DevOps performer? Find out with the Four Keys Project: I hate the title of this post, but agree with the metrics. Every good team I’ve been a part of has tried to speed up all of those things.
Code & Tools #
- editor.experimental.stickScroll.enabled: Saw this in Assaf’s newsletter, and immediately wanted to try it. Great way to keep context in VSCode as you go into deeply nested function trees.
- Prisma Data Platform: One of the frightening recommendations on Vercel’s site is to allow traffic to your datasources from all IP addresses. In other words, put your database on the internet. On one hand, this is bascially Fauna or Atlas, but these services were developed with the intention of being hardened against the vagaries of the internet (and can even be self-hosted). Postgres? Not so much. Stumbled across this while looking at Prisma as an ORM for one of our projects. Looks like an interesting workaround for traditional databases - at least you get a fixed IP address range to whitelist. Step in the right direction.
Maker & Home Automation #
- Oura Ring: Oura is running a refer-a-friend program right now - I was reminded of this last week during our company meetings in NYC where a full 3 of us PLUS a rock-climbing, tri-competing advisor all were wearing Oura Rings and raving about it. If I had to choose between my Apple Watch and the Ring, the Ring gives me more actionable information and data - it’s the must use daily device. The Watch is more social (gotta close those rings!) and allows easier access to my laptop and phone, so in practice I always want to wear both. The Ring is way better for sleeping and recovery metrics. The data is actionable. For example, my sleep isn’t great when my heart rate takes longer to slow down over the night. The app offers reasons why the heart rate can stay up (e.g. eating too close to bedtime), and I can usually map them to something I did the night before. So, you get an affiliate link today. Not a maker things, per se, but a wonderful set of tiny sensors you can work into your life.