Steve's leaving and I'm going all-in on databases

Hey y’all, If you didn't catch the bombshell on this [week's Mostly Technical](https://mostlytechnical.com/episodes/88-steves-leaving-try-hard), Steve has decided to move on from Try Hard Studios. It's a very amicable breakup! There's no hard feelings whatsoever. He just wants to take his career in a different direction, and so I can't fault him for that. I am going to keep the party going by focusing on databases. I bought the domain [DatabaseSchool.com](http://DatabaseSchool.com), moved the podcast over there, I will start moving all database courses over there, and we'll start producing a lot more database courses on every flavor that you can think of! --- ### Thoughts from the week With Steve being gone, everything now falls on me. Those tasks have taken on a mix of, "I will do it," "Kelsey will do it," or "We won't do it at all." A lot of the things have come down to me having to do those things. So it's been very stressful! The first part of this week, it kind of got on top of me and I was having a pretty tough time. But later on in the week, I started just writing down everything that needed to be done and crossing it off the list. I think I mentioned that in one of the tweets below. I'm going to do everything in my power to make this business that I'm running sustainable and hopefully extremely profitable for me and my family. Honestly, I feel pretty excited about the new focus on databases. It feels *great* to have a solid plan that I can just execute on. --- ### Tweets from the week [](https://x.com/tikalteacall/status/1938282898865508585) Keeping on the long-running theme of reading the source material, this would be an excellent way to learn about a bunch of random stuff that may or may not actually matter, but would probably be better than laying in bed and scrolling Twitter like I often do. --- [](https://x.com/BonesawMD/status/1937188744064332054) I think the theme this week is pretending to be something that you're not. This one hits pretty hard in terms of trying to maintain an image but never really doing anything. It ties back to last week's article about performative entrepreneurship. I'm very sensitive or I'm very attuned to this because I do spend a lot of time being public because that's one way that I can drive eyeballs to our business. I have to be very careful that I'm not just LARPing as somebody who does things and I'm actually doing things. --- [](https://x.com/p_millerd/status/1937493982721798470) Again, this is a shot across the bow of what I do! It's easy to count working on the website or building out little tools to help me schedule YouTube videos as “the work.” While that is important, the work is actually a lot harder and requires a lot more of yourself than the pretend work of... --- [](https://x.com/robpetrozzo/status/1937634356090249340) This is on that same theme of doing the hard work and not looking for easy ways out. I think the trick here is you have to do fewer things! If you're gonna take the shortcut, you can do a lot of things. You can do a lot of things in a crappy way. I am certainly coming to the realization that I need to do fewer things. --- [](https://x.com/4AAAAart/status/1936669193861992810) Even ordinary things can be made beautiful. --- [](https://x.com/DylanoA4/status/1937141548086673452) This is exactly how I have felt this week. With Steve being gone, everything falls on me and it’s been incredibly overwhelming. The first half of the week it got on top of me. But by the second half of the week I just started making a list. I came to the office every day, made a list of all the things that needed to be done, and just started working on those things. --- [](https://x.com/jeremiahajayi_/status/1936917154630127685) I feel this in my bones. It would be way, way easier to give up, but I know that that would fill me with regret. --- [](https://x.com/Build_Culture/status/1937155902869508507) "Casual competence" is such a great turn of phrase. It's not ostentatious, it's not gaudy, it's not in your face, but you can tell it was crafted with love and care, by humans, for humans. It's not a giant, cavernous space, it's human-scale with human textures. It just exudes competence and care. --- [](https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1937593065918873631) I recently bought and framed a Gustave Doré print of the resurrection of Lazarus. If you haven't checked out his works, I would highly encourage you to. It's very dark and emotive. --- [](https://www.amazon.com/Sweetness-Bottom-Pie-Flavia-Mystery/dp/0385343493) I read a book! One of my favorite professors in college has a newsletter where every year he sends out what his family has been up to and this book was one that he recommended. I don't read a ton of fiction, but I'm trying to read much more. This was a great book. It follows a young girl who’s a bit of a self-proclaimed detective. It’s sort of a murder mystery… but it’s fun, light, and just really well done. Highly recommend giving it a read. ---  I know that Prime is one of the biggest streamers in our space, but this still surprised me. I think is indicative of the current age that we're in and probably the future age. A single person can get 3,700+ viewers while a company is getting 170 viewers. Now, to be fair, the company’s headlines and topics are pretty bland, so that’s probably part of it. And who knows, maybe all 170 of those viewers are high-value potential customers ready to go buy DigitalOcean servers. I think media and marketing is moving more towards the authentic individual versus the corporate. --- [](https://x.com/fractaledmind/status/1938248472291119596?s=46) If you're in the dev tools space or even the SaaS space, I would encourage you to click through and read this thread. Stephen is asking a sincere good faith question here and Good Guy Jesse Hanley comes in with a lot of valuable responses about marketing in the dev space. --- 🎬 **YouTube** **Speed up your Inertia.js website with these 7 tactics** Check out one of my latest YouTube videos where I show you seven practical techniques I used to make my site feel ridiculously fast from server-side rendering to clever link prefetching to those buttery-smooth image transitions. You also get a sneak peak of my new personal website design! Let me know what you think! [Check it out on YouTube.](https://youtu.be/UNODn5b52u4) **Making MySQL faster** I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal. We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe storage, and how Metal delivers game-changing speed for MySQL workloads. [Watch the episode](https://youtu.be/3r9PsVwGkg4) on YouTube or listen on the [Database School Podcast](https://databaseschool.com/). **🎙️ Podcast Appearances** Rob Walling and I were on Jordan Gal's first episode of the Offsite Podcast this week! We talked a lot about the weird balance of being authentic but still marketable, how different our businesses are (especially when it comes to chasing income vs building for an outcome), and what actually makes a podcast good. Plus, I shared a bit about how we’re trying to stabilize the course business at Try Hard Studios Check out the [audio](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/zero-percent-concerned/id1822851694?i=1000714556560) or [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tARCvAGuSGk) version. --- 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." }}