learning Archives - Michael Bianco

What I’ve Learned Searching for a New Startup Idea, Part I

I’m a couple of months into hunting for a new startup idea to work on with my cofounder. I’ve learned a lot and I’m trying to capture these learnings as I go to share them. Finding an idea to build a new business around is an interesting process: it’s much different than having a burning problem that you got excited enough about to quit your job. Finding a big idea is similar to being an investor—mixing analytics, experimentation, serendipity, patience, and convictions about what the future looks like into a specific bet on an industry, future trends, product shape, and initial feature wedge…

Learning Elixir and Ecto

I’m finally posting a long-running learning document that I wrote as I I continued work on my original Elixir side project. I stopped working on this for at least a year and recently picked it back up as part of exploring some technologies for my next startup. This post got way longer than I expected, but hopefully, it’s a great compendium of notes and learnings from someone trying to learn Elixir who has a strong understanding of ruby, python, javascript, etc. What I’m learning Here’s what I’m going to be learning: How does Ecto work? Supervisor, tasks, processes, etc. "Let it Crash" philosophy. What exactly does this mean in practice?..

Learning tmux

I’ve tried tmux before for about a day at a time and promptly forgot about it and never learned how it worked deeply. However, a friend recently reminded me about tmux’s copy mode and I was intrigued. I had the time to dig in and try to retrain my muscle memory around it. I use VS Code for my editor, but otherwise, I’m a very terminal-oriented developer. I love interactive REPLs and find that CLI tools generally allow you to move faster than GUI equivalents. Something that always frustrated me about my development loop was the need to put my hands on the mouse in order to interact (select/copy/find/etc) with the contents of my terminal screen…

Learning Swift Development for macOS by Building a Website Blocker

I loved Focus App. It blocked websites and apps on a schedule. But, years ago it started glitching out: sucking up tons of ram and freezing my computer. They didn’t fix the bug and I abandoned using it and instead switched to a host-based blocking system which has served me well. However, there are some issues with the host-based approach: I can’t block specific URLs, only hosts (focus app couldn’t do this either) I can’t set a schedule I can’t block apps If I remove a host it will not automatically get blocked unless I sleep and wake the computer Sleepwatcher (cli tool) is dead and requires some manual set up to get working…

My Experience With GitHub Codespaces

I have an older intel MacBook (2016, 2.9ghz) that I use for personal projects. My corporate machine is an M1 Macbook Pro and I love it, but I’ve been holding off on replacing my personal machine until the pro M2 comes out (hopefully soon!). I love playing with new technology, especially developer tools, and when I got accepted to the codespace beta I couldn’t resist tinkering with it. To speed up my ancient MacBook, try some new tech, and have the ability to learn more ML/AI tooling in the future. Summary I largely agree with this analysis. Codespaces are very cool. They work better than I expected—it felt like I was developing on a local machine…

Book Notes: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Something new I’m doing this year is book notes. I believe writing down your thoughts helps you develop, harden, and remember them. Books take a lot of time to read, taking time to document lessons learned is worth it. Here are the notes for The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Definitely worth reading, especially if you are actively building a company, although I wouldn’t say it’s in the must-read category. Below are my notes! Enjoy. Leadership A much better idea would have been to give the problem to the people who could not only fix it, but who would also be personally excited and motivated to do so. I think any good leader feels personally responsible for the outcome of whatever they are doing…

Using GitHub Actions With Python, Django, Pytest, and More

GitHub actions is a powerful tool. When GitHub was first released, it felt magical. Clean, simple, extensible, and adds so much value that it felt like you should be paying for it. GitHub actions feel similarly powerful and positively affected the package ecosystem of many languages. I finally had a chance to play around with it as part of building a crypto index fund bot. I wanted to setup a robust CI run which included linting, type checking, etc. Here’s what I learned: It’s not possible to test changes to GitHub actions locally. You can use the GH CLI locally to run them, but GH will use the latest version of the workflow that exists in your repo. The best workflow I found is working on a branch and then squashing the changes…

Lessons learned building with Django, Celery, and Pytest

As someone who writes ruby professionally, I recently learned python to build a bot which buys an index of crypto using binance. The best thing about ruby is Rails, so I wanted an excuse to try out Django and see how it compared. Adding multi-user mode to the crypto bot felt like a good enough excuse. My goal was to: Add a model for the user that persisted to a database Cron job to kick off a job for each user, preferably using a job management library Add some tests for primary application flows Docker-compose for the DB and app admin I’ll detail learnings around Docker in a separate post. In this post, I walk through my raw notes as I dug into the django + python ecosystem further…

Building a Crypto Index Bot and Learning Python

A long time ago, I was contracted to build a MacOS application using PyObjc. It was a neat little app that controlled the background music at high-end bars around London. That was the last time I used python (early 2.0 days if I remember properly). Since then, python has become the language of choice for ML/AI/data science and has grown to be the 2nd most popular language. I’ve been wanting to brush up on my python knowledge and explore the language and community. Building a bot to buy a cryptocurrency index was the perfect learning project, especially since there was a bunch of existing code on GitHub doing similar things. You can view the final crypto index bot project here. The notes from this learning project are below…

Building a Elixir & Phoenix Application

Learning Elixir Ever since I ran into Elixir/Phoenix through a couple of popular Hacker News posts I’ve been interested in tinkering with the language. I have a little idea for an app that I’m just motivated enough to build that Elixir would work for. I’ve document my learning process below by logging my thoughts as I learned Elixir via a ‘learning project’. What I’m building Here’s what I’d like to build: Web app which detects the user’s location using the built-in location service in the browser The zip code of that location is determined (server or client-side) The zip code is handed off to a server-side process which renders a page with the zip code…

Tag: learning