Weekly Waves 🌊 – 27 January 2023

The latest from software developer and entrepreneur, Anthony Corletti.

Hi all!

So long, January 👋 Time flies when you’re having fun! Or am I just getting older? Unsure.

Anywho, here is your weekly wave, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. Please feel free to forward this along to your friends if you enjoyed it!

🧰 PaaS I’m Researching

PaaS = Platform as a Service

Railway claims to be the cloud that takes the complexity out of shipping software, and I think it lives up to that claim well!

Heroku had a long career as the go-to PaaS for startups and dev teams. Not many PaaS services offered simple database and application integrations with low infra overhead. Now that Heroku doesn’t have much of a free-tier anymore, teams are looking elsewhere.

Think AWS or GCP but without all the need to manage infrastructure, containers, or any of that. That's mostly railway. It’s super simple to create a database, attach applications, ship changes to those applications, and scale out from there. I think it's a great option for many (and probably most) teams out there, but I think there’s still more to be done.

What about things like GPU tooling? Do I have access to persistent disks? Can I run anything I want on Railway? Railway removes the complexity of infrastructure, but does it really make feedback software development faster and better? I have to spend more time testing the product to see. Important to remember that just because something is the easy way, doesn’t necessarily make it the best way. Find the sweet spot for the needs of you and your team(s)! Maybe it’s railway!

Anthony Corletti 🌊 @anthonycorletti

💯sweet spot = the right amount of overhead for the right value add Just because it’s easy doesn’t mean it’s worth it 🤌

Erik Bernhardsson @bernhardsson

Random thought: the usability of a tool shouldn't be judged by how easy it is to succeed, but by how hard it is to fail. The best tools actively nudge you towards the right path.

👨‍💻 Programming Language I’m Learning

Rust!

I’m spending some time building small side projects and rustlings, and reviewing Tim McNamara’s playlist on important rust topics.

I think the future of systems and backend (and maybe frontend) software engineering could heavily rely on rust due to its performance and reliability features. So while the learning curve is steep (at least it feels that way for me), I’m enjoying the hike ⛰️

More on other languages I’m exploring for projects I’m cooking on in future articles!

😇 Announcement I’m Sharing

I’m angel investing and advising pre-seed startups! I’m focusing on companies working on challenges in cloud computing and the music ecosystem, but am also considering other areas! Please reach out over Twitter if you’d like to get in touch.

I’m working on finding my hedgehog this year and I think this will help me figure that out by growing myself and my network in financial, personal, and professional ways.

Outside of this newsletter, I maintain my own blog of ideas that I don’t send to you every time I post, but you can subscribe to its feed. Here’s my post about finding your hedgehog 👇

📝 Finding Your Hedgehog

🍸 Drink I’m Drinking

A tasty Mezcal Martini. My friends at Botanical Buzz came up with this one!

mezcal martini

Checkout their other recipes too. All of their drinks can also be easily changed to mocktails for your friends and family who don’t drink alcohol 💯

🧐 Quote I’m Pondering

“Let me make the songs of a nation, for I care not who makes its laws.”
– Andrew Fletcher

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Thanks for taking a moment to read Weekly Waves. I hope you liked it!

Please give me feedback on Twitter! Which of the above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @anthonycorletti and put #weeklywaves at the end so I can find it.

Have a wonderful weekend!

– Anthony