>/misc/blog

Getting scammed on the Internet

At the height of the Amazon self-publishing craze, I uploaded a few books which immediately bombed. One book in particular received a lot of negative reviews but also caught the attention of scammers.

As a result, the product page was regularly hijacked by some scammer. This happened regularly: someone would change the order of sellers so that some high-volume reseller would be listed as the original seller; the hits on the page would go up somehow; profit.

The thing was, while the scammers were making money as the top seller, I was still profiting from incidental sales, and so was Amazon.

Prologue: the book has since been put on hold by Amazon after too many negative reviews, so no one is making money now.

25/11/2024

Toronto Twitter

Did you know that Facebook started as a social network for students to connect with other students at the same school? That was the hook.

I was reminded of this because I recently tapped into Toronto Twitter: a group of users from the city, mostly developers and creatives, who know each other through school or workspace. The content is mostly shitposting and memes but also some of the best organizing and creative work I've seen lately, from an event series by New Demos to a fried rice tournament by @tommytrxnh to a whole lot by @saleh_digital.

My takeaway: geography makes the social network.

11/10/2024

How I learned to stop worrying and love AI

The idea: write an article using ChatGPT about writing an article using ChatGPT, and pitch it to New York Magazine.

"In an age defined by technological leaps..."

I ask Chat for a few introductions to choose from.

"Imagine a world where a machine helps you craft the perfect sentence..."

I spend the afternoon in a back and forth with Chat before deciding to put the project on hold.

If you write or draw for a living, you've already heard that AI is going to take your job, forcing you to be a full stack developer or leaving you free to make art with no expectation to work at all. Unless you work in mainstream media or SEO, I think your job is safe--for now.

09/10/2024

Money matters

Besides a short stint copy editing for a Quebec-based investment firm, I never paid attention to the business side of things.

A big motivation for starting this blog is to correct that mistake, realizing that a little business acumen can give legs to creative work.

My first homework assignment: study the work of two X/Twitter users in my area of interest: @aravindEO on the business of earth observation and @yohaniddawela on the intersection of spatial data and economics.

Look for an update with my notes.

08/10/2024

LinkedIn vs Twitter by the numbers

If you spend any time on Twitter, you'll know that it's "not what it used to be".

So I jumped on LinkedIn to test the waters and here's what I found:

I posted a link to this GitHub repo on both platforms. Over the first two days, there were ~400 views from Twitter and ~1,600 views (4x) from LinkedIn. (see Insights > Traffic on your GitHub dashboard for these metrics).

For context, I have around 4k followers on Twitter and around 1.5k on LinkedIn. As with any comparison, YMMV.

08/10/2024

Not just for developers

Open source is one of those rare professional spaces where you can share what you like, from niche academic research to passion project and everything in between.

I started by uploading some personal docs to GitHub, which were mildly successful, eventually leading me to create content for social media and the web.

I also met two mentors early on, Alasdair Rae and Ujaval Gandhi, both well known educators in the QGIS community.

To quote Alasdair: "Find a way to share your knowledge / experience / problems — even if you don't know how it might be useful; it's often way more helpful than you realise."

08/10/2024

Finding market fit as a writer

Nowadays, technical writing feels technically non-essential, with so many developers being good writers themselves and tools like TypeDoc that can translate comments in code into readable docs.

Is there still a place for writers in software?

The pivot: writing narrative-driven case studies that don't just show how the software works but how the software is used in real-life scenarios.

These case studies should have the user at the center of the story, not the software or the software company.

Who should I pitch this to?

08/10/2024