9 afleveringen
Code and Bootstrapping Alchemist Camp
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- Technologie
I'm Mark and I've long had a love of both business and programming. I've run two moderately successful brick and mortar businesses, a failed tech startup and now a lifestyle business.
This podcast is inspired by what I've learned over the past several years making the transition into the tech industry, working at startups in Beijing, Silicon Valley and elsewhere and then building my own profitable side projects. Whether you're currently an employee at a tech startup, an aspiring digital nomad with an interest in tech or already running a small lifestyle business, you just may learn something that saves you a lot of time, money and pain in your journey.
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An experiment
Episode Notes
Alchemist.Camp has been running for a year and it's time for a new experiment.
In this episode, Mark gives a brief introduction and shares his motivations and plans for this podcast. -
Frugality
Episode Notes
In this episode, Mark talks about the single largest reason Alchemist Camp has worked—frugality.
Leaving the San Francisco / Silicon Valley area to be a digital nomad and drastically cut rent, using open source and very inexpensive equipment and spending under $10/month total for a revenue-generating site... it was about as lean an operation as it gets. -
Automation
Episode Notes
In this episode, Mark talks about automation, where Unix luminaries saw its rise and where it's still undervalued, decades later.
See: The Practice of Programming -
Scalability Arrogance
Episode Notes
In this episode, Mark talks about common scalability concerns and why they're not generally a good thing for an early stage boot-strapper or even most funded startups to worry about.
Links
Firebase Costs Increased by 7,000%!
Twitter crashes hard, Internet freaks out
Twitter can't kill the Fail Whale
Crash Shuts Down Ebay for Much of the Day -
Rise to the level of confusion
Episode Notes
In this episode, Mark talks about feeling confused as a developer, why the feeling continues despite gaining technical skills and why a lack of confusion could be a bad sign.
Links
From Nand to Tetris
Also see the previous episode on Automation -
Using Heatmaps and Surveys
Episode Notes
In this episode Mark talks about how heatmaps and surveys were useful in the very early days of Alchemist Camp, how he used them and a common pitfall when taking surveys.
Links
Companion screencast: Using heatmaps and surveys to drive content production
The heatmap and survey tools I used: Hotjar
The Markdown to HTML converter I used: Dillinger.io