Chick-fil-A with my daughter

Hey y’all, This week's newsletter is getting sent out a little bit late for some good reasons. First, I've been kind of sick this week. Last night I had 102° fever and was up most of the night, which wasn’t great. So I got a late start to the morning. But, way more importantly and way more fun, I took my oldest daughter out to lunch. Our big twins just turned four, and one thing that I'm trying to do is spend more time with them one-on-one instead of just as a twin unit. So every Friday I'll be alternating and taking one of the big twins out to lunch, just me and them. Today I ate lunch at Chick-fil-A with my daughter and had a great time. Totally worth running a few hours behind. If you haven't seen it yet, Steve and I just recently migrated our course platform from Lemon Squeezy to Stripe. Along the way, we added in a lot of things to make the platform better and more flexible. I wrote up a little tweet thread about it [here](https://x.com/aarondfrancis/status/1920876635919622527) if you're interested. All of our courses are on sale right now to celebrate the move to Stripe so you can use coupon code STRIPE25 on the following sites: - [MasteringPostgres.com](http://MasteringPostgres.com) - [HighPerformanceSQLite.com](http://HighPerformanceSQLite.com) - [HighLeverageRails.com](http://HighLeverageRails.com) - [Screencasting.com](http://Screencasting.com) --- ### Thoughts from the week This week I've been thinking about something that has come up before but has become more apparent recently. I wrote an article recently called [Become Known for a Thing](https://aaronfrancis.com/2025/become-known-for-a-thing-5738e314) and one of my premises in there is that if you talk about a thing enough you become known for it and people start to associate you with it. That idea was mostly framed around work like your personal brand, professional expertise, etc., but I’m realizing it applies just as much to your personal life, too. It can be a way to create a friend catcher. Since I started this newsletter, people have begun tagging me in all kinds of interesting tweets and it’s been an absolute delight. Some of the tweets in this week’s edition are here because someone saw something fun or thoughtful and thought, “Aaron would like this.” And they tagged me. Which is amazing. Just by creating this newsletter, I am starting to catch friends. There’s an example of this down below of a tweet about someone crushing PRs at the gym between PRs, and a bunch of people tagged the same guy. I don’t know the full backstory, but I’m guessing he talks a lot about lifting and coding, so people associate him with that. That’s his friend catcher. This is also similar to the idea of a personal API, which I talked about on the [Code and Content podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SYhtWdaVhs). A personal API defines ways that the public can interact with you. For me, that might include databases, Laravel, having a bunch of kids, running a business, trying really hard, anything like that. Because those topics are part of my "API," people feel comfortable tagging me or starting conversations around them. It’s yet another argument in favor of doing things publicly. You will start to attract friends, which is really nice. Some people I talk to about Sufjan Stevens and Bon Iver. Others, the Fast and Furious franchise. It’s basically just common interests, but on the internet. If I see you tweeting about Fast and Furious a lot, when I see something hysterical about Fast and Furious, I'm gonna tag you and that strengthens our friendship. So if personal brand building feels icky to you, you can just say you’re developing “friend catchers”. --- ### Tweets from the week [](https://x.com/luke_metro/status/1920191048112041987) This is the one I was talking about above! See how many people are tagging him in response to this random tweet and he says, "I guess this is my brand?" You can replace brand with API here if you want to. Apparently, Luke likes to work out, and everyone knows that. So when something fitness-related comes up, people feel comfortable *interfacing* with him on that topic. That’s the magic of defining your personal API, it makes it easier for people to connect with you. --- [](https://x.com/waitbutwhy/status/1920206278967677347) My kids aren't in school yet, but this is my hope for the future of education is not to force them to write essays without AI, but rather teach them to do things with the help of AI. I'm never going to let my kids cheat on assignments, but I do want to prepare them for the real world. And while I hope schools play a role in that, I know that, ultimately, it’s my responsibility. --- [](https://x.com/wrathofgnon/status/1920134309752471647) Last week I linked to a tweet from the Southern Baptist preacher John Piper talking about how chat GPT is not capable of praise as they’re only capable of creating words. This piece hits a similar note, but from a non-religious perspective. Writing comes from somewhere and with a computer it can never come from anywhere. Good writing comes from lived experiences and computers just don't have those. --- [](https://x.com/lichthauch/status/1919812516386943390) "Excellence isn't beautiful up close." This makes me feel a lot better! I feel like I'm trying to pursue excellence and it always feels messy and kind of staccato, anything but smooth. This gives me great encouragement that maybe that's just how it is. I constantly feel like a failure and feel like I should be doing way more and I'm starting to believe that that may be how all people feel all the time. But I'll tell you what: I'm not going to quit. --- [](https://x.com/megbasham/status/1919899098078966215) This may not make sense if you're not from the south, but this is one of the funniest sketches I've seen in a long time. She absolutely nails it. There's a second one, a follow-up below the first one, and it's just as funny as the first one. --- [](https://x.com/protobard/status/1919512461574865401) I found this one because [Terry Sutton](https://x.com/saltcod/status/1919543707088359527) tagged me in it and this is exactly what I mean when I talk about creating a *friend catcher.* Terry reads this newsletter, knows the kind of tweets I’m always on the lookout for, and when he saw this one, he thought, “Ooh, Aaron would like this.” And he was right. I love this. “Home is just an accumulation of other people’s energy.” My wife and I have a lovely house, but without the people filling it, it’s not much of a home. I have some single friends with beautiful houses, and they’ve turned them into homes not through décor or design, but by being a welcoming presence and creating a certain type of atmosphere and aura in their homes when you come over to their house. I feel at ease in their homes and in my own. --- [](https://x.com/1000yearhouse/status/1918378013500068339) I think this is a sign that I'm getting old because I'm becoming drawn more and more to accounts like this that show beautiful kind of classic or traditional architecture. But look at this secret path. Look at this. It's just so inviting. I don't think Dallas is ever going to turn into something like this. But I do have dreams of moving somewhere when my kids are grown that is a little more human-scale than Dallas. --- [](https://x.com/grinich/status/1920636351139230043) I know that a lot of people don't like DHH and that's totally fine. That's completely beside the point here. But to criticize DHH for losing to Jira makes no sense to me. Michael is the founder of a VC company and famously DHH runs a bootstrapped company that makes profits. He’s basically saying that DHH is not doing a good job of playing the VC game, which is correct! DHH is not doing a good job of playing the VC game because he's not playing that game! I feel like this is the source of a lot of disagreements or hot takes on Twitter. Person A has a point of view or is working towards a specific goal and therefore they assume that everyone is working towards that goal or has that same point of view. So then they'll criticize person B for not using wise strategies to meet that goal and person B is not even trying to get to that goal! I feel like this kind of disconnect is behind a lot of Twitter disagreements and hot takes. Person A has a specific point of view or goal, and assumes everyone else is working towards the same thing. So they criticize Person B for not using the “right” strategies when Person B is not even trying to get to that goal. We end up talking in circles because we don’t realize we’re not even trying to go to the same place. So why would we use the same strategies? I’m not making a moral judgment about VC vs. bootstrapping. I’m just saying: y’all aren’t playing the same game. In a response further down in that thread I said, “this is like a bird criticizing a fish for not flying. The fish isn’t trying to fly!” It just doesn’t make sense. --- ### This week at Try Hard Studios We finally migrated our database courses over to Stripe for payments! This was a fairly big lift because the transition wasn’t one for one from our old payment processor. With [Screencasting.com](http://Screencasting.com)'s relaunch we needed to have functionality for bundling and digital downloads, so the Stripe implementation was essentially from scratch. If you check out one of our database courses, let me know what you think of the new cart experience! 🎬 **YouTube** **20 years of hacking Postgres with Heikki Linnakangas (cofounder of Neon)** I talked with Heikki Linnakangas, co-founder of Neon and longtime PostgreSQL hacker, to talk about 20+ years in the Postgres community, the architecture behind Neon, and the future of multi-threaded Postgres. You can [watch the YouTube version here ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SESrrvyuko)or catch the audio version on the [Database School Podcast](https://databaseschool.transistor.fm/episodes/20-years-of-hacking-postgres-with-heikki-linnakangas-cofounder-of-neon). **New Laravel starter kit (with built-in billing)** Laravel now ships with first- and third-party starter kits that make spinning up a full SaaS app faster than ever including billing, invoicing, and subscriptions. In this video, I walk through the new Chargebee-powered starter kit, show you how to get up and running in minutes, and explore some of the powerful billing tools available under the hood. [Check it out here!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBl8XagjG1w&pp=0gcJCYUJAYcqIYzv) --- If you’ve been enjoying the newsletter and think a friend may enjoy reading it each week too, please forward it to them! They can sign up to receive it weekly here: . That’s it for this week! I enjoy reading all of your replies, so if you see something interesting or just have a thought you want to share, please hit reply and let me know. Talk soon, Aaron {{ ENV.unsubscribe\_personal | default: visitor.unsubscribe\_url | hyperlink: "Click here to unsubscribe." }}