Resources, Just Do It, Airtable, Belief
☕ Good Morning!
Victoria Alexander, an anti-racist researcher, has created an extensive resource guide for anyone who wants to further engage with anti-racism. It explores “practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity, white supremacy, police violence, and injustice.” It also contains an extensive list of books, videos, movies, podcasts for further learning. You can find the resource here.
🚀 Maker News
Insightful interview by Tanya Kurkova with Danielle, who left the UK with her partner James to become a digital nomad and follow her dreams. They founded the web agency Squarecat and have been working on Leave Me Alone, an app that lets you easily unsubscribe from emails and newsletters. After studying computer science, she worked for the UK Government and a startup, but realised she wanted more freedom and less bureaucracy in her life. So she and her partner quit and left the UK, knowing that as full-stack devs they were fortunate enough to be able to work remotely. She quickly began working in public, which helped her to stay focused and accountable. Important realisations they made with early products was not launching fast enough with a basic MVP and trying to solve problems that they weren’t experiencing themselves. Her advice to other women is to “just do it” and she hopes that the tech industry will “keep creating safe spaces for women and girls to find each other, and their passion for tech.” Read the full interview on TechTwoX.
Tamara Sredojevic shares a helpful post by Marie on Women Make, which has put together a list of resources on how you can support Black Women Makers. You can find the post here.
🏗️ Build + Launch
For anyone looking to quickly setup a self-hosted Ghost site, Dan Rowden has just launched Install Ghost For Me. This is also a great example on how easily you can build and launch a XaaS (see yesterdays newsletter) MVP over a weekend. The identified problem: Many non-developers would like to self-host Ghost thereby saving money, but have no idea how to do this. Dan’s solution: Build a basic landing page (you could use Carrd) offering a ready-to-use Ghost installation on a Digital Ocean Server in 24 hours at a fixed price and scope. Brilliant job! You can visit the site here.
🖥️ NoCode
If you want to learn more on how to use and implement Airtable, you need to watch The Essential Guide to Airtable by Aron Korenbilt, a member of their education team. His guide tackles the fundamentals of this part spreadsheet, part database application, covering everything from working with one table, multiple tables, styling as well as automations using Zapier. You can find the free guide here.
A helpful tweet by Bram Kanstein, depicting his NoCode stack for No-Code MVP, which includes Carrd for the website, Airtable + Google Docs/Sheets for the database and Zapier for automations. You can watch Bram’s easy tutorial on how to build a landing page using Carrd here.
💭 Thoughts
James Clear gives us a great quote by Bruce Lee called the “four idea principles”. This should truly apply to all Makers and NoCoders looking to take action. For me (4) goes back to the importance of Belief Capital which KP wrote about a few days ago and which is so vital to go from an idea to launch. Take care of each other and see you tomorrow!
You can also find me on Twitter if you’d like to follow my thoughts in real-time!