This is a weekly newsletter on the Software as a Service world. Learning, building, and shipping. Written by Ethan Mick.

With how fast the world is moving today, now is the best time to jump in and work on your SaaS projects. As things continue on, new opportunities that were impossible are now just around the corner. The best place to find ideas is to live in the future.

The Best Bits

• Use Phind for your coding questions to get better answers, faster, and with more relevant results.
• You might think your SaaS needs some fancy new framework, but GitHub was entirely built on Ruby on Rails.
• It's Launch Week 7 at Supabase, and they've released lots of new features and code, including Supavisor, open source logs, and SSO support for auth.
• Storybook v7  and Next.js 13.3 are out.

Shipping faster

I'm constantly looking for ways to let me ship code faster. Faster code means solving problems faster. And solving problems creates value.

And people pay for value.

When I started programming over fifteen ago, there was no Stack Overflow. That was founded in 2008 and probably didn't have worthwhile content for a couple of years.

No, there were random forums and terrible documentation to get started. And I knew nothing, so it was a lot of slogging to figure out.

I probably should have read more books.

But I've always learned from doing, and that pushed me to keep trying things until I could get them to work. It taught me to try different approaches and to break the problem down into small steps to figure out which step broke.

And then, when I was in college, I found Stack Overflow.

It was a godsend.

I cannot explain enough what a feeling it was to be able to ask questions and get answers, real answers! Good answers! In just a few hours.

Stack Overflow is the reason I managed to piece together my first iPhone app. It's what got me a job at Apple.

Once I learned enough, I stopped asking questions on Stack Overflow. Simply Googling and reading the documentation was faster than asking on SO and waiting hours for a reply.

And now, with ChatGPT or Phind, you can get answers in seconds.

All of these improvements tighten the iteration loop. You will be able to write code faster, which ultimately results in creating more value.

On your journey to grow as a great engineer, remember: You're aiming to solve problems and help people. So use the tools available to make that easier.

Tech Tip

I've been using yarn for a long time but recently switched over to pnpm. Recently bumped to v8, it saves disk space, is faster, and creates a more sane version of node_modules.

It's one of those small things that is easy to set as your new default and has the same commands you love from Yarn and NPM.

Find alternative installation methods in their docs and never look back.

Cloud Chronicles

• YouTube Subscribers: 668 (+73 in the last 7 days)
• Newsletter Members: 87 (+16 in the last 7 days)

My trip to California was lovely, and I really enjoyed spending some time with my family. Coming back, I need to catch up on freelancing and get my next YouTube videos ready. These days I'm feeling quite busy, so I think I'm at my capacity for work. Now I need to start optimizing.

Last Byte

• This nifty deck of cards website (bonus points for a good domain name).
• A nice guide for Midjourney prompts (watch those hands)!
• Meet the projects in GitHub's open-source accelerator (Nuxt and trpc are in there)!