Is it Time to Fly the Nest?

The big news this week is the massive changes afoot at Twitter HQ after its purchase by Elon Musk. As many as 4000 staff are apparently being laid off in an effort to recoup some of the $44bn he recently paid for it. It's sad to see so many talented engineers be let go and especially brutal with so little notice.

I mentioned I be pretty concerned if I had built a product upon twitters API right now as there's no telling what form it will take or even if it will still be here in a couple of months. It's part of the reason I've never ventured that far myself even though I've had a bunch of ideas. But it dawns on me that the very tool I use to write this newsletter (Revue) is now owned by Musk too, so to some degree I have! Could this acquisition finally push me over to Ghost?

Image AI is showing no signs of slowing down after being featured in my newsletter last month. Pieter Levels and Danny Postma have both released services for AI generated avatars based on user uploaded photos using stable diffusion. They're currently battling it out for who can become king of the prompts. Pieter's work in particular is even more impressive since he's only just started another similar project interiorai.com!

In my own news, I recently celebrated my 2 Year Anniversary of my YouTube channel. I really had no idea what I was doing in my first video in 2020 but was determined to get started. It's still small but I'm enjoying the variety I get making videos compared to writing my blog. This month I've released a couple of videos about the amazing Steam Deck which I link to below.

I’ve included a regular assortment of code as well as affiliate links to discount kindle books you might like amongst this issue. Let me know if you enjoyed it by responding to this email. Also be sure to share this months issue with people who you think might enjoy it.

Until next time, keep on shipping!

Ian

Articles

The Perfect Commit

There's a whole bunch of knowledge that goes into a single good commit. Teams I've worked on in the past agonise over what it should contain. Here, Simon Willison digs into what makes up "The Perfect Commit".

Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model

How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, Andy Baio interviewed both the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.

Welcome to hell, Elon

Elon Musk now owns Twitter — and a huge number of impossible political problems around speech, content moderation, and trying to make money.

3 Reasons Why I Think 50% Coding 50% Marketing is the Best Framework for Solo Tech Founders

Jon Yong Fook employed a 50:50 split between coding and marketing for his SaaS product Bannerbear. Here he explains why he thinks it works.

The Art of Product: 218: Building a $1M/Year Dev Ed Business (with Adam Wathan)

Adam Wathan (creator of Tailwind CSS) describes how he got his start building digital products and why you should make their prices uncomfortably high.

Buy Me A Cuppa ☕

I recently started a Ko Fi page, which you can now donate to to show your support for the things I create - including this newsletter. I won't be buying coffee with it mind, I'm more of a tea man myself.

Code

What-the-Diff – AI-powered code review assistant

Bad PR descriptions be gone. BeyondCode recently released this awesome AI powered GitHub app that explains the changes within your pull requests in plain english.

What’s New In Python 3.11

Python 3.11 was released last week and is between 10-60% faster than Python 3.10. Here's a full list of all the new features. My favourite is the "fine grained error locations in tracebacks" which will prevent devs hunting around for the source of errors.

OG Image Generation by Vercel

OpenGraph images (not Original Gangster) are the previews that are displayed when you post links to social media (like the one to the right). This handy library from Vercel makes it easy to create and deploy them to their edge function service.

Beautiful hand-crafted SVG icons, by the makers of Tailwind CSS.

Beautiful hand-crafted SVG icons, by the makers of Tailwind CSS.

Nabla — the isometric color font by Arthur Reinders Folmer & Just van Rossum

A neat isometric font I recently spotted.

Bargain Kindle Books

Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill - Free on Kindle

The Obstacle is the Way, Ryan Holiday - £2.84 on Kindle

How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen - £0.99 on Kindle

Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day - Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky - £0.99 on Kindle

Effortless: Make it Easier to Do What Matters Most, Greg McKeown - £1.99 on Kindle

A Tweet I Liked