Modern Makers #25
15/11/2020
Modern Makers is a weekly newsletter where I share with you a selection of the best available content about no-code and productivity tools. I hope this content will help you grow your business, launch your project or automate your work.
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Hi makers,
This week in the agenda:
📚 The book of the week: How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
⌛ A lot of new features on Notion, including a Timeline view
📊 Amazon wants to compete with Parabola
🎒 No-code will be taught at Yale in 2021
Enjoy!
📚 Book of the week
How to Get Rich
Author: Felix Dennis
Release date: June 2008
Felix Dennis was an English entrepreneur born in 1947 who founded Dennis Publishing, an independent publisher, in the 1970s. Today, it is one of the largest publishers in the UK, with brands such as Auto Express, PC Pro and The Week.
Five key lessons / takeaways: Luck is simply what happens when preparation meets opportunity - how to be prepared? By learning all the time (as Felix says, "Anyone not busy learning is busy dying"). By working hard while remaining alert enough to spot an opportunity when it arrives. When that opportunity comes, don't hesitate, follow your instincts, go for it and seize it. Commit or don't commit. No half-measures
Follow the money and find your mountain - gold rushes don’t happen in old mines. Instead, try to find new mountains where gold is being mined, or will be mined very soon. Focus on what you like and are interested in, where you can apply your talents and skills. And follow the money. Money that has your name on it
Cut loose from all negative influences - these people will always pull you down, telling you over and over again that you won't succeed in becoming rich, that it's not for you. These people often tend to be your friends, your husband or wife or your family. This makes the breakup even harder. But according to Felix Dennis, it is absolutely necessary if you truly want to get rich. Often, the real reason people don’t become entrepreneurs is not financial. Rather, it's the fear of failure, the fear of disappointing the outside world and those around you who will judge you and mock you. Fear of failure is the main reason why people don't get rich. It is impossible to become rich without taking risks. And you can't take risks if you're afraid to fail
Ownership is everything - your goal should be to hold on to every percentage point you can. This is something Felix has done very well, which allowed him to build an incredible fortune (over £750M) throughout his life. Nowadays, it seems almost all startups offer equity to their employees. Felix believes that the people who work for him do not take any risks. The only one who takes risks is himself. The employees work for a salary. A salary that is guaranteed to them. They may also receive perks, healthcare or pension contributions. But they won’t own his business
Surround yourself with people who are more talented and smarter than you - identify talent. Reward it. Nurture it. Give it opportunities to grow within your company. Give it the work environment and responsibilities it wants. Promote it. When the time comes, fire it. You should also offer very competitive salaries to attract talent and keep it with you as long as possible. Your bonuses should also be significant in order to motivate your teams to succeed. Share the pie
Some other content that caught my attention this week:
Meet the Excel warriors saving the world from spreadsheet disaster - Wired UK - an interesting article about Excel and its 750 million users. This article focuses on the Excel experts, who help banks and multinationals to avoid errors in their Excel spreadsheets. Mistakes that could cause them to lose several million (and there are many examples, it is estimated that 90% of Excel files contain calculation errors)
Peter Boyce is a People Person - Superorganizers - a dive into the daily life of Peter Boyce, partner at General Catalyst, one of the best known venture funds. Peter presents in detail the tools he uses on a daily basis, allowing him to maximize his productivity. He uses Airtable to manage his network of contacts. Peter's other favorite tools: Notion, Feedly to read the news, Google Maps to list his favorite restaurants, Goodreads for keeping track of the books he reads and his notebook to take notes during meetings
The Queen’s Gambit - Netflix - I binge-watched all 7 episodes of this Netflix series in two nights this week. The story of an American woman who learnt how to play chess at the orphanage and discovers a true gift and passion for the game. The story takes place in the sixties, during the cold war with the USSR
🧰 Product
Notion released many new features last Wednesday, as part of the launch of its 2.10 version:
A new Timeline view - apparently one of the most requested feature from the Notion community. This new view allows you to create a timeline to visualize your database items over time. Several time intervals are available: hour, day, bi-week, week, month, quarter and year. However, free and PRO accounts have a limit of 3 timelines per workspace
Hide database properties - a feature that was long overdue. Databases tend to contain a very large amount of properties. By default, the complete list of these properties was visible when opening a database item. A lot of useless information was therefore disrupting the user experience. It is now possible to select only the properties you want to keep showing and hide the others. It's time to clean up your Notion workspace 🧹
Set a limit to inline databases rows - you can now choose to display 10, 25, 50, or 100 items in a database
New display options for Backlinks and comments - 3 display options are now available: not visible, visible and popover
Flexible sub-page permissions - until now, permissions could not be changed for any page that was nested inside another page — they always inherited the permission level of the parent page. Now, you can expand or restrict permissions for any sub-page. For example: if you have a company Wiki on Notion, you can give an edit access to the Team Meetings page so that your teams can add meeting notes to it. On the other hand, you can give them a read only access on the main page of the wiki in order to prevent some information to be deleted by one of your employees
We are now waiting for Notion's API in order to bring this tool into a new dimension.
Amazon continues to accelerate on no-code/low-code tools, just a few months after rolling out Honeycode. This week Amazon announced the launch of AWS Glue DataBrew, a visual data preparation tool. It is actually a new version of AWS Glue, a tool that has been around for a few years now and that required coding skills in order to use it. AWS Glue DataBrew integrates a visual interface that then makes the tool accessible to a wider audience.
Concretely, this tool allows you to retrieve raw data from several sources (including of course Amazon services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)) in order to be able to perform processing operations: combining columns, converting data, correcting invalide values, sorting data etc.
The tool already includes more than 250 pre-built transformations that can be assembled to create what Amazon calls a Recipe. On paper, it seems pretty clear that this tool has a lot in commun with Parabola and to see Amazon entering this market is a great signal.
AWS Glue DataBrew is available now on the following AWS servers: US (N. Virginia, Ohio, Oregon), Europe (Ireland and Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo and Sydney). A more global deployment is expected to take place in the near future.
🎒 Education
In the #22 edition of Modern Makers, I told you about Buildcamp, a platform created by Gregory John that helps you learn how to build apps on Bubble. I'm talking about Buildcamp again today as we heard no-code will soon be taught at Yale, one of the most famous private American universities. To be more precise, it will be taught at the Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking, an innovation center launched by Yale in 2017 whose primary mission is to inspire students from diverse backgrounds to solve real-world problems through innovative ways. So it's hardly surprising that no-code tools caught their attention.
Beginning in January 2021, Gregory will have the opportunity to teach a course entitled "An Introduction to NoCode: Build Software Without Being a Developer" so that students can learn how to create applications with Bubble. This program is spread over 4 weeks (2 hours each week). Upon completion of this program, each student will receive $500 in Bubble credits.
I think it’s a great news for the no-code movement and we will see this initiative being replicated in many schools and universities around the world in the future. I certainly hope that this initiative will be a great success with Yale students.
📦 In other news
Adalo has a new component: Horizontal Card List
Dorik now allows you to create multi-page websites
Webflow enhances its CSV import feature, making it easier to migrate content from your existing site to Webflow
Coda claims it has improved the median load time for docs by 25%
NoteCandy is a paid pack of 22 illustrations optimized for Notion
Black Friday is coming soon: Carrd's PRO plan is currently available at 50% off (make sure to use the promo code BLK2020)
You can now run paid newsletters through ConvertKit
That’s all for this week. If you like the content of this newsletter, please share it with your friends, colleagues or communities, it's what helps me the most :)
I also invite you to contact me if you have questions or need help with no-code tools or if you want to have a virtual coffee with me ☕
Have a great week, and keep building!
Martin,