jacobobryant.com update

Hi.

Findka

I've made a lot of UI improvements, added an onboarding tutorial and added a (dummy) recommender system. So along with the feed of things you've explicitly subscribed to, Findka will sprinkle in recommended content items (every 5th item currently). The algorithm is just random selection currently. As there aren't many users yet, the algorithm doesn't have a ton of data to recommend anyway.

I'll be improving the algorithm going forward, but getting more users to import their data would be most helpful. So if you're interested in Findka, now would be a good time to try it out. I also need a small core of interested users who are willing to give me feedback regularly as I release updates. I'm thinking of making a Slack group/some other kind of group chat for that. Let me know if you want to get in on it.

The Solo Hacker's Guide To Clojure

I've just posted the next article in this series, Landing Pages. Previously I've written about generating HTML + CSS with Clojure, but this takes you through an example of creating a complete landing page. I've also made updates to the main page (see the Changelog section).

I also appreciate very much all the interest I got in this guide when I posted about it last week. Since then, it's received at least 1.2K hits (a lot more than my articles usually get).

Recommendations

I enjoyed this article linked from HN: Will Spotify ruin podcasting? It had some interesting notes about how the market works for creators. There are hard challenges there in making a system that's good for everyone. It's relevant to Findka--I haven't really figured out a revenue model that I think is super great yet; and I think I'll need to do more thinking on these kinds of issues before that happens.

--Jacob