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A reading workflow that works

It’s hard not to fall prey to information overload these days. There is quite literally an always-on, never-ending stream of it being fed into our lives, and staying on top of it all and sifting out what might actually be useful can be incredibly difficult. Personally, I’ve come up with a system that works for me, and am quite structured about it. Being the kind person I am, I decided to share that recipe with you.

The tools

I do 85% of my reading on my iPad. It really is made for it, and being able to lie on a couch or in my bed at the end of the day and catch up on the cool articles from the day is an enjoyable experience. It’s a great device, if for no other use than this.

Most of my actual ‘discovery’ of articles takes place on my day-to-day machine. Most of the discovery is through Twitter - I follow people that generally share cool articles, as well as a few publications such as The Next Web, Wired, and the like. While Tweetdeck runs on my machine in a tab all day, I occasionally open Tweetbot on my iPhone (a great client!) if I’m bored, or possibly the official Twitter app on my iPad if I’m particularly bored during a meeting :P In addition, the nature of my work means that I often get interesting articles emailed to me from other people in the office. Lastly, I open up Hacker News if I have a few minutes during the day and do a quick scan down and click through to anything that catches my eye. I gave up on Google Reader and RSS readers a while ago; not because they’re not useful, but because I realized that the vast majority of the good articles that I would read there find their way to me in some other channel (like Twitter). Ultimately, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort I was putting into staying on top of it, or the sinking feeling of opening it up and seeing “1000+ unread articles”.

The process

If I see a tweet with what looks like it might be an interesting article, I generally don’t open it up. Instead, I favourite it. One of the tasks I run on Ifttt (one of the best services on web!) then triggers and sends the link in the tweet to Instapaper - here’s a link to that recipe. (The exception to this rule is that if I’m in Tweetbot on my phone, I can hold down on a link and send it straight into my linked Instapaper account - brilliant!).

If I do open a link in my browser (Chrome) - either from clicking on a link in a tweet, an email from a colleague, or a story on Hacker News - I use the Instapaper Read Later bookmarklet to add it to my account.

When the day ends, or I have a break and want to do some catching up on reading, I fire up the Instapaper app on my iPad. At $4.99, its worth every cent - it saves all articles for offline reading (eg for the plane), looks great and is easy to read, has a dark mode for nighttime reading, dictionary lookups, and sharing built right into it. This is where the majority of my reading takes place.

If there’s an article I really enjoy, I ‘like’ it from within Instapaper. This triggers two actions: 1) it shares it to Twitter for my followers to see and 2) it pushes it into my Evernote account (which you can link up within Instapaper). If I liked an article, i’m likely to want to reference it at some point in the future, and being able to search through that text in Evernote (either on my laptop, or my iPad in a meeting) is a godsend. If I don’t ‘like’ the article, I archive it to a Instapaper folder called ‘Read’, which helps keep my account uncluttered and means that whenever i open the app, I see only the articles that I haven’t gotten around to reading yet. If I got absolutely nothing out of the article (or its a dead link etc), I simply delete it.

In conclusion…

The result of following this fairly structured process is not only an efficient way to deal with the information flow during the day, but an end-of-day/weekend reading experience that I thoroughly enjoy. I get so much out of the amount of reading I do, and this allows me to keep doing that. 

I’d love to hear what works best for you.

(Outside of this workflow - which is specific to web articles - I subscribe to both Wired and FastCompany on my iPad, and buy far too many ebooks, which I read on my iPad in either iBooks or the Kindle app. And I still love an old-school book here and there.)

This is not another post about Instagram

Well, not entirely, at least. Instead, it is a post about how an industry has lost it’s way. 

I have a huge deal of respect for Kevin Systrom and the team of guys he has built up around him. And I love and use the product they have built, and appreciate the approach they took in building it in the first place. In short, I think they deserve every bit of success that comes their way. Including being snapped up by Facebook.

Does any of that equate to a valuation of $1bn? Not a chance. But it also doesn’t have to. The Instagram/Facebook deal has a lot more to do with Facebook than it does Instagram. Facebook has, deservedly, become the force to be reckoned with in the online space, and have the financial backing to support their position in the food chain. At the core of their success is their product, and the Facebook product, in turn, consists of a number of cores, including photos. It has been key to their success thus far. And yet, they aren’t dominating the highest-growing sector (mobile) of one of their product cores (photos) - Instagram is. With money to throw around, the acquisition of Instagram was a no-brainer. It’s one part product decision (it’ll improve Facebook’s competency in the photo and mobile spaces) and one part pure strategy decision (it prevents another company beating them at their own game).

So, is $1bn a completely irrational figure that has no relation to the actual value of the product? Yes. Does that matter? No. What does matter is the equally-irrational valuation of $550m that allowed them to raise $50m of funding just 2 weeks ago.

As an industry, tech and Internet-related startups have reached a point at which, in no world, do valuations match product. One can’t help escape the feeling that the investment community is nothing short of desperate to get their money behind the “next big thing”, and the size of the cheque is irrelevant in making that happen. Investment FOMO is destroying an industry. 42Floors founder Jason Freedman, in a fantastic post, outlined what it’s like being on the receiving end of this and it makes for a read that is nothing short of scary. None of the blame for this should sit with the founders and entrepreneurs, as so many seem to suggest. But it will be where the effect is most felt.

Bubbles burst and, when they do, industries collapse. And if you have any doubt that we’re in one, you haven’t been reading enough.

The (hypothetical) way to access Rdio from South Africa

Rdio is an awesome application. The UI is fantastic, the music experience is fantastic, and I think they could give Spotify a serious run for their money. There is only one problem. As with many other streaming applications, you cannot use it from South Africa. Unless you follow these instructions, which I have (of course) neither tried or attempted to. 

1. Get yourself a cloud server, or borrow one from a very nice friend. I recommend Linode (they are awesome). Make sure that, whatever service you use, the datacenter is based in the US.
2. Set up a SSH tunnel to this on port 9999. On a Mac, it’s as easy as running “ssh [user]@]server IP]  -D 9999” from Terminal. if you’re a Windows user, you can do it through Putty. Either way, you’ll then need to enter your username and password and log in to the server. 
3. Open up your browser (or a different one to your primary browser), and go into your proxy settings. Make sure that there is only an entry for the Socks5 proxy, and set this to ‘127.0.0.1’ and the port to ‘9999’.
4. Save your changes and check that you can browse the web (albeit slowly).
5. Go to rdio.com and sign up for an account. It should see you as a US-based user and this should be a pretty easy process. 
6. You’re now done with that whole tunneling business, so go ahead and close the connection, and put your proxy settings back to normal.
7. Head back to rdio.com and you should be prompted to sign up to be notified when it launches in your country. You can do this if you really like. Or you could click the “Sign in” link on the top right, and sign in with the details you’ve already created when you happened to visit the site on your brief trip to the United States.
8. When you browse the music, you should be told you can’t stream it thanks to regional restrictions. But the good news is that Rdio subscribers can stream music without restrictions while on indefinite holidays. So all you have to do is upgrade your account.
9. Go ahead and upgrade your account. Assuming you’re using a SA Mastercard, enter all those details, but enter your billing country as Denmark. You will be asked if you’re happy to be billed in a currency you’ve likely never seen before, and you can go ahead and accept that.
10. Find some great music and start streaming it!
11. Download the desktop apps, which make the experience even better.

The Mac apps I couldn’t live without

1. Dropbox.
2. Evernote. 
3. Skype.
4. iTunes.
5. Twitter. I used to use the Tweetdeck Chrome app, but having a native app is just better. I generally leave Twitter running, along with my mail, on a 2nd screen.
6. Alfred. By far the most useful app I have installed. Spotlight is cool - Alfred is better.
7. Caffeine. It sounds silly, but being able to quickly press an icon and not have your Mac go to sleep is incredibly useful. Think Skype calls and presentations.
8. Wunderlist. I’ve bounced around a couple of to-do apps, but Wunderlist has stuck for me. It’s simple and yet does more than I usually need from it, syncs across devices, and pretty much runs my life.
9. CloudApp. Right click and share with a link - that’s all I need, and it’s become how share almost anything with people. 
10. Bitcasa. This is the newcomer to my life, but essentially ‘cloudifies’ any folder on your Mac, allowing infinite storage in the cloud. I’m using it, at the moment, to cloudify by music and image collection, being the largest folders and the ones I most want backed up.
11. iTerm. If you spend any time in Terminal, this is an awesome replacement. If nothing else, just for having autocomplete.
12. TextMate. Absolutely perfect for doing the odd bit of coding or editing, and customizable enough to make it pretty powerful, too.
13. Cyberduck. My choice of FTP client. Works really nicely with Amazon S3, too.
14. Transmission. For the odd entirely-legal magnet or torrent link I receive.
15. Abobe CS. Illustrator and Photoshop form part of my daily life, no matter how bad I am with them.
16. MS Office. As much as I’d love to change over, in a corporate world dominated by Microsoft, there’s no other option. Despite my best efforts, Outlook just works better with Exchange mail. And I use Word and Excel an excessive amount.
17. iCal. I have a couple of calendars, but iCal is my go-to look at when I have time, as well as how I often go about scheduling things across the different calendars.

The Hacker Way - by Mark Zuckerberg

The Hacker Way

As part of building a strong company, we work hard at making Facebook the best place for great people to have a big impact on the world and learn from other great people. We have cultivated a unique culture and management approach that we call the Hacker Way.

The word “hacker” has an unfairly negative connotation from being portrayed in the media as people who break into computers. In reality, hacking just means building something quickly or testing the boundaries of what can be done. Like most things, it can be used for good or bad, but the vast majority of hackers I’ve met tend to be idealistic people who want to have a positive impact on the world.

The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo.

Hackers try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once. To support this, we have built a testing framework that at any given time can try out thousands of versions of Facebook. We have the words “Done is better than perfect” painted on our walls to remind ourselves to always keep shipping.

Hacking is also an inherently hands-on and active discipline. Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works. There’s a hacker mantra that you’ll hear a lot around Facebook offices: “Code wins arguments.”

Hacker culture is also extremely open and meritocratic. Hackers believe that the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people.

To encourage this approach, every few months we have a hackathon, where everyone builds prototypes for new ideas they have. At the end, the whole team gets together and looks at everything that has been built. Many of our most successful products came out of hackathons, including Timeline, chat, video, our mobile development framework and some of our most important infrastructure like the HipHop compiler.

To make sure all our engineers share this approach, we require all new engineers — even managers whose primary job will not be to write code — to go through a program called Bootcamp where they learn our codebase, our tools and our approach. There are a lot of folks in the industry who manage engineers and don’t want to code themselves, but the type of hands-on people we’re looking for are willing and able to go through Bootcamp.

The examples above all relate to engineering, but we have distilled these principles into five core values for how we run Facebook:

Focus on Impact

If we want to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems. It sounds simple, but we think most companies do this poorly and waste a lot of time. We expect everyone at Facebook to be good at finding the biggest problems to work on.

Move Fast

Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. However, as most companies grow, they slow down too much because they’re more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We have a saying: “Move fast and break things.” The idea is that if you never break anything, you’re probably not moving fast enough.

Be Bold

Building great things means taking risks. This can be scary and prevents most companies from doing the bold things they should. However, in a world that’s changing so quickly, you’re guaranteed to fail if you don’t take any risks. We have another saying: “The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.

Be Open

We believe that a more open world is a better world because people with more information can make better decisions and have a greater impact. That goes for running our company as well. We work hard to make sure everyone at Facebook has access to as much information as possible about every part of the company so they can make the best decisions and have the greatest impact.

Build Social Value

Once again, Facebook exists to make the world more open and connected, and not just to build a company. We expect everyone at Facebook to focus every day on how to build real value for the world in everything they do.