Hi there 👋

2 years ago, in August 2019, I shared this Ultimate Go Study Guide project on GitHub and started to see some interest from the community. 1 year ago, in August 2020, the project had over 11K stars, 900 forks with the help of more than 20 contributors. At the same time, I published The Ultimate Go Study Guide eBook because many people had asked for an eBook version. Only a few months later, Bill Kennedy reached out with an opportunity for both of us to publish the book on Amazon and make it even more accessible for everyone....

4 fundamental ideas that we need in order to design data-intensive applications. Reliable, scalable, maintainable applications. Reliability means continuing to work correctly, even when things go wrong. Common faults and preventions include: Hardware faults: hard disks crash, blackout, incorrect network configuration,… Add redundancy to individual hardware components to reduce the failure rate. As long as we can restore a backup onto a new machine quickly, the downtime is not fatal....

What is a good life according to Stoicism? Having a good life is not about making a good living or having a high-paying job since one could hate the job or have conflicting thoughts about its moral. A person must be virtuous in order to have a good life. A person’s virtue depends on their excellence as a human being, how well one performs the function for which humans were designed....

Guidelines A numbered list is used for each theme, where the higher the number is, the higher seniority level one has. Usually, each is built on top of the previous one. Junior-Senior levels generally focus on engineers executing works (number 1 and 2) while Staff-Principal levels focus on mentoring and guiding others in their work (number 3 and above). Competencies scale through impact: task → project → milestone → team → across teams → organization....

Tinder: pitched the idea to sororities and fraternities around USC campus DoorDash: printed menus and fliers and put them all over Stanford Lyft: asked people in the team for contacts at other startups and arranged a drop-off to give out ice cream and Lyft credits, sent personal invites to friends Uber: went to places like Caltrain station to hand out referral codes Snapchat: went to shopping malls to hand out flyers Etsy: went to all craft fairs across US and recruited sellers Pinterest: started as an invite-only community, went to Apple stores and changed all the computers to say Pinterest, emailed the founder’s connections Dropbox: created a demo and published it on Hacker News TikTok: put a really long application name on App Store so the search engine gave it more weight Loom: launched on Product Hunt, talked to organizations, introduced a referral system Netflix: joined online communities about DVD and movies, befriend my major players and moderators, and slowly, over time, tell them about Netflix Buffer: acquired 100k users solely through guest blogging (150 posts) Yelp: invited friends, mostly coworkers from PayPal and asked them to invite their friends Facebook: invited friends, put on mailing list Quora: had D’Angelo’s and Cheever’s college and high school’s friends, let users invite people LinkedIn: had Reid’s successful friends and connections Slack: asked friends at other companies to try out and give feedbacks Clubhouse: did a private Testflight, kept high quality, made it exclusive, had high-quality referrals from seed users Instagram: gave it to a few people who had large Twitter following within a specific community, contacted press directly Robinhood: put up a landing page with a waitlist that showed how many people were ahead of you or behind you Spotify: new users must be invited by existing users Twitter: leveraged influencer’s posts Product Hunt: started as an email list, sent personal emails to influencers and invited them to contribute to press Airbnb: took an advantage of a political event, made custom cereal boxes with messages to well-known tech bloggers StackOverflow: both founders already had a large followers on their blogs so they invited them to a private beta Asana, Intercom, Okta, Coda: asked friends and former colleagues Carta: asked the angle investors and sister portfolio founders Gusto: first 10 customers came from friends founders knew, YC batch, non-tech small businesses Stripe: setup Stripe on the spot for people who wanted to try, looked for personal connections Amplitude: first customers came from YC network Shopify, New Relic: showed the Ruby On Rails developer community Plaid: grew through word of mouth in the developer and product manager community via forums, IRC, meetups, startup accelerators Figma: cold emailed designers on Twitter Square: met and spoke with actual merchants in person Atlassian: targeted open-source communities, mailing lists, IRC Segment: launched as an open-source library on Hacker News Airtable: invited friends and family then published to Hacker News Twilio: launched on Tech Crunch in private beta References:...

What is network effect? Network effect describes what happens when products get more valuable as more people use them. If your friends, family, coworkers, celebrities you follow aren’t using the same apps you’re using, you will leave. The network is pretty much useless. Network effects are embedded into many of the successful products around us in different variations. eBay, Uber, Airbnb are networks of buyers and sellers. Dropbox, Slack, Google Suite are networks of your teammates and coworkers....

Jeff Bezos once said: I very frequently get the question: “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” That’s a very interesting question. I almost never get the question: “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?” And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two. You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time....

What do users want? What new things could you build for them? Founders who’ve become billionaires are always eager to talk about that topic. That’s how they became billionaires. In a market economy, it’s hard to make something people want that they don’t already have. If people knew about this need and were able to satisfy it, there would be no room for startup. That said, it has to be either a new and uncertain need or a new way to satisfy one....