Things feel accomplishable

Hey y’all, I hope y'all are gearing up for a fun Fourth of July if you're in the United States. Please don't blow off your fingers, those are relatively important. We will probably be just doing sparklers because my oldest kids are only four and I can't imagine trying to do actual fireworks with them, but I am looking forward to popping some of those little poppers and doing sparklers with them! --- ### Thoughts from the week You know what, the ups and downs continue, but this week was mostly up! You'll see in several tweets below the theme of finishing stuff. (You'll also see a lot of marble statues, but that's not as relevant.) I have felt this week like things are accomplishable! I think one of the hard parts about running a business is you *could* do anything, but you *can't* do everything. And I'm starting to internalize that a little bit more. This week I've started working on the curriculum for my next course, which is database related. It's going to be on Redis! It's still very, very early. I'm just still doing research and a lot of reading, but there's something about knowing what to do and starting to make progress on it that just feels like a massive relief. So this has been a good week. I got a couple of YouTube videos out. I've made progress on the course. I'm setting up my studio to use a new editing computer so that I can do that more quickly. I feel like things are moving and spirits are good. --- 🎬 **YouTube** **Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale** Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube's database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres. This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he's joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge. Check it out on [YouTube](https://youtu.be/28q9mFh87KY) or on the [Database School Podcast](https://databaseschool.com/episodes/vitess-for-postgres-with-the-co-founder-of-planetscale). **Hacking the Laravel router** In preparation of releasing my new personal website, I needed to spruce up some URLs. In this video I dive into the Laravel core and hack together a feature I’ve always wanted, route bindings that gracefully fall through if a model isn’t found. Along the way, I show how to safely extend Laravel with macros and custom validators without breaking future upgrades. [Watch it now on YouTube.](https://youtu.be/NecBFUJmov4) --- ### Tweets from the week *Just a heads up that each tweet screenshot has a link to the original tweet if you want to go follow the account.* [](https://x.com/mspringut/status/1940573691634741632) This week is weirdly a big statue week. I think the government should fund things like this. This guy runs a company that uses robots to carve sculptures and then employs artisans to hand-finish them. I think the government should be in the business of funding durable, beautiful things for the public to consume. I personally find these statues to be very beautiful. --- [](https://x.com/guy_pharm/status/1940223587308499308) I'm not sure how I was supposed to know this, but I certainly didn't know it! I did not know that the marble *was* the mountain. I certainly thought that marble was in some deposit underground and we just dug it up, but apparently entire mountains are made of marble! And the fact that this is the quarry that the ancient Romans used and we're still using it is frankly hard for me to comprehend. --- [](https://x.com/PabloPeniche/status/1940810905111220497) Okay, this one is not real! This is AI, so do not be fooled! But Greco Futurism is something that I think I can get behind. The big breezeways, the beautiful stonework, and the lights, the subtle lights adding the futurism. It feels a little bit like Greco Art Deco Futurism, and I think it's fantastic. --- [](https://x.com/VividVoid_/status/1940486368171643332) I see this a lot in real life, but I also see it a lot online. You'll see people online who are super abrasive and acerbic, but they have close relationships with, let's say, a company that maybe sponsors them. Then something happens. I don't know what it is, but something happens and they turn that abrasiveness onto the company that was formerly sponsoring them. And it's a real [“I didn't think the leopards would eat my face”](https://x.com/Cavalorn/status/654934442549620736) situation. Remember, when someone shows you who they are, you should believe them! --- [](https://x.com/catehall/status/1940470835141398953) This tweet links out to a full article which I will excerpt here: > It happens on the scale of decades, when somebody dreams of becoming a songwriter but doesn’t ever write a full song, because they’re afraid of confronting their current lack of skill. They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting — talented in their imaginary world — than actually bad on the way to being actually good. “They would rather be hypothetically good at songwriting than actually bad on the way to being actually good!” Oof. I think this is the resistance I feel when making a new course or even a new video or a new blog post. I have to sit down and confront the fact that some parts of it are going to be bad. And as long as I don't start, it still has the chance to be good. It’s a scary thing to say “I'm actually going to sit down and do it no matter how different it turns out than the perfect version in my head.” Definitely read the full article: [https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/learn-to-love-the-moat-of-low-status](https://usefulfictions.substack.com/p/learn-to-love-the-moat-of-low-status?manualredirect=). --- [](https://x.com/basvanderploeg/status/1940473345235161160) What an absolute delight. --- [](https://x.com/DudespostingWs/status/1940558396329246791) I actually really like following this dudes posting their W's account because it often will highlight things like this. Guys going over the top to make gardens for their wife, dads going out of their way to care for their children, that kind of stuff. It is actually good wholesome W's. This one is a very well done video about a guy who builds, frankly, a beautiful garden for his wife and it looks like a couple little kids. --- [](https://x.com/davepl1968/status/1940089036380807439) [](https://x.com/readswithravi/status/1939174881209565649) This guy Dave is an old-school Microsoft employee who wrote a lot of the early stuff at Microsoft and I really resonated with the line, "They're not all winners, but they're finished." In the other tweet, the line, "There are no great artists, athletes, entrepreneurs, or scientists who become great by half finishing their work" also really resonated with me. I wrote an article a while back about finishing your projects and, like most articles I write, it was mostly for me! It's an encouragement to me to finish my projects, to lash yourself to the mast, lest you be lured away by the siren song of a new project. That’s something that I'm constantly relearning. I’m getting better at it, however slowly. You can read it here: --- [](https://x.com/buridansridge/status/1939237177814057075) My situation is a little bit unique because I have two first-borns and, weirdly, two second-borns! Which I guess means I do have a firstborn daughter. She's only four, but she's already incredibly strong, capable, and resilient. I can very much see an oldest daughter archetype in her. I hope to raise her to be a strong and capable woman, which honestly may just mean nurturing who she already is. --- [](https://x.com/rpnickson/status/1939716235903529039) I'm sorry, did we know that VR lenses are available for consumers? Maybe consumer is not quite right because I think the lens is like $3,000 and the camera is like $3,000. Sooooo I can't really justify it right now, but hopefully I can justify it at some point before my kids are old because this idea is incredible. --- [](https://x.com/zachpogrob/status/1939123837737877996) I don't think I agree that winning solves *everything*, but I think it is directionally correct. I think you see this most often in companies where when everything is really working and sales are up, revenue is up, lots of little problems just kind of go away. Or no one cares about them! And when everything is slowing down, everything becomes a problem. I've heard another saying that “sales cover a multitude of sins,” and that's kind of a cheeky way of saying stuff doesn't super matter as long as the sales are coming in. I think the part I disagree with is winning in that regard won't make for a happy life. I think a lot of people sacrifice things that they shouldn't in order to win at business, but if you constrain it just to business, sales do cover a multitude of sins. --- [](https://x.com/jh3yy/status/1939305902395543633) This is a whole thread of interesting things you can do with position:sticky and of the 12 or so tweets, I knew… oh maybe one of them. It's really cool you should definitely go scroll the thread and look at all the little videos that he's put together. --- [](https://x.com/blankspac_e/status/1938725585355948109) I've added this to my inspiration board for the new design of [DatabaseSchool.com](http://databaseschool.com). I definitely want to lean on the school aspect of it without being cheap or cringy. I don't know how exactly I'm going to do this, but as I was scrolling Twitter and saw this I thought, man, that's exceedingly clever and very pleasing. --- 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." }}