☝️Interesting Things #1
☝️Interesting Things #1
New year, new newsletter! Much new! A newsletter about interesting things.
Who am I?
I’m Alex. I’m a software engineer, entrepreneur, infovore, and aspiring polymath.
I love learning. I have something of an obsession with consuming information and translating it into some form of (usable?) knowledge. As a result I spend an inordinate amount of time reading, listening, consuming content, information, and products across a broad spectrum of topics.
I’m always on the hunt for something cool, interesting or insightful that I can share with friends. That’s what I’ll be doing here.
What to Expect from ☝️ Interesting Things
For lack of a better name, ☝️ Interesting Things is a weekly newsletter surfacing interesting products, podcasts, books, tweets, articles, newsletters, and other nuggets. (More or less my own version of Tim Ferriss’ five bullet friday)
The first issue is below and will be roughly the regular format every week. Enjoy.
- Alex
⌨️ Products
Craft is a native note-taking / knowledge management tool. Craft might be the first great Catalyst app, Apple’s iOS / MacOS cross-platform technology. Hat-tip to Tom Meagher for the turning me on to it.
Lunch Money is a simple, intuitive personal finance tool. /ht to Ian for surfacing.
Capiche.fm is a platform for creating carefree, low-friction, social podcasts. Listeners can easily call in, and speakers can promote them so the audience can hear them. They also package/distribute an RSS feed to make it a Real Podcast™. @jason has been using it to do espresso, a casual discussion format podcast.
Wohven is doing subscription t-shirts for crazy cheap. $12/mo. I just got my first one, good shirt, I’m happy.
📖 Reading
His Greatness (Matt Levine) is back from leave with a new issue of Money Stuff. 2021 is looking up indeed.
Dan Wang’s 2020 Letter is a deep and insightful look at China. It’s a sweeping and in-depth piece that covers a lot of ground. Mostly it’s an attempt to explain to a Western audience what China is really like, contrasted with what we in the West think it’s like. It’s a 10,000 foot view of China, but with a very high-powered lens to see things as they are from that height. I tweeted a bit about it. Here’s a particularly insightful blurb:
This Wired UK piece on the woman who invented mRNA is absolutely mind-blowing on so many levels. It’s the backstory of the incredible breakthrough that’s powering the covid-19 vaccines, a story of extreme perseverance measured in decades. It’s inspiring and angering, and most definitely worth a read.
How mRNA went from a scientific backwater to a pandemic crusher by David Cox.I recently listened to the audiobook for Wright Thompson’s The Cost of These Dreams. It’s about athletes and performance, drive and motivation, success and failure, and dads. It’s just fantastic, and the first chapter alone about Michael Jordan is worth the price of admission. Best of all, Wright narrates the audiobook; his voice is butter, and further convinces me many more authors should narrate their own audiobooks. I discovered this book via this episode of the Longform Podcast (linked again below).
🎙 Podcasts
💡 Ideas
Kickstarter for group vacation planning. Make it easy to plan trips with friends. A layer that sits on top of the vacation rental apps and makes it easy to collaborate with friends, find properties, get opt-ins, price-split, pick dates, etc.
SaaS Hub: a unified digital card for all your SaaS subscriptions. Could be for business or personal.
🔥 Tweets
High meme art:
@GavinSBaker on the markets:
Unconventional startup advice via Nick Huber @sweatystartup:
@morganhousel on AWS:
Via @machinepix:
If you find this useful, have any feedback, or have something interesting that should be featured here, feel free to email me at ajsharp@gmail.com.
P.S. Much of the content you see here originates in one form or another from my main Twitter list. Feel free to follow if you’re interested in drafting my content feed.