PJM - December '21

🎇Happy New Year! 🥂

Anybody else put on 10 holiday pounds? (if you're outside the US that's ~4.5kg...yes we're gluttons over here)

I guess I've stopped setting New Year goals b/c naturally they're really mid-to-late January goals. Does anyone really even talk about them past that?

Anyway, broadly, I would like to do a few things...

  • Remove myself from social media

  • Focus more on my long-term health

  • Create a $1000+ MRR SaaS product

Seems like another tough year to make any travel plans but hoping to get in a few new countries if possible :) ...and visit some old friends ;)

PROJECT UPDATES...

DeFacebookMe

So the DeFacebookMe.com site is done. I'm sure I'll add some small edits and tweaks along the way...

If you have any suggestions please send me your thoughts!

Personally - I haven't fully deleted my WhatsApp/Facebook because I mainly live in places where it's near impossible to communicate without them. I do plan on it but after I've closed up and transferred all the apps/pages on FB (it's even harder to do as a dev!).

You can find me on Signal or in the Icelandverse from now on ;)

CURRENTLY LIVING IN...

NEW JERSEY, USA

Still holding it down Jer-z Strong 💪!

Forgot how holidays worked round here. It's like clockwork. Thanksgiving ends... then Christmas decorations are up that weekend. My mom cooked every single day through the new year (no exaggeration). Cookies/cake/prepping for Christmas dinner, then for my Dads birthday, and then New Year. Definitely put on a few LBs 🎅

I have plans to head out in a week but the ol' rona is making the rounds in NY/NJ - probably 50% of my friends currently have it. We'll see what plans mother-rona has for me and my flight.

MY FAVORITE CONTENT FROM DECEMBER...

Business | Marketing

Busted taillights, missing plates, tinted windows: Across the U.S., ticket revenue funds towns — and the police responsible for finding violations.

#truth

If it smells like bullsh*t, it probably is bullsh*t. Apple knows privacy is a big deal and isn't technically ahead, but more marketing-savvy.

Deal includes making a couple of islands "look bigger" and a secret $275 billion pledge

Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist found herself blocked, with seemingly no recourse, from an account documenting nearly a decade of her life and work.

AMAZON TOO!? CCP is winning hard.

Infarm, an Amsterdam-headquartered start-up that grows food indoors in racks, has been valued at over $1 billion in a new $200 million funding round. Looking forward to seeing these in one of the first future cities.

Dang! That's like... 1/10th of Elon's tax bill 😂

Farming twitter trolls is the new war of the 2020s.

What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something?

Design | Development

I ❤️Tailwind. Nothing has amplified my development in past 3 years more than TailwindCSS. This update was mostly edge-case and minor improvements tbh but still awesome.

Sound principle and a little bit how I live. But makes the 'get a $500-1000/day' job sound a bit too easy.

Great questions for interviewing devs at a startup. Most devs try to show off their skills. A great startup dev will say, "You got $20/month to spare? There's already an app for that."

Definitely depends on the type of work - but yes can work wonders. I mean code has definitely become more stylistic and design-oriented as opposed to old-school nerd-aholics.

*Ehem* ... if there are any DoorDash dev subscribers here (unlikely) - STOP BEING A SPOILED OVERPAID B*TCH AND DELIVER ME MY FOOD

Statistics can lie. Always be cautious when hearing 'well it's in the data or...it's Science!'.

Governor Mike Parson wants a St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist prosecuted for looking at website source code and alerting the authorities to a significant vulnerability he found.

😞 dear lord the world needs millennial leaders...

It's a great time to be a dev in the market for a FAANG job...

A man from the UK, who accidentally threw out his hard drive back in 2013, has been trying to get permission to search for the device in the local landfill.

Travel

An epic thread response to a statement on the importance of not wasting your 20s traveling.

Science

A "creative sweet spot" may exist in the brief moments you spend in a little-known early sleep stage, according to a new study. Sleep is the new exercise - be prepared to find tons of new products this decade.

I meeeean this one's kinda funny 🤣 5G conspiracy people are some of the funniest. Conspiracies exist but "conspiracy stacking" does not work.

Interesting piece on the history of monogamy in different species. As a species, we are not completely faithful and never have been.

This could potentially replace reading glasses for some of the 128 million Americans who have trouble seeing close-up.

When mental health therapists start getting mental health problems from too many patients...you know things are f*cked.

Stuff like this just makes me love the internet.

I've tried to follow along with the actual scientific papers and data related to covid-19 rather than read news/conspiracy/twitter-banter. The old-school process is fucked - but new technology is changing this and it's super exciting and interesting to dive into the data.

Ever wonder why positive people seem to never get sick?

In the future, kids will learn about the "war on drugs" and think of our generation as not far evolved from monkeys.

Books | Podcasts | Music

"Do not pray for easy lives, pray to be stronger men, and pray to be among the few who understands this." - John F Kennedy