Each week I’ll have a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads or videos, as well as updates on my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• Half Way

• Devin and Robots

• AI Color Designs

• UI Design Crash Course

• What Exactly is a Spy?

Half Way

We’ve made it halfway through the month of March, assuming you’re reading this the day it arrived which should be Friday, March 15th (unlike last week where I completely forgot to send this newsletter because I was Deep in work).

The Deep work continues, though and since we’re half-way through the month, that means we’re half way through the Deep work session as well, and so far so good! A little behind schedule, but close. The goal is to have 10 landing pages by the end of March, and so far I have 4 completed. I’m planning to whip up the fifth one later today after finishing this newsletter…

The website building process is getting both easier and not easier. Each site takes about the same amount of time because I’m getting faster at building the initial layout and simple effects, but end up adding fancier and more complicated elements with each new site, so it’s balances out to a manageably challenging experience overall which was exactly the intent. Gotta build that muscle.

The results:

• Investing: https://divs-digital.appspot.com/

• Fitness: https://operation-6-pack.appspot.com/

• Fake SaaS Company Landing Page: https://saas-landing-1.appspot.com/

• Gaming/Streamer: https://ruhdacted.webflow.io/

Check them out and let me know what you think! Or send anyone that needs a site over to divs.design and I’d be happy to build one for them at a discount!

Devin and Robots

The big events in tech this week involve both software and hardware.

One is a follow-up to the announcement of all the investments and partnerships with Figure AI on the hardware side. OpenAI showcased the Figure 01 robot operating with OpenAI’s models in a short demo of human interaction and dexterity, responding to voice commands to delicately handle food and dishes. Subtly incredible.

On the software side, Cognition Labs unveiled “Devin”, the first AI Software Engineer. It’s a big step forward from other projects like AutoGen and ChatDev which had the same intent of AI developers, but Devin pushes further and gives the AI it’s own IDE so it can write and execute code as it needs.

Pretty amazing to watch if you’re a programmer, probably less exciting for those that aren’t entertained by watching code. Their demo is worth the few minutes to see where the industry is heading, though.

AI Color Designs

This is now an AI and Web Design newsletter since I’ve been deep in the Web Design world for the last couple weeks. YouTube caught on to that trend and started offering me a number of design videos now. I’ve only take then bait on a handful so far, but this one in particular got me curious, and once again, YouTube didn’t disappoint.

The channel DesignCourse demo’d how you can use Midjourney to quickly create color designs for a website in one short prompt. Admittedly, I’ve kept my Midjourney subscription active even though I haven’t touched it in a few months, but I’m sure I continued paying for it for this very reason.

Testing the concept out last night with a simple prompt of “ui/ux design black with teal accents”, Midjourney came back with this gem:

Turned out amazingly well for such a simple prompt. I’m sure I’ll be implementing this as a vital stage in the web site building pipeline. You can watch DesignCourse’s video below where they take it a step further and show how to pull the elements out of the image and into Figma (which is an awesome free tool too). Looking forward to trying this full process for myself very soon.

UI Design Crash Course

Since I’m currently in the process of speed learning website design, Juxtopposed’s video world’s shortest UI/UX design course could not have popped up in my feed at a better time. At less than 7 minutes, it’s fast paced and dense with value.

The video may have also been a sly sales pitch for their websites realtimecolors.com and stacksorted.com but I fully support the hustle because realtimecolors.com has been an amazing tool for initially designing a website. Additionally, the video and the site answered a number of my concerns with “how do I pick colors and fonts?” and “how will they look on the page?” Amazing tools, highly recommend them.

And unsurprisingly, YouTube also later served up a video from Huy NG about the only resources you need for web design, which happened to reference the same Juxtopposed video above.

All of this was incredibly useful so I’ll be coming back to these resources as I continue my brief journey to web design expert. And now you can become an overnight pro too!

What Exactly Is a Spy?

And of course, have to wrap up by suggesting a podcast completely unrelated to anything else above.

I’ve watched a few podcasts now with Andrew Bustamante because they don’t disappoint. He’s a former CIA operative that’s turned his intelligence training into a business and he’s quite good at telling the story. In this session he covers:

• his experience in the agency (which I’ve heard multiple times now but listen to every time)

• the skills he developed that he now uses to operate and grow his business and help others grow their businesses

• how spies developed a reputation through the likes of James Bond and Jason Bourne, and that the CIA shifted away from that perception some time ago

It’s a long one at just over 2 hours, but it went quickly for me. Despite the clickbait title, it’s an entertaining listen I’d recommend if you have the time!

And that’s it for this week! This is now officially and AI and Web Design newsletter, among other things. I hope you enjoyed!

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!