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Ask HN: What are you learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#111
post #78

World-building. After reading about storytelling, I realized that I'm as fascinated to a well-crafted world as good plots and characters. There's not much to read about, as a fiction world can contain as much detail as the real world. I'm spending time looking at the fiction worlds that I like and taking them apart. As an exercise, imagining places and races is also interesting. You'll be amazed by the amount of deta…

If you speak French, there is a conference by one of Ubisoft's creative directors about the Might and Magic world building techniques and choices on the BNF's Fantasy podcast.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#112
post #7

Computer networking. I’m reading through TCP/IP illustrated. Also learning about Linux. I used macOS for about a year and thought that I knew “Linux” but now I’m seeing how far the rabbit hole goes. I installed arch linux and am currently just customizing it and immersing myself in the community. Eventually I’ll pick up a systems or operating systems book.

For playing with both networking and Linux, you should really look into dn42. It's pretty much an internet sandbox.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#113
I watched all but one of Lamport's videos on formal specification with TLA+, though I yet have to tackle some project with it.

Right now I got my hands on Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" as per some HNer recommendation (thank you!).

Yeah, I lose interest quickly, eh. There's so much cool things to learn that in the end I learn nothing well. Bummer.

edit: grammar, spelling

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#114
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do in-house marketing and digital marketing. What challenges are you facing? (I don't have a course to sell you and my services are not available for hire.)

Thx for asking. oo, where do I start ? I guess setting up an overall strategy before any actual tactical execution. We do close to 1M in revenue already and have inbound traffic already but I got to this point somehow without any real planning. We write a few blog posts, content etc, got social profiles where we post, were lucky to get a few great backlinks and have built some relationships with influencers in our in…

There’s two divergent approaches to learning, sometimes referred to as top-down or bottom-up.

Top-down begins with broad context, such as the history of programming languages, the advent of objects and classes, and eventually zoom in to modern languages, syntax and functions.

Bottom-up works inversely; maybe you’re given a Python sandbox, a hello world, and a cheat sheet. You explore what you can do and build on those low-level operators to create foundations that frame wider context.

Effective learning is always a mix of both. Everyone learns somewhere on the spectrum, maybe bouncing around depending on motivation and experience.

With respect to your goal of learning marketing, you’ve identified your path of study: strategy. And just like your SaaS product was created out of an understanding of functions and needs in a space, so too should your research explore the functions available to your business and how they’ll affect your pipeline.

Simplified: you have a tool, and since you have revenue, you know people want it. Your goal is to find questions to ask and answer them, and use that feedback to make decisions regarding your marketing strategy.

-What is my biggest source of traffic to my site? Where do they spend the most time? What causes them to click buy? How can I use these data to optimize my funnel?

-What is my total marketing cost divided by the number of paying users (CPA)? What’s their expected lifetime value? What do other products in my space cost?

-What do my customers and affiliates describe my product as? What problems disappear once they subscribe? How does this translate to value for decision makers? Do my enterprise sales represent 80% of MRR or 10%? Should I use multiple approaches to entities of different scale?

The questions you’re asking are the right ones. And like any other field, they multiply and become more specific - but if you bear in mind the top-down goal (spend less, charge more) of a business, things will crystallize quickly.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you describe the difference between working in devops vs working in web dev?

My days right now are full of Chef, Terraform, Bash, etc. The coding I am doing is usually scripts and utilities. It's more about glue and automation vs actual product/feature dev.

That's the job I want.

Re: Ask HN: What are you learning?

#119
Elixir and Phoenix!

It's been a long time coming, but finally doing it now.

After coming to grips with functional programming concepts (introductory in Ruby, more advanced in JavaScript) I decided to explore Elixir and what I found really surprised me in the right way.

So I've decided to dedicate myself to become very fluent in it.

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