We’re right around the corner from the Hackathon results on Monday, but I’ve had plenty to keep me busy besides squeezing in a few last minute app features.

Balancing that with creating a podcast, keeping up with current podcasts, exploring AI ideas and other distractions, it might be time once again to reprioritize and simplify things.

A few of those ideas below:

• The Big Reveal

• Bridge Construction

• Volume and Iteration

• o1 API Access

• Simplifying

The Big Reveal

The Twitch Hackathon projects were finally revealed today as we wait to see the winners announced on Monday.

Only 52 other projects to compete with and I didn’t see any other stock-market-inspired submissions so we may be alone in that category which is hopefully a good thing.

I didn’t get all the features done that I wanted, but I’ll try to sneak a few more in before Monday.

Got a little hung up adding and removing Twitch channels in a league, but we’re getting close to a full flow.

Users can sign up, login, and create or join a league.

I have the ability to add a channel working, but the removing isn’t quite working yet so I’m hoping to push that to the website this weekend.

And we’ll see what happens on Monday!

It may be a mad scramble to stabilize everything with a sudden traffic spike after we win…

Bridge Construction

So Andrew Huberman endorsed me (and everyone else on his feed) to start a podcast.

Way ahead of him on that as The Dev Sync already has 10 whole episodes.

Admittedly I’ve been over strategizing podcast approaches lately, rather than executing.

Instead of recording another episode, I ended up watching a few videos about new podcast trends.

It’s tricky how this can feel like being productive, when it’s not actually producing anything.

I did learn a few new tips though, like part of the secret for Steven Bartlett’s success with Diary of a CEO’s growth and how recording a fake podcast by yourself work surprisingly well:

But then got stuck in the cycle of ideating and not recording, while also trying to build out some features for Hype Bid.

I like to think it’s easy to do multiple projects at the same time, but a lot of the time it’s much easier to focus on one project at a time.

Context switching is a real issue.

If you’re only thinking about one problem all the time it’s easier to come up with multiple solutions, but if you’re jumping between multiple problems, there’s less time to come up with good solutions.

It’s like slowly building different partial bridges at the same time instead of building one complete bridge, and then building a second, better bridge based on what you learned from completing the first bridge.

You may learn the wrong lessons from building incomplete bridges.

The main bridge, The Dev Sync, isn’t going anywhere, I’ve just been focusing more on the Hype Bid bridge for now.

And may need to focus on it more next week.

But after a holiday break, it’ll be time to re-prioritize bridge construction projects.

Volume and Iteration

Listening to The Iced Coffee Hour’s episode with Codie Sanchez this week, Codie was listing green flags for people she would bet on.

One quality was a bias towards speed and action.

She gives an example that Mr. Beast’s team is able to do so much because they move uncomfortably fast.

This allows them to have way more “shots on goal” so that even though most ideas might fail, they are able to get through all the failures quickly and find the winners faster.

The same idea in the quote from Edison that he didn’t fail, but he found 10000 ways not to make a lightbulb.

Today, we can get through 10000 ways that don’t work much faster than ever before.

It’s a mentality I realized I talk about but need to implement.

Thinking about it more, I remembered trying to run an ad for divs.design at one point, but I only ran one version of the ad with a budget of $10.

About 9999 versions short of finding a working ad or a 0.01% of getting it right the first try.

But I was able to get that one ad in front of over 5000 people for less than $4.

So spending $40,000 could get 10000 different ads in front of potentially more than 2 million people and that would be substantially more data to work with and find an ad winner that gets a lot of customers.

Same goes for content creation and podcasts.

After 1000 episodes, you’d probably have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t work based on the numbers.

And even if you didn’t have a decent audience or view count by then, you’d have a lot of evidence of things that aren’t working.

At the end of the day it comes down to volume and iteration.

Try a bunch of stuff and then when you find the thing that works, keep tweaking that thing to be better and better.

o1 API Access

OpenAI saved me some money this week, as I’ve still been debating whether it was worth spending my way to Tier 3 API usage so I could access o1-preview and o1-mini programatically.

Luckily they opened up access to everyone with a paid subscription to ChatGPT.

I had to resist the urge of firing up a new project right when I saw the email.

Hype Bid is the first priority for now, but I’ve been itching to get back to experimenting with AI app integrations.

Corporation-as-a-service is right around the corner, I can feel it…

Simplify

Matt Gray often pops into my YouTube feed with a nice title or thumbnail I can’t help but click on.

His video this week was both practical and a good reminder of what I intended to do a while ago:

Limit my inputs.

Ironically, consuming this and other podcasts this weeks isn’t exactly limiting my inputs but I have a been a little more mindful of what I’m getting out of it.

Even the Codie Sanchez podcast I mentioned earlier, I was somewhat weary of pressing play, worried I would be tempted with another idea of something I should work on instead.

But I think just the awareness is a key to preventing the distraction.

And Matt echoes that sentiment, recommending you create an environment or space to incentivize work and limit distractions, and develop a routine for success.

It was a good reminder that I need to get back on the deep work schedule I followed earlier this year.

I still plan to be productive everyday but I’ve gotten lax with the timing.

Sometimes I’m too flexible with when I get to work and I don’t end up spending as much time in deep work as I should.

Next week will be a little tough but after the holidays, it’ll be back to more a regular calendar-based routine.

A few hours of focused work, clean eating and some exercise.

It’s always a bit of an adjustment to get a proper routine down, but after a few weeks of practice, the rhythm should be natural, even almost automatic.

Time to simplify once again.

And that’s it for this week! Hacking, inputs, outputs and everything in between. Maybe too much in between...

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

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