BNW001 - New Year, New Me, Newsletter and What I learned

Hello and welcome to the first edition of Better Next Week, your weekly dose of coding, productivity, and self-improvement inspiration.

As we start the new year, many of us have made resolutions to be more productive, improve our skills, or work towards our goals. For me, one of my resolutions is to write every week and share my thoughts, learning, experiences, and resources with you all through this newsletter.

Here are three things I learned in preparing for this newsletter:

Don't wait to become a better me to start something

I've actually been wanting to start a newsletter since September, but like many of us, I procrastinated for months. Just as Nicholas Cole writes in his book The Art and Business of Online Writing,

We are afraid of sharing who we are today - because we believe who we'll be tomorrow will be "better". This is a vicious cycle.

I realized that I can't be better if I don't start today and learn from experience. So here I am, starting this newsletter with the goal of providing some value and inspiration to you each week.

Keep it simple

I'm new to the Gatsby.js framework, and while I've been trying to get some code to work, I've realized that sometimes it's best to just keep things simple. For now, I'm manually adding links to each edition because the most important thing for me is to start writing, not to have a fancy website.

Use automation

I'm using an RSS feed generated from my static blog to automatically send newsletter each week, so I don't have to manually copy and paste everything. This will save me time and allow me to focus on adding my own personal thoughts and insights to each edition. Realizing that automation is a must for me also made it easier to decide which platform I use.

So with that said, let's dive into this week's edition. I hope you find something here that helps you be a little more productive, learn something new, or just feel inspired to take on the week ahead. Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I look forward to sharing more with you in the weeks to come.

📚 Book

The Art and Business of Online Writing

Just finished reading Nicolas Cole's book "The Art and Business of Online Writing", which has quickly become one of my favorite books for 2022. My plan was to read one chapter each day and finish the book in 2 weeks. However, each time I finish a chapter and glimpse the chapter name for the next one, I just want to know what the author says next. As a result I finished the book in 4 days.

The book talks about theory and methodology. But most importantly, he provides instructions and examples that I can actually follow. For example, he talks about how a great headline should include: What this piece of writing is about, who this piece of writing is for, and the PROMISE: the problem that will be solved. He also has templates called "1/3/1" and "1/5/1" for paragraphs and shows you exactly how he uses those templates in his writing.

As I read the book, I keep thinking back to the articles I click and read on Medium. Nicholas definitely knows what he is talking about. Instead of just feeling "this is a great piece", or "I want to know what this article is about", I can identify some of the tricks and methods the authors used to grab my attention and keep me reading.

🔖 Article

I have to confess: I used ChatGPT as I wrote this newsletter. Here are some interesting articles I read about it.

• Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT
  • Making ChatGPT act like a linux machine: use commands such as echo, ls, pwd, curl. You can also send requests to API endpoints in the alternative ChatGPT universe.
• AI Homework
  • Another article about AIGC. While ChatGPT seems to be able to run python calculations, it's just looking for an answer that has the highest probability. That means, unlike a calculator, if you ask ChatGPT to do math calculations, it could be wrong. The answers to other questions can be wrong too. What's interesting in this article is that the author proposes a zero-trust learning method for school. Instead of worrying that the students avoid doing their work by using AI tools, AI tools are provided to students with a record for each individual use. Students have to use this AI to generate answers. But the answers could be wrong sometimes. So the students have to spend time learning the materials to know which answers should be corrected before submission.
• Write an alternative ending scene to Avengers Endgame, where Thanos fell in Love with Iron Man and together they defeat the universe and become parents to a lovable, purple furry.
  • Collection of ChatGPT examples. This Thanos and Iron Man story is hilarious.
• Disputing A Parking Fine with ChatGPT
  • An interesting use case of ChatGPT
• 20 Entertaining Uses of ChatGPT You Never Knew Were Possible
  • I tried 6. Naming Things, 10. Lesson plans for teachers and got amazing results.

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