Week 33, 2020
On life
Off the back of a recommendation from a colleague at TransferWise, I find myself taking Zinc. It’s an attempt at staving off the feeling of fatigue that I’ve been dealing with on-and-off for over two years now. I’m very curious to see how it pans out—so far, so good.
On writing
I’ve also been thinking quite a bit how I can continue improving my writing. I’ve realised my biggest gap is in the depths of the ideas.
A lot of what I’ve written so far is quite shallow. I’ve failed to really take an idea and explore it fully. I suspect this is due to not doing enough reading around a topic. That is, I’m not doing enough research.
Inspired by Ness Lab’s How to read a book, I’m rectifying this by taking a whole lot more notes while reading. I’m starting with Vagabonding by Rolf Potts, and accompanying it with a bunch of post-it notes, using them as my bookmark and notepad.
On each post it, I write page numbers, quotes and any offshoot ideas that I have while reading. I’ll then write these up into Roam Research, when I’m done reading for the day.
And I can already see its influence, as I’ve begun writing a more indepth version of Quick and Shit. Though it’s taking a little while to become accustomed to the fact that the process is now a whole lot longer.
I’ve started a thread on the resources, tips and guides I’m using to get better at research.
On Timo
While most of the recent work is still being tested, we’re making good progress with Timo’s Overview page. Compared to where we were just two weeks ago, it’s come a long way and should now be a lot easier to use and digest. We’ll be sharing it without beta users very soon.
The good news is that with the Overview page starting to shape up, we’re gearing up for onboarding our first beta users. If you’re on the email list, expect an invite in the next few weeks 🎉
We’ve also got our act together with the roadmap. Having set up a Notion Roadmap and Backlog, which handles a lot of prioritisation for us. We plan on sharing a template and more information on that soon.
Also worth noting how useful Notion can be for start ups. For those pages that you don’t necessarily care too much about how they look, using public Notion pages is a great way to bootstrap a content-management system. We’ve started using it for our public changelog and legalese pages ✨
On TransferWise
At TransferWise, I’ve been exploring Webpack 5’s new Module Federation feature. Thanks to Jack Harrington’s introductory videos, we have a working example of a TransferWise app with module federation and a first draft of a blog post on the topic. It’s pretty exciting, as it should allow us to cut our micro-frontends’ bundle sizes down significantly—something we need a great deal.
In other news, TransferWise are hiring again after the recent Coronavirus hiring freeze. We’ve had the incredible privilege of avoiding the need to make redundancies, and it’s amazing to see how quickly we’ve recovered. If you’re looking for a job, and find a vacancy that looks appealing to you, hit me up and let’s have a conversation!