Hello CoRecursive newsletter subscriber,

It’s April now, and I have a new episode out here:

​https://corecursive.com/april-fools-is-cancelled/​

Today being April Fools, I brought back frequent guests Don and Krystal to discuss the banning of April Fools pranks from Hacker News in 2014, and from there, we explore the history of tech pranks, April fools’ jokes, and having fun at work. Including the IETF’s April 1st RFCs, google’s long history of pranks, and the many attempts that missed the mark.

The episode is my first attempt at a new segment I’m calling “This day in history,” and I’d love to know what you think of it. The plan is that in each segment, we discuss an event that happened on that day and how it affected the world of tech.

Writing

I’ve written several articles for the earthly blog in the past month. My favorite is One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions, which started as a book review of “Seeing Like A State” but ended up reflecting on something that went badly at a place I used to work.

I’m always nervous about sharing stories of previous companies because by fitting a real-life event into the form of an article, it sort of necessarily becomes a bit of a caricature, and that can be unfair. But I think, in this case, it worked out well. So much of the real story gets elided away, but the lesson came through.

The article led to lots of discussion on hacker news and on Reddit.

Text-Mode

Text Mode: Another thing I’m pretty proud of is this little service I built for viewing the articles in plain text. Find it here and here. And you can read my previous article in text using it like this. The pages are a little slow to run because it has no caching and runs in AWS lambda. But, I could easily make it a lot faster with some extra effort.

And, most importantly! I got to build it as part of my job because we thought there was a chance it might get people excited on hacker news, and they might learn about earthly via it. That didn’t happen, but it’s a pretty excellent job that lets me play around like this and calls it content marketing.

The text-mode solution runs on a container, inside and AWS lambda. I’ve never used a lambda before nor hooked it up to a container, and the process was pretty simple. The ease of writing a small web-service that autoscales this way has given me all sorts of ideas for future projects. So expect more quirky web services in the future.

Bonus Episode

On March 15th, I released a continuation of my interview with Nadia Odunayo. You can find it here. Her story of how she built the first version of the recommendation algorithm for Story Graph is a bit mind-blowing.

That's it for the newsletter! Let me know what you think of the April 1st podcast episode.

Thanks, Adam @adamgordonbell