Lab Notes - April 16, 2023

Hi Everyone,

Here is the latest edition of my weekly lab notes. Feel free to forward this along to friends.

Initial Experience with Fly.io

Thoughts? Great developer experience! I had heard of Fly.io, but hadn’t needed a reason to use their service. That changed the other day, when I needed to update an internal tool. The tool had originally been deployed on AWS lambdas using the NextJS Serverless Plugin. But, due to the plugin not being maintained, I started looking into other options. I was first thinking of using SST with their NextjsSite construct, which I am using for some personal projects. But, if you aren’t as familiar with Lambdas it can be a little complicated to understand. The next obvious choice would be to deploy the Nextjs app to Vercel. The reason I chose not to deploy to Vercel was because as a company we weren’t using their services, rather Fly.io. So I decided to give it a shot. After setting up the CLI tool, I had - no joke - the app up and running in 5min! Super easy to deploy from the CLI, and the Fly’s dashboard was super intuitive. After reading some docs, I soon had continuous deployments set up via Github Actions.

I have to say - overall I had a great developer experience with Fly.io. Based on this experience, I may move more of my projects other to their service. I’ll keep you up to date here on the Lab Notes.

YouTube Video of the Week

I listen/watch a wide variety of YouTube videos throughout the week. One that I wanted to highlight was Ali Abdaal’s Deep Dive with Cliff Weitzman the founder of Speechify. It was a great listen with a bunch of amazing takeaways. Cliff Weitzman has dyslexia, and built a text-to-speech application to help him in school, which turned into Speechify. Cliff goes into the power of speech, and how it’s helped him consume vasts amount of information, to putting good out into the world.

As a person who is a slow reader, and often turn to listening to books or consuming information via podcasts. I found the following quote from the podcast illuminating.

Checkout the YouTube video here Ali Abdaal’s Deep Dive with Cliff Weitzman

Inspiration for the Lab Notes Newsletter

Recently, I began reading Skip the Line by James Altucher. In the book, Altucher highlights the 10,000 experiments rule vs the 10,000 hours rule. At a high level he explains conducting 10,000 experiments as a way to develop expertise and build a successful career. The idea behind this recommendation is that in order to become truly exceptional at something, you need to be willing to try new things, make mistakes, and learn from your failures. Emphasizing, that conducting a large number of experiments allows individuals to quickly identify what works and what doesn't, and to build up a base of knowledge and experience that can be applied to future endeavors.

This got me to thinking. I’ve been putting off a bunch of experiments myself, one of which was creating a newsletter. Which in combination with watching Ali Abdaal’s video on why everyone should start a newsletter, gave the the nudge I needed to start this newsletter!

Still not sure what the format will be. But one part I am sure about it keeping track of experiments.

Other Notes

• Have you seen my latest Hashnode article? I discuss a strategy to handle long running AWS Lambdas. View Article ↗️

• I’ve decided my next project and experiment will be building the business service log platform in public. Subscribe to Lab Notes to follow along.

• The thumbnail for this post I created using Midjourney. An active experiment with generative AI. See below!