Recent content on Ben Barbersmith
It’s easy to be happy if you live the life of your dreams. The trouble is, few of us do. Most of us never actually consider what the life of our dreams might be. Society has imbued each of us with a vague desire to be rich, famous, successful, or powerful. We dream about winning the lottery, or travelling the world, or building a billion dollar business, or becoming a celebrity.
(A letter to my goddaughter, to be opened on or after 1 May, 2039.) Dear Kate, 17 years ago, I promised you — among other things — that I’d introduce you to my passions and hobbies, try to be a good role model, and always try to make you laugh and smile. I’m going to try to live up to these promises, in part, by sharing two guiding principles that have improved my life more than almost…
To be happy, you must be willing and able to suffer through your discomfort. This sounds counter-intuitive. Why would you need to suffer to be happy? Because discomfort is a fact of human existence. We experience discomfort in all aspects of life, and we crave distraction from it. Maybe we allow ourselves to become glued to our phone. Maybe we daydream about the future, or we ruminate on our…
B2B sales are lucrative. They can generate 1000x as much revenue as B2C sales. But for most indie hackers, sales is scary. Selling to businesses is super scary. This blog post explains how I closed my first $20k of B2B sales as an indie developer in 5 simple lessons. Prelude: Who am I, and why should you care? First, let me present my credentials and introduce myself. I quit my job at Google to…
With Google Apps Script, OAuth is super simple for integrated services like Drive (DriveApp), Gmail (MailApp), Google Sheets (SpreadsheetsApp), etc. If you use an integrated service that requires specific scopes and permissions via OAuth, Google Apps Script automatically prompts users for those permissions whenever a function from the project is run. For most project and most users, this means…
Okay, time for some real talk. If you’re like most devs, you don’t write SQL. Instead you write less efficient and less maintainable data processing code in JavaScript, Python, Java, PHP, Go, Ruby, etc. You miss out on the real power of your database. Why? Because SQL is mysterious and you don’t know what it can do for you. SQL is hard because it’s declarative, not imperative. You have to…
You’re tired. You know being tired makes you cranky, anxious, and negative. You know it results in worse decision-making. You know you’ll be hungrier, make less healthy food choices, and exercise less. You know you’ll be less pleasant to be around. So what do you do? You decide to have an early night. You plan to go to bed early and get a great night’s sleep. Tomorrow…
Have you ever put off something you know you needed to do? Ever binged on junk food during a diet? Ever put off calling your relatives because you’d rather play video games? Ever done anything you knew you’d later be ashamed of? Of course you have. We all behave in ways that are inconsistent with our beliefs, values, or todo lists. We shirk responsibilities. We ignore lapses in moral…
In this post I’m going to discuss a simple, easy, cost-effective, evidence-based step you can take to live a longer, happier life. Don’t worry, I’m not selling anything. You don’t need to buy anything. In fact, you’ll save money. You don’t need to go anywhere or do anything outside your usual routine. You don’t need to stop eating any particular foods or stop any specific…
Stop me if you’ve heard any of this before: You don’t need to lose any more weight! Isn’t it bad for your knees to run so far? I wouldn’t want to put on too much muscle and look all bulky. Don’t you want any of these donuts? Aren’t you going to have another beer? Anyone who ever lost weight, gained muscle, got fit, or improved their diet has faced these kinds of questions and objections.
All good things come to an end. Benjamin Barbersmith Employee number: ██████ Senior Technical Solutions Consultant Friday 26th June 2020 Please accept this letter as my formal notice of resignation from my role at Google. My last day of employment at Google will be 7 August 2020. Sincerely, Benjamin Barbersmith This was the best job I ever had. But after 7 awesome years at Google, it’s time…
June seems to have been a long month. Maybe it was the big decision I’ve been building up to (more on that next month). Maybe it was the change in lockdown restrictions which allowed more to actually happen. Maybe it was the wild variety of weather, from 32C heat to torrential rain and thunderstorms. I don’t know. But it’s been an excellent month in very many ways, and I’m…
Life is rhythmic, peaceful, gentle. I am largely content. Except for being unable to see my family and friends, I have somehow avoided almost all of the negative impacts of living through a global pandemic. I’m spending a lot of time feeling extremely grateful. This seems at odds to the terrible events sweeping the globe. Perhaps I’m in the calm before the storm, or the eye of the…
April was a full month in lockdown, yet it flew by. The world is so different to how it was even a month ago, and so many aspects of life will change in the months to come, yet our day-to-day routine has become more tranquil and rhythmic than ever before. I find deep happiness and contentment in many parts of my daily life, while still feeling much of the uneasy malaise that seems to affect so…
I turned 33 yesterday. Not being allowed to leave the house except to buy essential goods and take one form of exercise made it pretty weird. I’m an obscenely lucky man with almost everything I want, so my birthday present from my wife was the one thing I lack: time to myself. I was given a day free of obligations. I had a lie-in, breakfast in bed, a nice run, made PBJ chocolate brownies…
I’ve been back to work full-time for a month now. It’s been about as difficult as I expected to balance family life with full-time work and a long commute. What I hadn’t anticipated is that having very little time to myself for personal projects and self-learning would also really get to me. I think I’m going slowly insane. Home life Going back to work after a year of…
I’m a seriously goal-oriented person. I’ve been setting and reviewing goals for myself on an annual basis since 2012. But somehow, this year is different. It’s not just a new year, it’s a new decade. Does that feel intimidating to anyone else? (Yes, I’ve seen the relevant XKCD. No, I don’t care. Welcome to the 20s.) In this post, I’m going to start by…
Maybe I’m nuts, but I genuinely believe I can live to see my one hundredth birthday with a smile on my face, a spring my step and many more years of joy ahead of me. And you know what else I believe? It’s the perfect goal around which to structure your life. Think about it. To be happy when you hit 100 years old, you need to live a good life for several decades between now and then.
This is the plan I wrote for Caster Level before launching it in December 2017. It’s interesting to see what I got right, and what I got very, very wrong. Goal Build a business to take advantage of the engaged, affluent, excitable TTRPG audience worldwide. Background Market research Market research is encouraging. Over 48k games of D&D 5e, D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder were played on Roll20 in…
The Lean Startup “A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” – Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup The purpose of a startup is to produce validated learning that helps to build a sustainable business. State your hypothesis Design your MVP experiment Optimise relentlessly (this ain’t no fair test)…
Hackers, designers, students, wantrepreneurs and a myriad of other kindred spirits wrote a ton of comments, emails and tweets in response to my article a few weeks ago describing the hacker lifecycle. It took me by surprise. Until then, I’d thought that perhaps I was the only nerd stuck in this recurring loop. Everybody else seems make things happen, ship code, and get things done. But…
This page is a collection of various ideas a.k.a. “things I would build if if only I had the time”. If you’re interested in building something from this list and want to talk about or even work together, get in touch. Immersive language acquisition on steroids Start with a responsive, mobile-ready spaced repetition flashcard app for the web. Word lists are automatically compiled…
Sundial is an international telephone number to timezone converter. Give it any telephone number qualified with the relevant international country code, or give it an unqualified US telephone number, and it will tell you the local time and timezone at the other end. Sundial was first released in 2011 as a PHP hack to solve a common problem at work: “What’s the local time for this…
Your Company Needs Pre‑Sales Engineers I’ll explain why using three questions: What Do Pre‑Sales Engineers Do? What Does That Really Mean? Why Do Pre‑Sales Engineers Really Matter? What Do Pre‑Sales Engineers Do? Communication is hard. We help very different people understand each another. Developers Product managers Marketing teams Testing teams Service delivery managers Project managers…
In general I’m a very motivated person. But during my free time, my motivation is cyclical – it waxes and wanes over the course of 9-12 months. I’ve started to think of this as the hacker lifecycle. For the last 2-3 months of the cycle, I am content to spend my free time playing video games, catching up on the few good shows on television, and reading fiction. But for the other…
Having neglected my personal blog for almost 2 years and my personal website for closer to 4 years, I’ve made the decision to switch technology in the hope of revitalising my online presence. The original and now defunct site was built in 2009 on a combination of PHP-based homebrew with hand-cranked XHTML and CSS. The blog that went with it was based on Wordpress with a custom theme tweaked…
I started running around 4 months ago. I was immediately entranced by it and even blogged about my experience, extolling the virtues of run commuting and the dramatic benefit I received from the activity. I was particularly smitten in my last post, having managed to run over 5 km on the road without a rest in just 27 minutes and 38 seconds. I gushed about how each and every run made me feel great…
Last winter, I saw a post by Twitter comedian and voiceover performer Scott Fletcher joking about how awesome a knuckle tattoo generator would be. You know what I mean by knuckle tattoos, right? Picture the classic love and hate tattoos, each letter on a different knuckle. Scott’s throwaway tweet made me chuckle. Pick two random four letter word, and tattoo them onto a pair of fists.…
There are plenty of articles online that tell us that working out makes us better entrepreneurs, makes us more successful, keeps us awake, and so on. Exercise is regularly billed as being an excellent way to improve your general alertness, productivity and lifestyle while getting fitter and adding years to your life in the process. No surprises there, then. Well, I recently decided that it was…
Even the most slovenly of brains are constantly solving problems. We look for ways to make our lives easier, to make ourselves happier, to make ourselves richer or even just to pass the time. We all solve problems all day, every day. Our brains are churning out novel solutions to everyday problems in every waking moment. For some of us, There’s only one difference between entrepreneurs and…
I just wanted to write a quick follow-up to my post yesterday on Diaspora’s failure to practice what they preach and implement real privacy controls on basic user information. Yesterday I said that to date, the Diaspora developers had “failed to integrate their most basic premise into the software design. They’ve missed the point from first principles.” Well, a couple of friends…
I was recently able to sign-up to Diaspora thanks to the kindness of some friends on Twitter. I’d been quite excited at the idea of an open-source network, distributed across many machines and administered by anyone who cares to run their own instance (or “pod”, as Diaspora calls them). The pods interconnect, the network grows, and everyone can feel lovingly involved in a real…
Last week marked a momentous change for the UK accounting industry. On April Fools Day 2011, it became mandatory for UK companies to report their statutory accounts and tax computations in a new format called Inline XBRL. This change transformed the way in which organizations report to HMRC in one fell swoop, simultaneously ending the centuries-old practice of filing on paper and unsanctimoniously…
(With apologies to Lou Bega…) Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Quantum Number 5. s, p, d, f, g Everybody in the lab, so come on let's see; Drive a quantum oscillator They say that it's classically forbidden But so did Weber. Funded like we were last week We need more kit, but hydrogen's cheap I like Niels Bohr, Max Born, and Erwin Schrodinger, (I won't touch Marie Curie Cos she was a minger!
I make a lot of international calls at work to US clients and prospects. Unfortunately, many of the calls are to different people in different cities. I’m not yet at a point where I associate particular US area codes with their timezones (nor country codes with timezones for that matter), and to be honest I’m not sure if I ever want to be that familiar with them. My process used to be…
As I tweeted yesterday morning, I have only one resolution for 2011: work hard, and get rewarded. Perhaps it sounds more like a mantra than a goal, but I think it has a lot of value. Throughout our lives, we work. We work for satisfaction, for payment, for food and for shelter. Some of us work for something to do. Most of us work because we have to. Very few of us stay at home and do nothing all…
Snowfall is a fairly regular occurrence. In the UK we are graced by snow for around 10 days per year. Fewer days of snow may affect those near the coast, or many more may affect those in the Pennines, but it is a safe bet that you will enjoy a nice coating of snow for at least a few days per year. The reactions to snow are mixed. For some, they fear the hassle it brings: disruption to travel, to…
Picture this: you’re sat, notebook in hand, and you’ve begun to write, to draw, to create. You wisely decided to go analogue in order to get your creative process started. Now you find yourself with the fuzzy outline of an idea, some fractured content, and a frame on which to hang a real and valuable piece of work. This happens when brainstorming for all manner of tasks, as varied as…
Travel can be wasted time, but it can also be a fruitful session that is hidden amidst an otherwise dreary part of the day. Some use it for work, some use it to read or to listen to music. I like to use it to set aside the time to let my mind wander, pull out my trusty notebook, and dump my thoughts onto the page. Let me tell you: nothing that you can use with a keyboard, mouse, touchscreen or…
This page records everything I’ve studied, learned or practiced since I left formal education in 2009. If you want to chat about my experiences, or if there’s a book or course you’d love to recommend, get in touch. 2021 Refreshed my advanced SQL skills with specific focus on PostgreSQL. Taught myself intermediate TypeScript. Taught myself intermediate NestJS. Taught myself…