Entropy is my attempt to make something I’m already doing - voraciously reading everything I can - into something useful for others too. Thanks so much for subscribing and being here for my first ever issue. Here’s what’s got me this week!

Built With Borrowed Hands

Link: https://cra.mr/built-with-borrowed-hands/

I love David’s title here and I really appreciate seeing another very experienced operator break down their process in such detail. Some great, actionable tips in here that map well with my experience too. The kind of stuff you can actually implement right away.

There’s no speed limit | Derek Sivers

Link: https://sive.rs/kimo

‘Standard pace is for chumps’. Yes! A thousand times yes! Energy and persistence conquer all things! Analyse everything all the time - can this be faster? What am I waiting for? What if I had half the time, what would it look like? I stumbled on this timeless article this week and I really needed to read it again.

Modern PHP development with FrankenPHP and Docker

Link: https://sevalla.com/blog/modern-php-with-frankenphp-and-docker/

I’m using this exact same setup and it is blazing fast. FrankenPHP is a giant improvement on php-fpm and nginx all configured ad-hoc. I’ve been running this in production for a few months now and the performance difference is palpable, especially with worker mode keeping everything in memory between requests. Steal this for your next project!

Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear Now

Link: https://linear.app/now/quality-wednesdays

Linear continues to raise (and talk about) the bar for software. It’s no wonder their app is lightning fast and powerful when they laser in on stuff like this and codify it into team-wide practices.

On over-engineering; finding the right balance

Link: https://www.16elt.com/2024/09/07/future-proof-code/

You have to be able to pull your head out of the sand to check why you’re doing something and why it’s this specific way. Without doing this reflexively, you’ll run repeatedly into over or under abstraction. Like, you need to actually step back and question whether you’re building the right thing at the right level - are you making it too specific for today’s problem, or are you going way overboard trying to solve every possible future scenario that might never happen?