- William Every Week
- Posts
- WEW14 - How To Never Code Again, Social Networks of the Future, and How To Use AI
WEW14 - How To Never Code Again, Social Networks of the Future, and How To Use AI
DALL·E 2023-03-02 14.50.38 - a bunch of bears working on computers all at a round table in a pink room, digital art
It's hard to believe that I’ve been at this email for over three months, that’s early but not quite “new” anymore. From the pilot recipients to those that subscribed along the way, “thank you”. As of last week, these newsletters are no longer published at WilliamEveryWeek.com , they are just for your inbox. But make sure to check out the site for tons of other great content posted multiple times a week.
If you are finding these helpful, forward them to a friend or recommend they subscribe [link]. I’ve recently also started doing hourly consulting as a fractional CTO, so if you, or a startup you know needs support from a senior exec, get us in touch.
In this week’s Email:
Social Networks - Twitter is dead, and LinkedIn isn’t fun.
Artificial Intelligence - Prompt writing is worth mad money
Productivity - Kids shouldn’t learn to code, and here’s why.
Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week
Social Networks
Social Networks Of The Future
Forget about your corporate Twitter and Insta for a second and think about your personal ones. You feel great when your follower count goes up, but when was the last time you made a real connection there? Name one person you met online in the last month who started to mean something more in your life than the occasional like or re-post.
Since the engagement and viewership on Twitter began to plummet, there has been an exodus to other social media sites, and many of the laid-off employees from current social giants have started to build their own competitors to their ex-employers as well.
But what we use today is “Social Media” not “Social Networks” and the difference between the two matters a lot. Ian Bogost last year wrote about it deftly in an article for The Atlantic, but I’ll abbreviate it. Social Networks are how people are connected and stay connected together. Social Media leverages users as eyeball machines to get ad impressions.
With my Twitter stagnating, I took some inventory of my actual network of contacts, where they have come from, and how I’ve gotten and stayed close to people. The most effective digital ecosystem for me has been hyper-curated micro-communities.
I’m a member of Rand’s Leadership Slack, I run a mastermind group, I am a part of a small circle of hardcore pokemon players, I’m in a poker club (which has a digital chat), and I just joined a WhatsApp workout group. These don’t all meet digitally, but they all have some form of a group chat that is ALWAYS busy with the members that are a part of it.
The connectors who are leading each group are also discerning judges of character and ambition. The people in these groups are my peers and meet my hunger for personal and professional development. They help me grow and we grow together. When is the last time your Twitter account did that for you?
As more companies enter the social space, we are going to see communities form in different ways than we did in the early wave of digital society. The early excitement for crypto and NFTs fueled the creation of countless waitlisted and limited membership communities on discord, and in physical space, membership clubs are rising in trend again. People are yearning for meaningful micro-communities.
There is a massive opportunity to create digital experiences and micro-networks that put people in touch with others at their level in high-value groups. The more mutual, engaging, and bond-forming the opportunities these groups provide, the higher value they will be.
Artificial Intelligence
What Can Better Prompt Writing Do For You?
Prompts are what we call the input given to AI. It’s the same concept as when you were in grade school and asked to write a three-paragraph essay about a picture or based on a single sentence. Except now, you are the teacher and artificial intelligences are the children scrambling to fill in the blanks. That means you are the judge of quality and correctness.
If you are getting bad results you have to put the blame on yourself. Your student is all-knowing. Why can’t they write a good response to your query about the next steps in your career? Most likely because they don’t have the context or clarity for what you are looking for.
Writing great prompts is a hirable skill, and showing up increasingly on resumes. There are multiple postings by major companies online for “prompt engineers.” After all, isn’t writing instructions for a machine so that it gives you valid output… coding?
In time I predict this skill will fade in the same way that putting a word processor on your resume did. We will assume that if you are an adult working in a professional industry you can use AI and write effective prompts. It will just be a part of how work gets done.
In the meantime, however, I’ve written a guide for you on how to write prompts more effectively so that you can actually get the value you need quicker than you could on your own from AI-powered systems: Read it here.
Productivity
No Code Tools Are Everywhere
I was dead wrong about the next generation.
I love management, but also felt that that was the only place people could go as they aged in tech for a long while (I don’t feel that way anymore). My thought was that each generation would be better and better programmers than the last. Computers being completely ubiquitous would mean children everywhere could play with the command line of their system as I did, tinker with hosting their own websites, and so forth. We “olds” wouldn’t be able to compete with the coding skills of the professionals of tomorrow.
Wow. I was wrong.
As we have seen with technologies pre-existing computing such as book printing, meal prep, and countless others, things advance ever towards ease of use.
No-code tools such as Squarespace and Bubble allow the creation of websites and applications for users that don’t need to know any code. Beyond those application-building utilities, most tasks that would have needed someone to be at least “script-savvy” now can be accomplished through some existing website or app. If you are growing up today and need to get something done on a computer, it’s rare you need to know anything about coding to get it done. Coding is depreciating in value as a skill for people who don’t aspire to do it professionally.
I’ve been trying to shake off the rustiness of my coding skills, but the greatest barrier for me is getting past the no-code options available today. From building goal trackers to customs CRMs and more, I can hook up a few services in the browser or set up a page in Notion that does what I need.
It takes mere minutes.
I could code it, for fun, but my mind is ALWAYS on the fastest path to value creation, and nothing beats these tools’ ease of setup.
Notion, a popular productivity app, allows for setting up spreadsheets that work as tables and easily feed into other pages as views. It’s like making complex software with oversized children’s legos. Recently they made available their AI solution as well.
Just by hitting space in a page in the note-taking app, you can ask it to do things like “set up a table for a custom CRM.” You can also create a new page with a blog post title and it will offer to write the post for you with just a click.
I used to think being code-literate was a requisite for the future, but I see now my thinking was old-school. When it comes to computing technology, the first wave was hardware, I lived through software, and now we are in the age of AI. The most coveted skill should be value extraction from using machines and the adaptability for what that means as we enter whatever the next phase will be.
Further Reading
Libby
I’m mid-read on a number of books at the moment and don’t have one in particular that I’d want to share, but I want to tell you about Libby. I give a lot of money to Amazon via Audible. Reading 11 books a month adds up. But I’ve realized that was out of laziness. For those of us in the US we have libraries available to us as an amazing resource.
Libby is an app connected to our library system that makes it easy to get set up with your local library card and check out ebooks and audiobooks from your local library through your phone. What does that mean? Free ebooks and audiobooks, without leaving your house. But you are on a timer for reading them, they have a “due date”. Only so many digital items for each title can be checked out at once. It’s a great way to save and a great way to leverage an amazing resource.
Blogposts By William
The 5 AI Prompt Writing Skills You Need To Work Your Best - William Every Week
Digital Employees and Digital Influencers are About To Change Everything - William Every Week
If you were forwarded this email by a friend and liked it, you can subscribe for free. If you are already subscribed and have found my newsletter helpful, forward it to a friend.