Nick Manning ⌨️

Solopreneur, author, mentor, proud father of two. Building 🤘 Prev: Google, 3x startup CTO. 👨‍💻 Sharing my findings along the way.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

So I'm crafting content for a small book and course over this winter break - heck why not?

Topic not yet public!

Yesterday was day 0.

I’ll be documenting my naive shot at this - because again, why not? Maybe it can cajole others to give a go? At minimum I can get some helpful feedback along the way from others.

Here’s what I did yesterday starting from absolute 0:

1. I recorded a brain dump video, talking about who, what, why, how etc about my idea.

Somehow video recording myself "put me on the spot" and I was able to focus more on conciseness.

2. I generated a book/course outline from this.

I uploaded the video to https://t.co/izX28fB5PM to transcribe it. I refined it into a tentative chapter outline and dumped it into Notion.

Side note: I typically like the https://t.co/izX28fB5PM iOS app to quickly record my thoughts so that's why I went with that. And for some reason I'm not a huge fan of writing like this in Markdown (i.e. via Obsidian) so I'm trying Notion. I like the writing experience in Notion especially with the prospect of later collaborating with an editor later.

3. Then I recorded a brain dump video on "topic A”.

So this time not a video, just for convenience. I used https://t.co/U7SJgZk922's macOS app to just talk away for 30 minutes directly into Notion. Talking for about 30 minutes gave me roughly 2000 words. Calculating how much I need to do this gave me a lot of motivation.

For example, I want to craft a book and course where someone can choose to read or consume video. For video, I want to keep it to max 2-3 hours so I'm going for 10k words per hour. Therefore I whittle it down 2000 words with heavy editing. I think that after a few weeks of repeating this process I can achieve this goal, then heavily edit the content down further.

Notes for the engineers reading this (warning, needless geeking out here). I may consider just self publishing later later + host the video version on a microsite served by a simple web-app that pulls the content straight from Notion (cached of course when served up). I can later host multiple publications courses using that same web app as it could support multi-tenant (extract domain from HTTP header -> determine tenant to serve up, host on same VPS for dollars a month).

https://t.co/G2O2j4YIAp if anyone wants to keep tabs on my progress and gain some insights. Definitely not an expert on this entire process but I think the conversations will be interesting along the way.

[Milez ◡̈ @MilezGrey]

@jack This is crazyyyyy.

[jack @jack]

We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.

https://t.co/r0qFLdvd6c

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Stressed navigating a challenge as an engineering manager? People challenges can be tough.

I’ve found more and more that thinking in and leaning on frameworks to navigate those challenges at bare minimum can nudge one in the right direction.

Stress can down immediately too thus leading to clarity of thought and an optimized outcome.

And if the framework is repeatable and ends up useful, bonus – note it down for next time.

My personal fav: SBI

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Commit and push after every session. With herdr and Tailscale, I can riff from my phone and pick up where I left off.

Interested to hear what has worked for others.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Anyone else writing their first book, or thinking about it?

I'm writing one for new engineering managers, aiming for about 17,000 words. Ultra hard mode now with a newborn at home so free time comes in short bursts.

This past weekend I found a solid flow and setup that works 👇

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Takeaway: it's far easier to shape a book as a list of crisp talking points than as pages of prose. Move them, cut them, merge them until the argument works. Then write.

[DHH @dhh]

Burnout happens when you work too hard with not enough meaning.

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how" — Nietzsche

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Je ne commanderai plus jamais chez @SGMJ_Officiel. Ces génies ont saisi MANUELLEMENT mon adresse de livraison INCORRECTEMENT dans @ChronopostSAV et l’ont envoyée à la mauvaise personne. Une incompétence scandaleuse.

[Nick Manning ⌨️ @seenickcode]

Is it just me or do most engineers not really have a solid idea of what an engineering manager actually does?

[Naval @naval]

One of the best recent podcasts on AI. Neil has a gift for explaining all of the jargon and insights simply.

(I’m not involved, just found it unusually educational).

[Paul Copplestone - e/postgres @kiwicopple]

who made this masterpiece ?

[Cursor @cursor_ai]

Origin, our code hosting platform, is now live.

It's fast, easy to use, and deeply integrated with Cursor.

Get started by syncing your repos from GitHub.

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

New: A map of the most important skills in AI Engineering. https://t.co/VVkn1Dqp1N

[Anatoli Kopadze @AnatoliKopadze]

https://t.co/fyBGWQbsvn

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

I got early access to Grok Bot and I'm hooked.

I haven't been this excited about a new AI product in a while.

It's like OpenClaw, but super easy, reliable, and less scary to use. I think this will be a huge new product line for Cursor/Grok/SpaceX.

I've already found so many ways to use it that have meaningfully made my life better:
1. Matchmaking people looking for jobs with companies who are hiring (see below)
2. Auto-replying to support emails (saves me hours!)
3. Scanning my credit card statements and finding recurring subscriptions to cancel
4. Sending me (really good!) briefs for upcoming podcast guests

See below for my actual set of agents that I've been using and chat with daily.

Great work on this team Grok Bot.

(I'm not an investor in this, nor do I have any ties to this product/company. I'm just a fan!)

[codila @0xCodila]

Andrew Ng just released 2-hour course on 100% Graph engineering: 1 prompt → 100 agents → loops → graphs from scratch:

10% → 9:14 - build your first agent from scratch
30% → 33:11 - Loop engineering
55% → 1:02:46 - Graph engineering
75% → 1:30:15 - agents that rewrite themselves
100% → 1:49:05 - full graph system that work without you

most graph tutorials stop at the diagram - this one has you running one in the first 20 minutes

watch this brilliant course, build the graph - then read the full architecture below ↓