Yevgeniy Brikman, a software engineer and author of Terraform books, writes on developer productivity, tech talks, infrastructure and startups.
HN links it for his essays on the 10x developer and on ad-driven tech talent, and commenters mention his Terraform book and talks.
Check out the talk Startup Ideas and Validation [1]. The key insights are:
* Innovative ideas are rarely, if ever, eureka moments. They usually evolve after spending a huge amount of time thinking about a specific problem.
* Ideas do not form out of nothing. You are not creating new knowledge so much as finding new ways to connect knowledge that you already have. So the more you know, the more ideas you can have.
* The environment plays a huge role in helping you combine your existing knowledge in novel ways. There are a number of tweaks you can make to your environment that make it easier to come up with great ideas, including keeping an idea journal (write down not only ideas, but problems you encounter on a daily basis), regularly letting your mind wander and relax (fixation can prevent creativity), adding constraints to the problem (constraints breed creativity), playing the "Wayne Gretzky Game" (live in the future and build what's missing), and seeking out pain (where there is pain, there is opportunity).
[1] http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/02/14/startup-ideas-and-validation/
>I always saw 10x average, not worst. See: http://antirez.com/news/112 (first result on google after writing "10x developer")
It's a pity that's the first result, because it's flat wrong. This article actually talks about the origin of the claim:
https://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2013/09/29/the-10x-developer-is-not-myth/
I believe in 10x programmers, because I have known many programmers over the years, and I can think of many pairs where one was clearly 10x as productive as the other. And I think the reason there are 10x programmers is that our profession tolerates a lot of embarrassingly incompetent people. If someone were 10x as productive as an average developer, that would be truly extraordinary. But I don't see 10x programmers as all that extraordinary, because there are so many people who get paid to program but suck at it so bad, that being 10x as productive as they are is not all that impressive.
Infrastructure as code.
Terraform provisions servers and infrastructure based on yaml config files that you can do things like commit to source control and see a diff of changes to your cloud provider. It's really fun but very tied into each specific service providers' nomenclature and services, I wish it was higher level. It provides backends for all the major players but I think there is (was?) some large variation in quality.
Wonderful talk here explaining with real examples: http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2016/03/31/infrastructure-as-code-microservices-aws-docker-terraform-ecs/
Kind of—I have several lists, compiled by others. Here's some:
- http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/05/29/must-see-tech-talks-for-every-programmer/
- https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1198/what-videos-should-everybody-watch
- https://github.com/JanVanRyswyck/awesome-talks
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5511466
- https://github.com/hellerve/programming-talks
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12637239
Plenty of material. ;)
The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads—and that's ok: https://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2014/08/10/the-best-minds-of-my-generation-are/
Also relevant: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-04-14/this-tech-bubble-is-different
Blog post introducing the service:
http://www.ybrikman.com/writing/2015/09/21/introducing-atomic-squirrel-startup-checklist/
Link to startup ideas, referenced in the site: http://www.hello-startup.net/resources/startup-ideas/