A Byte of Coding – A curated newsletter of programming articles | Hacker News Reader

A Byte of Coding – A curated newsletter of programming articles

abyteofcoding.com

62 pointsvonadz23 comments

Nice, adding your own comments AND tags is helpful to know whether to open the article or not.

Suggestions:

* Clickable tags to see all articles that qualify for that tag (or a general search feature like https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/)

* Option to subscribe once a week/month instead of 4 times a week.

Thanks for the advice! I'll look into adding both of those features.

>[...] articles that I personally curate from across the interwebs. [...], so I select articles

Not to dissuade you from your effort but I wanted to offer why I won't subscribe: Because I don't know who you are, I would also need to see the articles you reject and your reasons why. (E.g. I spent 20 minutes reading "Why Machine Learning Won't Cure Cancer" and you can avoid wasting time and skip it. My criteria for rejection are...)

I explained this reasoning in a previous comment about a similar service: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22545396

That's actually a great idea! And I have the perfect article for it too.

Updated.

As a fellow newsletter maintainer (https://weeklyrobotics.com/) I can only imagine how much efforts it takes to put something out 4 times a week.

Is your workflow automated in any way? I would appreciate any tips you might have!

Currently, not really. I plan to very soon though. Mostly for scouring the web for new sources. I wouldn't say I've hyper optimized my time enough to give any good tips. I used to work for Pek (https://morningcupofcoding.com/) and I'm sure he can offer much better advice than me.

The header logo seems to redirect to https://www.abyteofcoding.com/abyteofcoding.com instead of simply to /.

Thanks for the catch! Fixed.

the Javascript tag is misspelled in this article too:

Karen on Python mocks: threading.Timer

Got it, thanks!

This would be cool as an RSS feed, with each article a new entry, but in it's current form it's not something I'd subscribe to: * I don't just give out my email address * I don't want 4 emails per week, that's a huge volume that will just get routinely ignored after about 3 days. * the RSS feed that I did find (for the archive) has one entry per edition, meaning that I'd have to read each one. I want to just scan it for articles that I might care about.

* #1: Not much I can do about this * #2: I'll be setting up a weekly edition as well * #3: This just goes counter to what the newsletter is about. One of my main inspirations for it is the fact that you can find inspiration in unexpected places, including articles that at first glance don't appeal to you. There have been countless times where I've read an article for the newsletter on a topic I wasn't really interested in, only to have something related to it unexpectedly come up a couple of weeks later for work or in conversation. I think being knowledgeable of topics beyond your areas of interest is very beneficial. Hell, you might also find that something you initially thought was lame, was actually pretty cool and get into it more.

This reminds me of https://www.osnews.com , a combination of a tech news site and a personal blog (all submissions come from Thom Holwerda).

Are you planning on supporting comments? OSnews does quite well with a small but active community.

Yeah I'd be down to add comments for issues on the site. Ideally I'd like for people to be able to add them without accounts, but I can also see how that might cause problems. I'll ask in the next issue if that's a feature people would like.

Thought about this as a business idea but didn't find any way to monetize this except to sell something through email list. Can you elaborate on this part?

Currently I just offer people to support me on Patreon or through donations. I might have ads in the future (for non-supporters) if a company whose product I actually use comes to me about it. My only goal right now is to be getting more than I pay per month on mailchimp/hosting, which is about $55. Ultimately I hope that if people find value in the work I'm doing, they'll help support it. If not, oh well. I'm enjoying curating, writing, and connecting with subscribers, and that's enough for me at this point.

Is there a way I can submit an article that might be worth incorporating in your newsletter?

Email me at alex@abyteofcoding.com

Thank you.

But having RSS as an option would be even better for those who already use RSS readers.

I appreciate the tip, but I like the email format more. Reminds me of writing letters and feels more personal.

I also prefer RSS, so I'll second that suggestion. It saves my time and prevents mixing up my inbox (work) with my blog browsing (recreation). To me at least, blogs with RSS feel more personal because they remind me of a decade ago when the web was more open and personal instead of subsumed by social networks.

Another suggestion would be to make the tags clickable! Why bother tagging something Elixir if I can't click that and see the other posts on Elixir?

To each their own :) Yeah I'm working on updating the site over the weekend with clickable tags, searching, and comments.

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