Recent content on ferrucc.io
If you’re using Ghostty and pressing Shift+Return gives you [27;2;13~ instead of a newline, here’s the fix. By default, Ghostty sends an escape sequence for Shift+Return. To make it behave like a normal newline, add this to your config: keybind = shift+enter=text:\n Or just run this one-liner: echo 'keybind = shift+enter=text:\n' >> ~/.config/ghostty/config Your config file is at…
One thing I never liked of writing on this site is not having a nice editor to be able to write content. Also now that AI has taken over most coding editors it’s annoying to have to deal with autocomplete and tab. When I write my thoughts I don’t want AI to get in the way. So today I decided to build a small web server with an editor that I can use to edit my articles.
I’ve found that doing multi-day hikes is the perfect break from the keyboard. I’ve done 5 multi-day hikes in the past 3 years and I’ve enjoyed them all. The main benefit for me over spending a week on the beach somewhere is that my day to day is already very sedentary. As I’m spending my life in my head I try to spend my holidays in my body. The ingredients for a great…
This article was originally posted on the June blog . I am reposting it here for my own reference. Two years ago we raised a little over $2 million dollars as a seed round from some of the smartest investors in the world. Last week, Louis, our board member asked us to give a presentation to share our learnings with other companies in the Pointnine portfolio. We got great feedback from fellow…
As a 13 year old, my dad’s advice on internet presence was: “Everything you post will be used against you in the future. So you should never associate your name with anything on the internet”. As a rebellious teenager my view was the opposite: “Everything you post on the internet will get lost. You should associate your real name with everything you find interesting” I think looking back, this…
The only thing that matters is throughput. Becoming the most prolific version of yourself is the most important thing you can do to become proud of your work. Making a group of people become the most prolific version of themselves sounds like a reasonable way to build a great company. So that’s what we’re trying to do. Throughput is the speed of getting to some outputs. The faster you…
This is an open engineering question at June . If you want to solve problems like this one, please reach out - we’re hiring June allows you to add dynamic traits to your users. For example, if you want to run an analysis only on users that are on your pro plan , you can do that by adding a “plan” trait to your users. The value of these properties is mutable and has no…
If you’re working on something new, there are so many directions your work and product can take. The biggest risk is that you build something that is hard to explain and no one wants. A good process minimizes this risk. Helping you move in the direction of building something people want. To build June me and my cofounder Enzo used a very systematic approach. We decided to shared it as you…
Try the beep As requested by Hunter Walk Data sourced from the NYT {{name_abbr}}
Sometimes I come back home from work, stuck on something, no adults to ask help to and a deadline in the morning. I fall asleep thinking: “Tomorrow is the day I’ll get caught. This will be the one problem I won’t be able to solve. The rest of my life is going to be misery and failure” Every morning though, with more or less pain things get sorted. Anyways here’s what…
This is the world in the eyes of a dog The poor things have such a cold experience of the world. Our eyes while giving us a richer experience of the world are also a limited mechanical tool. The world doesn’t care though. It stays the same regardless of the tools we use to perceive it - whether it’s the eyes of a dog or my presbyc ones. This sounds like stoner talk, but hear me out.
Ferruccio Balestreri I love making things and take pride in it.
Most founders in tech will tell you that they’re a contrarian But is being a contrarian an optimal decision? What are the alternatives? Is being a contrarian an advantage? Founders of high growth companies, are making one big high risk high reward bet. If you’re looking for a big win you first have to find something that has high uncertainty. For example, there’s high uncertainty…
The ability to make friendships through your passions is the best super power that the internet gives us. The best things that happened in my life happened through communities on the internet. Here’s a story of all the places I hanged out on the internet and made friends from. Until the first year of high school I’ve been offline. My experience until then with the internet was running a Blogspot…
One of the most interesting thought experiments one can do is exploring the history of aesthetics. Human aesthetics change over time in ways that reflect progress. How did people get bored of Greek tragedy? Why did chubby people become unattractive, when did people start liking squares on a canvas? There was a moment when Dante’s books were considered good. When realistic paintings like…
An axiomatic deduction of “Healthcare should not be free” starting from 5 agreeable axioms. I like the idea of my site being a snapshot of my thoughts that I can point to people when having a discussion. I don’t like repeating the same arguments over and over. So here are some of my thoughts on “Socialised Healthcare”[1] for wider exposure and future reference.…
Doing the nand2tetris course is an extremely enlightning experience into the world of computers. The course starts from the simplest building block, the “NAND” operators and helps you step by step to building a modern, functioning computer, OS and tetris Game. The NAnd block stands for Not And. It takes two binary inputs, A and B and outputs true only if they both aren’t true. A…
Every year I look back at myself one year back and cringe. So as a gift to my future self, this is a collection of all my current habits I know I’m making a meme out of myself Note taking I take a lot of notes. After trying many apps I’ve settled on Apple Notes. My thinking here is that the standard Notes app is here to stay. Even if I ever go broke I still should still be able to access it.
I set out to write this article by interviewing 40+ engineers at companies of all sizes. The main learning here was that organizational design and culture are a fascinating topic, and that they might be as important then company size when picking a job. Let’s say you’re early in your Software Engineer career. You’re a competent programmer looking for a change in working…
How two board games shape the concept of conflict in the western world and China. Let’s start with two photos: Who won? Try and guess who won in the two games. In the first picture, even if you don’t understand the game you can guess who won. You can tell that the white is smashing the black into a corner. And has more pieces in play. Chess is a game based on domination.
This is a roundup of my experience as a 👨🏻🍳 Chef Technology Officer, building the tech side of Al.ta Cucina , the fastest growing recipe site in Italy! In two months we went from idea 💡, to product : The Story April 15th. I just finished interviewing for a bunch of tech companies to move away from Italy. I’m trying to figure out where I want to go and what I want to do next.
Here’s a list of experiments I did: Publicly Sharing my browsing history - more about this here Fiverr profile - The goal of this experiment was to see how efficient the internet is at talent discovery and monetization of hard skills. I didn’t manage to get any clients except for a friend, so it was a failed experiment. Original tweet Fiverr Profile Calls with strangers Original Tweet…
You are developing an app that uses emails, and need a testing account? What’s the fastest and easiest way to get a test account up and running? By default Gmail doesn’t support email importing from a file. So the first step we’ll have to go through is creating an Outlook email account here: Create an Outlook Account After creating an Outlook account we need to import data into…
If there’s something that I held as a deep belief growing up is that there is not such a thing as a free lunch. I also developed an instinct to spot trends. Mostly to find opportunities, but also for fun. So when I stumbled upon Andrew Yang . I listened to a couple of his interviews and realised his ideas are powerful and bipartisan. The way he talks makes him likable both on the left and on…
This is my full browsing history! (Until March 4th 2019) Why? Why not? I think it might be fun for people wanting to introduce themselves via email to know where I’m hanging out on the interwebz. I hope to get some good reading suggestions from this. I also hope to get more picky with the content I decide to consume.
The music I like isn’t that ordinary, but I’d say it’s popular among developers in my age group. I found that every time I meet someone in person that codes professionally the discussion at a certain point moves to “What do you listen when you code?”, “What is your favourite genre/artist?”. Here’s what developers from big cities in the 20-30 age group tend to listen. Take it easy…
6 years ago this video came out. At the time I couldn’t code yet. This concept is still mind blowing to me. Up until now I always thought about code as a collection of files, connected through imports. But really we import functions, not files. We use files to store code because they’re a convenient way to serialize code. They’re not the best representation, in fact functions might…
I’m 21, but I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years. I grew up doing this. What I’ve written on the internet has reached millions of people. Most of what I’ve written is in Italian, but I was also quite successful when writing in english. My Quora profile, reached 400k people in three months. Through blogging I had the opportunity to travel the world, getting free tickets to…
Blog Posts The Matrix Calculus You Need For Deep Learning Design Inspiration As I want to improve my UX skills for the next projects I’ll be using some standard frameworks like: Ant Design Material UI Landing Pages This is a list of landing pages I look to when trying to find inspiration: Pitch Not Pot Don’t want to miss any of this? You can find out about everything that gets added…
I’m Ferruccio Balestreri I’ve founded and was the CTO at June . Before that I worked at Intercom as an engineer. My hobby is to make small projects every couple of months I make something new to have fun and sharpen my skills.
Marketing on the internet isn’t much different from Marketing on any other medium. So let’s go back a hundred years to get some inspiration. Inspiration from the 1920s After selling 100 million books of his series Little Blue Book marketer Julius Hadleman wrote a book analysing all the data he had collected. The book title is “The First Hundred Million” and it came out in…
VCs do everything you would expect the USSR would do, while being a private company. VC Financing projects without asking too many questions. Sometimes people refer to this as VC welfare . If a company puts the right combination of “disruptive”, “blockchain” and “AI” in their slides they receive funding. Showing some APIs, an app with users (real or fake) the…
It’s been almost I month after I started working on Magehash This is my first cybersecurity product I’ve ever developed so I decided to share what I learned so far! 1) Selling Pain Points We can divide products into three different groups: candies, painkillers and vitamins. We don’t want to have much to do with candies. Vitamins are interesting. We love Painkillers. For Cyber…
In the last month a group of hackers called Magecart came back striking in full force. They first appeared in the news back in 2015 when RiskIQ found out they injected code in Magento’s “Magecart” shopping software. Thus the name. The attacks they organized have caused massive damages to hundreds, likely even thousands of companies like British Airways, Ticketmaster and even…
Two months ago I hadn’t launched any solo project that got users. Until lately everything I had ever done was with someone else, usually with a compatible skillset. The problem with this approach is that if someone on the team loses interest or is busy the project dies out. As this happened a couple of times I decided to take some time and work on projects by myself. The products I launched…
A little more than two months ago Konstantin asked me how long would it take for me to develop something that would let him receive forms on his website as Telegram messages. I wasn’t sure how long it would take, but finding the task interesting I decided to just do it. In an afternoon of work I made the first version of “Dripform”. After making it I started exchanging ideas via…
We now have a government in Italy. Everyone around me is talking about this, so I figured out I might as well try to analyse what are the biggest problems the country is facing. Here is a list of existential problems we face: Labor Market laws make it almost impossible or extremely costly to hire/fire anyone. Organised Crime, Tax evasion, Corruption and waste of public money plague the country.…
Every time you finish writing a blog post you get that feeling that it’s not ready to post it. It’s time for proofreading, but it’s painful to proofread your own writings. What is fun instead is reading someone else’s writings. So how great would it be if you could post your drafts somewhere, read and comment a couple of blog posts by people with your same interests, while…
Since starting to work on June, I haven’t read a lot of books. I only read a few Substack posts for fun and go out for long walks. My favorite blog right now is Samo Burja’s Bismarck Brief . Every week I get a new post on something I would’ve never thought of being interesting. I also like reading Palladium Magazine . Recently, after listening to Chris Arnade’s podcast…