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ARE WE USING THE RIGHT CHANNELS?

This post contains 7 tips to ensure you have the right growth marketing channels in place for B2B startups of all sizes. A chart is included in the post to make it easier to determine channel fit.

5 PROVEN LEAD MAGNETS

A lead magnet is an offer or an opt-in bribe to get someone to join your email list. This post contains 5 high-converting examples of lead magnets: quizzes, masterclass webinars, e-books, calculators, and training videos.

20 SEO TOOLS I USE EVERY SINGLE WEEK

This list contains some common tools like Moz and Screaming Frog, as well as a few lesser-known plugins and add-ons such as Wappalyzer for checking competitors’ tech stacks, Nightwatch for seeing SERPs in other countries, and Glimpse as an add-on for Google Trends.

3 QUESTIONS EVERYONE SHOULD ASK IN A SURVEY

A survey question should only be asked when it can help you learn something or act on something – otherwise, you should probably cut it. This guide walks through how to write good survey questions, as well as tools, timing, and utilizing results.

BOOTSTRAPPING AN 8-FIGURE TALENT NETWORK WITH ZERO AD SPEND

GrowthAssistant hit $50K MRR in its first 100 days and has grown to over $11 million with major clients in less than three years. It was able to achieve this with just 8 employees and zero ad spend. GrowthAssistant did this by putting a huge focus on who it hired, leveraging organic social, and goaling marketing against the number of meetings held instead of just the number of leads driven.

CATEGORY CREATION AND COMMUNITY-LED GROWTH

This interview covers how communities factor into growth, branding, and product support, as well as their role in an emerging category. Oftentimes in category building, the community will play a pivotal role in product creation and refinement. However, the community-led approach can be more slow-going than other traditional growth methods. The interview contains examples of community-led products as well as anecdotes from the interviewee’s 15 years of experience building communities.

DESIGNING A DESIGN SYSTEM FOR LOBLAW DIGITAL

Loblaw Digital faced challenges establishing a company-wide design system due to the diverse nature of its digital properties. This piece shares how various stakeholders within the company and product and technology partners worked together to make the design system come to life. It continues to be a living, breathing system to support the organization’s evolving needs.

THE KALM RETROSPECTIVE FOR MARKETING

The KALM retro has four main components: Keep, Add, Less, and More. It’s a simple but effective way to improve marketing campaigns continuously. This post includes a template.

INSTAGRAM IS RETIRING ITS GUIDES POSTING OPTION NEXT MONTH

Instagram Guides are going away as of December 15, with all existing Guides on profiles to be converted to Collections.

YOUTUBE IS THRIVING. ADVERTISING ON YOUTUBE REMAINS...COMPLICATED

Despite its financial growth and diverse advertising avenues, YouTube faces complexities in ad spending allocation due to its sprawling advertising structure and challenges in navigating various vendor roles within its ecosystem.

HOW TO SCALE A LARGE CODEBASE

Vercel uses a monorepo architecture to organize and reuse code efficiently across teams. Its team suggests using Turborepo for monorepo management and emphasizes the importance of feature flags for safe code release, incremental builds for quick iteration, and skew protection to handle version discrepancies. Thanks to their monorepo and these tools, they are able to have frequent and confident code releases, easy adoption of new technologies, independent work on UI parts, and efficient sharing and reuse of code.

A FASTER WEB IN 2024

Core Web Vitals are a set of specific factors that Google considers important in a webpage's overall user experience. The interaction responsiveness metric Google uses in its Core Web Vitals assessment is changing in 2024 to INP (integration to next paint). This post outlines how this metric is uncovering issues that have been flying under the radar. Many websites today are bound to fail this metric and the post looks at what developers can do to mitigate such issues.

STOP PARROTING YOUTUBE SOLUTIONS IN SYSTEM DESIGN INTERVIEWS

This post looks at five common mistakes in system design interviews and how to avoid them. These mistakes include not prioritizing scenarios properly, talking too abstractly, having a shallow design implementation, speaking about superficial tradeoffs, and having irrelevant failure discussions. Overall, it’s important to focus on core questions asked during a system design interview and understand what the interviewer is looking for that gives them a “hire” signal.

YOU DON'T NEED CRDTS FOR COLLABORATIVE EXPERIENCES

CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) are commonly used for collaborative experiences, but are not necessary for them. They are essential in specific scenarios like offline-first applications and text editing, where they prevent overwriting and ensure accurate character placement. However, CRDTs have downsides, such as ever-growing state, complex implementations, and opaque data storage. Instead of CRDTs, collaborative applications, like spreadsheets, presentation tools, form builders, and more, can benefit from contextual information, locking mechanisms for safety, small-scale updates, and real-time updates distribution. This approach allows for effective real-time collaboration without the complexities of CRDTs.

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SCREENSHOT-TO-CODE

Screenshot-to-code converts a screenshot to HTML and Tailwind CSS. It uses GPT-4 Vision to generate the code and DALL-E 3 to generate similar looking images. You must use your own GPT-4 Vision API key in order to use it.

MAKEREAL

MakeReal is a canvas where you can draw anything and have GPT-4 turn it into actual working code.

VITE 5 IS OUT!

Vite 5 has been released. Vite is the main development environment for new React applications that aren’t based on create-react-app or Next.js. The new release of Vite comes with a host of changes, such as performance improvements.

THE LACK OF COMPENSATION IN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE IS UNSUSTAINABLE

Maintainer burnout can happen with open-source projects that have garnered significant usage but no financial compensation. One solution to this is a compensation model that pays active contributors to highly utilized products. Companies using open-source software should either contribute financially or allocate developer time to these projects.

PLANNING FOR UNPLANNED WORK

Unplanned work, which includes bug reports and emergencies, can cause friction to a team’s productivity. Managing unplanned work involves two phases: intake and execution. Intake focuses on turning unexpected issues into actionable tasks, emphasizing the need for a frictionless process to ensure comprehensive reporting. The execution phase centers on efficiently resolving these issues, such as using a shared team inbox for bugs. Clearly defined roles and Service-Level Agreements (SLAs) help maintain accountability and prioritize urgent work.

25% OR 6 TO 4: THE 11/6/23 AUTHENTICATION OUTAGE

C++: THE MOST IMPORTANT COMPLEXITIES

A collection of C++ complexities and tips to learn them better.

MASTERING DOM MANIPULATION WITH VANILLA JAVASCRIPT

A series of free tutorials to learn DOM manipulation using vanilla JavaScript, starting with the basics and going all the way to advanced tutorials.

THE VERCEL STYLE GUIDE

Vercel has released its style guide for code. The repository includes configs for popular linting and styling tools, such as Prettier and ESLint. It supports TypeScript.

85+ SaaS and cloud integrations

* 500K+ users worldwide (G2 overall leader)

automation

MICROSOFT IS FINALLY MAKING CUSTOM CHIPS — AND THEY’RE ALL ABOUT AI

Microsoft built its own custom AI chip for training large language models. It has also developed Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both chips will arrive in 2024. They could potentially lessen the industry’s reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft is already designing the second-generation versions of these chips. More details about the new chips are available in the article.

GOOGLE SEARCH WILL LET YOU LEAVE AND READ ‘NOTES’ ON WEB PAGES

Google is experimenting with a way for users to create and read Notes that contain tips from other people when searching for an article or topic. The feature is a response to the popularity of people adding ‘Reddit’ to their search queries for more human results. Users can like, share, save, or report Notes. More details about Notes and other new features Google recently added to Search are available in the article.

CHINA CLAIMS WORLD’S FASTEST INTERNET WITH 1.2 TERABIT-PER-SECOND NETWORK

Huawei and China Mobile have built a 3,000-kilometer-long internet network linking Beijing to the south. The firms claim it is the world's first network to achieve a stable and reliable bandwidth of 1.2 terabits per second. The network uses domestically-owned key technologies.

CRISPR GENE EDITING SHOWN TO PERMANENTLY LOWER HIGH CHOLESTEROL

A single infusion of a novel gene-editing treatment has been shown to reduce cholesterol in people with an inherited condition that causes extremely high LDL cholesterol levels. The treatment uses CRISPR to edit a gene in the liver. Gene editing could provide a longer-lasting option for treating hereditary high cholesterol compared to long-term medication. A lot of work still needs to be done to ensure that the treatment is safe.

MONKEYPATCH

MonkeyPatch is a method for easily calling an LLM in place of the function body in Python. It produces the same parameters and output you would expect from a function implemented by hand. MonkeyPatch produces functions that are well-typed, reliable, stateless, and production-ready.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF SERVERLESS DATA SYSTEMS

The future of cloud data services is large-scale and multi-tenant. This article looks at real-world serverless multi-tenant (MT) data architectures to understand how different types of systems implement serverless MT. While some patterns immediately jump out, there is a surprising amount of diversity among the systems surveyed. The article covers what serverless MT is and the generic challenges in building these systems.

AMAZON TO STAFF: COME INTO THE OFFICE – IT'D BE A SHAME IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO YOUR PROMOTION

Amazon employees risk undermining their own promotion prospects if they don’t return to the office for three days a week. Corporate workers must get VP-level approval if they aren’t able to come into the office. Amazon had issued a return-to-office mandate in May. Around 10% of its employees protested the mandate, including those that joined the company during the pandemic as remote workers.

EXPLORING GPTS: CHATGPT IN A TRENCH COAT?

GPTs allows ChatGPT Plus users to create their own custom GPT chat bots that other Plus subscribers can then talk to. While it might not seem like much more than a fancy wrapper for standard GPT-4 with some pre-baked prompts, GPTs combines many features to provide much more than that. This article discusses these features and shows users how to get the most out of OpenAI’s latest feature.

GOOGLE’S 36% SEARCH REVENUE SHARE WITH APPLE IS 3X WHAT ANDROID OEMS GET

The highest tier of search revenue share for cooperative Android OEMs is 12%.

MICROSOFT OFFICIALLY LAUNCHES LOOP, ITS NOTION COMPETITOR

Loop provides flexible and collaborative workspaces and pages that make it easier for users to cooperate on work.

ELON MUSK'S STARLINK IPO MAY LIFT OFF AS SOON AS NEXT YEAR

SpaceX is considering launching an initial public offering as soon as late 2024.

WHY DO PEOPLE USE VBA?

Most people who use VBA do so because they have no other choice - many organizations run their entire business processes with Excel, which requires VBA to automate.

PUSH IFS UP AND FORS DOWN

Consider moving if conditions inside functions to the caller instead, and if you have a whole batch of things to work with, you can amortize the startup cost and be flexible about the order things are processed.

HOME INNOVATION ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE READY TO SIGN UP FOR CHATGPT PLUS? JOIN THE CLUB

Users wanting to sign up for a new ChatGPT subscription will now have to sign up for a waitlist to be notified when subscriptions reopen.

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waitlist to join with this exclusive link.

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MICROSOFT IS MAKING CUSTOM AI CHIPS

Microsoft has developed its own custom AI chip, Azure Maia AI, and an Arm-based CPU for Azure data centers, Azure Cobalt, aiming to reduce reliance on Nvidia and prepare for an AI-driven future. The chips are set to launch in 2024.

GOOGLE’S GENERATIVE SEARCH ROLLED OUT TO 120 MORE COUNTRIES

Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is slowly being made available to more countries in many languages after debuting earlier this year. The company is taking a slow and measured pace to this release as it touches many of its key search systems.

GOOGLE'S AI-POWERED SEARCH FEATURE GOES GLOBAL

GitHub's Copilot X revolutionizes software development by embedding AI in every stage. The new Copilot Chat, powered by GPT-4, enables natural language coding. It arrives in December 2023. Copilot Enterprise, tailored for organizational codebases, will launch in February 2024. Enhanced AI security features and the expanding Copilot Partner Program further enrich GitHub's offerings.

DIRECT PREFERENCE OPTIMIZATION IMPROVES MODEL FACTUALITY

Optimizing models according to preferences was one of the breakthroughs that enabled the widespread adoption of ChatGPT. Similar technologies can also be used to improve the correctness and factuality of models, reducing errors in medical recall by over 50%.