Fun fact. This week marks one year since I first hit publish on this newsletter. 🥲 {how time flies}

Leading up to posting this issue, I spent a lot of time reflecting on this journey. When I look back on this past year I realize something about tech careers that feels a little backwards. Many of us tell ourselves we’ll start something once things are “ready”. When the idea in our head is clearer and more defined. Or when we’ve learned just a liiitle bit more about x, y, and z.

This week’s issue digs into that common problem and leans more into motivation than education. But if it gives even one person the nudge to start something they’ve been putting off, I’ll call that a win.

What Building a Newsletter Taught Me About Tech Careers

It usually sounds something like this:

But if there’s something I’ve learned managing a tech blog, newsletter, and with nearly a decade working in the tech space, “being 100% ready” is just a fantasy. One that can unexpectedly hold us back rather than motivate us to move forward.

When I started PlotStack, I didn’t have the conversion pipelines I have today or a monetization strategy… heck, I didn’t even have a domain. I just wanted to write and share information with like-minded people. And what surprised me is that most of the real learning and growth came way after hitting publish, not before.

(And a great deal of that growth has been thanks to readers who engage, vote, and leave feedback… so thank you!)

If there’s anything to take away from this, it’s that sometimes the best way to figure out your next step is to simply just take one before you feel completely ready.

Now, please enjoy this week’s list of motivational reads and resources I’ve found helpful over the years. Have a great week!

This week’s topic was: helpful / not helpful

Before live streaming, video calls, or even YouTube existed, what was the very first thing ever broadcast over a webcam on the internet?

A. A university lecture
B. A weather station
C. A coffee pot
D. A traffic camera

Answer at the bottom of this issue

Drew Houston (Dropbox)
The Forgotten Flash Drive That Built a $2B Empire by lyn graft
Houston didn’t start with a polished product or a full company plan. He was frustrated with constantly forgetting his USB drive, so he built a rough prototype to solve his own problem. The famous early demo video was created before the product was truly ready and it was essentially a test to see if anyone else cared. That imperfect first step validated demand and became the foundation for what is now Dropbox. Read more

Melanie Perkins (Canva)
Billion Dollar Design: Canva's Melanie Perkins on How She Turned Her 'Future of Publishing' Idea into a Unicorn by Pooja Singh
Before building Canva, Perkins was teaching students how to use complex design tools. She noticed they struggled. So she created a very basic online tool as a teaching aid. It wasn’t meant to be a startup. It was a scrappy solution to a problem she saw in front of her. Only after people used it did the bigger vision become clear. Read more

Chris Wanstrath, P.J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner, and Scott Chacon (GitHub)
How GitHub Tamed Free Software (And More) by Robert McMillan
GitHub began as a side project to make collaboration easier for developers who were already working together. It wasn’t launched with the intention of becoming the central hub of open-source development. The early version was just functional enough to solve their own workflow issues and then they improved it in public as more developers adopted it. Read more

Bio.Sites #productivity
Bio Sites by Squarespace is a simple way to keep all your important links in one place. It gives you a single, customizable page to showcase your latest projects, products, and socials. So instead of updating links everywhere, you maintain one central source of truth. I even use its link as a QR code on my business card, so people always land on the most up-to-date version of what I’m working on. I’ll plug mine here for reference.

Litmaps #productivity #research
Spring semesters are ramping up. Since there's a great deal of students subscribed to this newsletter, this one's for you (and researchers). Next time you need to write a paper check this website out. It will help you find credible, peer reviewed, real literature on whatever topic you are working on. I'm not being dramatic when I say it's saved me DOZENS of hours of research when I was in university.

Have you seen this prompt that’s been circulating?

Try it out yourself. Why does this happen? The following video can shed light on this funny interaction. Or just read my description for the gist.

▶️ How LLMs Actually Generate Text (Every Dev Should Know This) by LearnThatStack (9 mins)
This video breaks down how large language models actually process language, showing that AI doesn’t read text word-for-word the way humans do. Instead, it first tokenizes text, splitting words into smaller pieces that are converted into numbers the model can work with mathematically.

Before live streaming, video calls, or even YouTube existed, what was the very first thing ever broadcast over a webcam on the internet?

A. A university lecture
B. A weather station
C. A coffee pot ✅
D. A traffic camera

In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge set up a camera to watch their shared coffee pot so they wouldn’t walk to the kitchen just to find it empty. It wasn’t meant to change technology, just to solve a small, annoying problem. It unintentionally became one of the first examples of live video streaming.

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Newsletter publishing is hard work. If you ever feel like extending a thanks, leaving feedback and a testimonial helps a lot! I also keep an Amazon Wishlist of books and tools I’m interested in. Just another way to directly support my work.