24 Jul 2025 #books
Adam Aaronson drank every cocktail on the official list.
Yes, there’s an official list of cocktails. And Adam drank them all. He started by handing the list to a bartender in his city and ended up at Satan’s Whiskers in London. Yes, that’s a bar.
Quite an impressive adventure.
Just like Adam tackled cocktails, what about book lovers? That story reminded me of a 10-idea list I wrote with 10 book reading challenges. If you want to try one, here they are:
- Join a book reading club
- Read the last 25 Pulitzer winners
- Read the last 25 Nobel Prize winners
- Read your favorite writer’s complete works
- Read a book from a new writer every month
- Read one book per week. Or 52 books in a year
- Take your own MBA by reading 12 business books in a year
- Read 12 biographies of history’s most influential figures
- Read James Altucher’s book recommendations. Full list here
- Read 10 or 12 books released more than 50 years ago. Idea from CulturalTutor.
Which one would you like to try first? For my challenge, I’m doing #4. I’m reading most of James Altucher’s books.
23 Jul 2025 #mondaylinks
Hey. I just realized I already had 4 interesting links to share. I didn’t want to wait until next Friday to share them. So here they are.
#1. I have to admit I fell into the specialization trap and started calling myself a “backend engineer.” I stopped trying to be a full stack developer. Maybe with AI, we’re witnessing the renaissance of full stack developers (10min) again.
#2. The problem with Google AI Overview is we think their answers are accurate. Hey it’s Google. They must be building AI answers from all the pages they have indexed. Wrong. In fact, Google AI Overview might kill you (7min)
#3. Speaking of Google killing people, Chrome killed uBlock Origin. And if you want it back, you need to turn to Firefox. Here’s a good adoption guide (8min).
#4. From Clean Code, I learned to avoid comments, like all comments. But there’s some value in TODO comments (2min).
And in case you missed it, I wrote on my blog about productivity secrets revealed by a real spy (2min) and a language lessons I learned in an Asian restaurant (2min).
(Bzzz…Radio voice) This email was brought to you by… Check my Gumroad store to access free and premium books and courses to level up your coding skills and grow your software engineering career.
See you next Friday, even if that’s only with one or two links.
Cesar
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22 Jul 2025 #writing
I’ve decided to start a new writing adventure: writing a book.
I’ve had to debunk lots of limiting beliefs.
- “I need a publisher”
- “I need 100% new material”
- “Writing a book is hard.”
Wrong!
After going down the rabbit-hole of searching how to write and self-publish a book, here’s what I’ve learned:
1. A hit book creates demand for more books.
After Atomic Habits, there was an audience interested in habit creation. Then, more books about the same topic came out.
A hit book isn’t necessarily competence. It’s signal of market interest.
2. You can plagiarize yourself.
We can remix our own ideas. Credits to James Altucher’s podcast.
A good post can become part of a book chapter. A series of posts can become a short book. A personal story can become an intro.
That’s the strategy Yuval Noah Harari used to write 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. He compiled lots of disperse ideas into a book.
More examples? The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck was a blog post. The Psychology of Money, a series of posts.
You see? We can repurpose our posts into books.
3. A book’s job is to tell stories.
(Another lesson from James Altucher’s podcast.)
Always be storytelling. Stories are the best way to make a message memorable.
Our job is to tell stories, not to present facts - unless we’re writing a textbook or something.
4. A book lives forever.
Your book doesn’t need to be a best-seller at launch. It can succeed anytime. And there’s plenty of time for that.
21 Jul 2025 #misc
Yesterday, I revisited an Asian restaurant I hadn’t been to in years.
It’s a family business in a neighborhood I used to live in. It’s still run by the same Chinese couple. And interestingly, their level of conversational Spanish is rather intermediate. Still the same as when I met them. Probably an A2, if you’re familiar with language proficiency levels.
But they know enough Spanish to explain what’s in every dish, take your order, and take your payment. And that’s all they need.
Their Spanish may be basic, but it’s enough to meet their daily needs. Do they speak Spanish? Absolutely. Maybe not about politics, philosophy, or the meaning of life.
Too often we think fluency is about attending a language institute and getting straight As on an exam. But fluency isn’t about perfection.
Fluency is about connection and communication. It’s about knowing the right words for the right moment. And the Chinese couple running the restaurant are completely fluent.
Maybe you’re not opening a restaurant, but here’s how I’d learn a language for work from scratch and 10 hacks I’ve used to learn foreign languages faster.
20 Jul 2025 #writing
You can smell AI-generated content from miles away.
You can feel it. It’s the opening lines, the weird word choice.
- “Delve”
- “Ever-evolving”
- “In our fast-paced world…”
You can’t fight against it.
Recently, I learned how to stand out from AI while listening to James Altucher’s podcast. I forgot to take notes, but he said something like this,
To stand out from AI, we have to live an interesting life.
AI only remixes content it was trained on. AI can’t beat an authentic voice with impactful stories. We have to live our stories and pour them into our writing.
My writing resonated more once I started sharing personal stories. They turned my writing from crickets to likes. So tell stories only you can tell. That’s how you truly stand out from the noise.