Bas' Take on Tech: Crisis Mode, AI, Conformity, Sandro's Thoughts
Hi there,
thanks for reading my tech newsletter about the recent buzz, Python, and DevOps.
In this issue, Sandro Volpicella gives an insight into his current project and shares his goals for the year.
Have a great week ahead!
📉 Crisis Mode
When I started this newsletter in December, Elon Musk had bought Twitter, which caused a lot of buzz in the tech scene, at least among those who were (or are) using Twitter – obviously. Laying of the majority of people was seen as a “special thing”, and this decision was seen in tight conjunction with Elon’s personality. What followed was, in fact, another recession, only that this time the tech industry is affected the most – to be honest, this is not the first recession that started in tech – “dotcom”, anyone? Layoffs after layoffs after layoffs. It’s still strange to see all this inflation rise, an emerging housing crisis in Sweden, a war in Ukraine, and the aftermath of the pandemic. All of this should now impact the tech industry that was thriving in the last year because everyone worked from home? The more I think about it, the more I start to believe that every major tech company was expecting a “different economic reality” – as Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s CEO, admitted. And yet, the crisis was on the horizon. Unforgotten is the drastic letter to YC founders from May 2022. Frankly, it seems everyone was wrong. Which, again, isn’t something new. Everyone was wrong about housing prices in 2008, right?
So, the dotcom bubble (2000) led to the housing crisis (2008), which led to cheap money, and now with the help of external shocks and some collectively taken wrong assumptions, to another tech crisis? Maybe…
On a personal note, I didn’t expect this newsletter to turn out into a crisis ticker. It is what it is, however.
I didn’t expect it to become a Twitter ticker, either, and yet there is another thing going on there: After cutting off third-party clients, they will now shut down free API access in two days. RIP, bookmarks.email!
🗞️ Buzz
Apple reportedly plans on a foldable iPad and an iPhone Ultra, although it seems current sales are dropping significantly.
Microsoft seems to have experimented with a ChatGPT interface in Bing. Also, OpenAI announced paid plans for ChatGTP and now offers a tool that can detect AI-generated content. All of this AI stuff might be another bubble, though.
🗣️ Interesting Discussions and Perspectives
🎥 FOSDEM ‘23
Last weekend, FOSDEM took place. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it this year, although it’s really around the corner from where I live. Luckily, they have recordings of the talks. I did not have time to scan the schedule, but I’m pretty sure there will again be some gems.
☕️ In other news
I’m genuinely a 90s kid. I grew up with all the cool stuff. Of course, as any old person will tell you: Everything was better back in the day. In fact, it was not, unless you consider weird modem sounds cool – it was not only the sounds but also the fact that the internet was only available when no other family member wanted to have a phone call. Anyway, it was good to read a nice piece about how the 90s were objectively the best time to be alive.
To close the arc to the current situation of the tech industry, I stumbled upon a conversation between Michael Seibel and Dalton Caldwell about the “Cult of Conformity in Silicon Valley”. They point out an interesting thought that I almost always share when I’m asked about my first job during coffee chats: Back in the day, tech was for nerds and geeks. The term hacker had a completely different meaning to the general public than inside the tech community. And let’s be honest: Almost everyone "in tech" wore washed-out t-shirts from sinister heavy metal bands and was almost pathologically more interested in compilers than their own personal hygiene. Somehow this has changed. Tech is cool and mainstream now, and developers are called “rock stars” by some smart recruiters. FAANG are the top priority for students. Somehow, working in tech today is what working in investment banking was like back then. Or, as Michael and Dalton put it: Tech used to be for non-conformists, and now it’s the opposite.
🎥 Video Content
I started my Twitter account, where I share content about Python, DevOps, and Databases, almost exactly one year ago.
Now, it’s time to get to the next level: I want to share video content on these topics, too. I have a long list of topics I want to cover in some short 15-20 mins videos – now I just need to find the time to produce them.
If you want to be among the first to get notified when I release my first video, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel!
📝 Sandro’s Perspective
Sandro Volpicella is Hashnode’s Platform Engineer Lead and co-author of AWS Fundamentals. I asked about his current work and his goals for this year. Here is his answer:
I mainly work on three things at this moment:
Hashnode as a Platform Lead
AWS Fundamentals
ServerlessQ
My goals are to excel at these three topics. I am highly motivated to build three products in three distinct areas.
At Hashnode I love to work on a high-scale, early-stage startup with a great team, amazing founders, and a huge engaged community. I implement things at a large scale and can really test out AWS limits and see my AWS knowledge growing. My goals for hashnode is to build up the platform team so far that we can all replace each other in terms of engineering new tasks and debugging incidents. This is largely a teaching effort.
Other than that we have some amazing features in the pipeline. We just launched one, which is our new newsletter experience. Building these features with serverless services and third-party vendors is truly amazing!
In AWS Fundamentals the goal is to automate the newsletter, sales, and SEO process. This means creating good and high-quality content. The precise goal is to sell a minimum of 7 books per day.
Since we were writing a book we actually didn’t have time to create content on social media and on our blog. We are changing that now. The goal is to publish one article per week on our blog and repurpose this article on social media channels. Additionally, we send out high-quality newsletters bi-weekly to our subscribers. The focus is on providing amazing content and pushing on a second acquisition channel: SEO
For ServerlessQ we want to integrate more tightly with Vercel. ServerlessQ is growing slowly but steadily. We have some dedicated users that use SLSQ for their prod usage and it is working out great. We just submitted an official Vercel integration and hope we can get it through soon. The next step is to refactor our repository a bit and make everything more observable. After that it is time to talk to our customers again. Since we are three people for this project I try to focus mainly on product, marketing, and sales. I want to talk to customers and see what specific needs they have for a truly full-fleshed serverless experience without AWS.
🚀 What else?
I have changed this newsletter from “occasional” to at least once every two weeks. The new format not only contains curated news and insights from the tech world but also sets the stage for fellow developers.
I will ask people about their journeys in the tech world and also in life. I’m pretty sure there is much to learn from listening to other people’s experiences, and I am excited to share that with you!
Of course, I need your help with this.
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