On the show today we do something a little different: we each brought some links that have meant something to us in the past few weeks and on this show we share them with you.
You’ll find links to all the articles, videos, books and more below. And the stories in podcast will walk you through why we think these links are important enough to share.
Enjoy!
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“21 things to read, watch or listen to (Feb 2016 edition)”
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Steph’s Links:
A new course on how to Conduct Customer Conversations — We just finished filming a brand new course here in Chicago for Fizzle members. It's all about a process for conducting interviews with your potential customers in order to learn about the problems they face (and how you can solve them.)
PowerSheets by Lara Casey — An excellent goal setting workbook that helps you cultivate a vision for the next 6 months to a year, and then break that down into monthly, weekly and daily goals.
Expecting Better by Emily Oster — For the soon to be parents out there, this book uses real studies in order to present research around the most controversial parts of pregnancy, empowering you to have all the information you need to make your own decisions.
I’m a Woman in Tech, But Even I Didn’t “Get It” Until This Week — by Laura Roeder. A great, quick article about the importance of diversity on teams, and how a "culture of sameness" impacts the direction of your business.
Barrett’s links:
The Presidential Primaries — because, they’re important and more than ever before, absolutely fascinating to watch. My wish is for people to spend half as much time reading up on policy proposals from the candidates rather than reading Tweets from candidates. It’s a much more enriching experience.
Just In Time Learning for Business Builders — Just in case vs Just in time learning. Really important piece of motivation about what you should spend time learning (and what you shouldn’t).
Paul Graham’s Economic Inequality & Tim O’reilly’s Response — These two guys are smart about alot of things, and reading this intellectual exchange between them made me smarter. I don’t agree with 100% of what either one said, but that’s not the point. The conversation showed that we can have intelligent discourse with one another about hot button topics without belittling or demeaning each other. That’s encouraging.
Tesla Model 3 — I’m still incredibly optimistic about how Tesla will change the way we get around, as well as the environmental impact of transportation. The Model 3 will be the most affordable car to date from the company, and I’m hoping it’ll give me a chance to become a Tesla customer myself.
Originals: how nonconformists move the world — by Adam Grant. My one allowed book suggestion before I’ve read it. Adam Grant’s first book, Give and Take, was an excellent look into why some people do nothing but take from their relationships while others are remarkably generous. If the new book about how nonconformists move the world is half as good, it’ll be well worth the investment.
An Open Letter To My CEO — by Talia Jane. Wow. I’m not surprised she was fired after penning her open letter on Medium, but I think she has sparked some important points of conversation across the web. Make whatever argument you want, but the issues of cost of living, living wage, a company’s responsibility to it’s employees, student debt, and the challenges of getting started in a career right out of college are all important topics we should be talking about publicly.
Corbett’s Links:
The Six Stages of Facebook Reaction Grief — now we can be angry or sad or wowed by posts, yay!
13 Vagrant Resources for WordPress Development — and Ansible-based WordPress development: quicker and more consistent development environment configurations
Stripe Atlas — helping entrepreneurs quickly and inexpensively set up a US-based company and bank account
Chris Guillebeau’s New New Economy — We save this one for next time but I figured we should put a link here as well just in case.
Chase’s Links
Winnebago man — because if you’ve ever tried to record a video yourself and keep flubbing the lines, you know what this guy is going through!
Instagram (team fizzle) + multiple account ability — We show some behind the scenes stuff here, so be sure to follow along if you’re into Instagram.
The Jess Lively Podcast — We got to spend some time with Jess Lively in person (keep your eyes peeled for a new massive interview with her inside Fizzle!). Check out her podcast if you haven’t yet.
Fizzle Founder Stories — In depth, very honest and usually cocktail infused interviews with movers and shakers in independent entrepreneurship. (Hint: you can watch several in a free trial of Fizzle. Signup here.)
iPad Pro and Apple Pencil — I’m loving these things! Totally replaced my physical notebook. Totally make me feel like a real artist! (a little.)
Beauty is Embarrassing — Excellent documentary about an artist who’s been through TONS of ups and downs in his career. How do we stay grounded as creatives in a world built for popularity and success? Awesome movie. It’s $5, buy, watch, love, make.
Jodorowsky's Dune — The best movie ever about a movie never made. Creative process, creative life, creative vision and passion for creation.
Learn how to set goals that actually stick!
The Top 10 Mistakes in Online Business
Every week we talk with entrepreneurs. We talk about what’s working and what isn’t. We talk about successes and failures. We spend time with complete newbies, seasoned veterans, and everything in between.
One topic that comes up over and over again with both groups is mistakes made in starting businesses. Newbies love to learn about mistakes so they can avoid them. Veterans love to talk about what they wish they had known when starting out.
These conversations have been fascinating, so we compiled a list of the 10 mistakes we hear most often into a nifty lil' guide. Get the 10 Most Common Mistakes in Starting an Online Business here »



God F’n help you if you don’t buy this G*D [email protected] F’n Winnebago!
“You believe that [email protected]?”! Lol
Zedd did a song using clips from the Winnebago video. https://youtu.be/W2BnS2BBZjg
“Don’t slam the fk’n door!”
OMG this is ah mazing. SH*T!
Great episode as always guys! I have been following the election from UK and over the last few weeks from Sweden. I am absolutely terrified at the prospect of Donald Trump getting the republican nomination and I am awed that he’s even allowed to keep running after all the bullshit he’s been spewing out, I’m even more chocked about the fact that there are people actually voting for him.
If I was American I would be ashamed, I am Swedish and we have a racist party in parliament but they wouldn’t dream of publicly saying the things Donald Trump says (although they are thinking it) and many swedes would not admit to voting for them!
I think it’s funny that Sweden has been referenced quite a few times in relation to Bernie Sanders and yes if I was American I would vote for him 😊
#feelthebern
The Winnebago man is exactly how I feel after endless investor pitches!!
I saw this a couple years ago, funniest/sad clips I have ever seen!!
#1 “Quality, comfort and…. WHAT’S THE G^*@[email protected] LINE, TONY!? F**K! My mind is a piece of S$!T this morning.”
#2 “ACUTRAMA? What is THAT S#!T?”
#3 “The Winnebago concept on engineering department has developed the multi functional bathroom, privacy I don’t know what the f^@k I’m reading. I wonder what the f^@k the real dialogue is. What the f^@k is this thing? Under the windshield for f^@ks say. Oh f^@k. What the f^@k did I say? That didn’t’ sound for s^!t did it? Trying to give these guys everything they can get from me. That’s it, f^@k it. I don’t know that the f^@k I’m saying.”
I have to go back and watch it now, “Thanks for doing me a kindness” Lol!!
Ha! “Acutrama!?” got me, Rick. Thanks for transposing it :)
Corbett, I’ve been enjoying Docker. It really comes in handy when you need additional resources such as a Redis container to support background processing. However, we just use it for our development environment and have not used Docker in production yet.
Nice, glad to hear that. Docker is next on my list to play with.
Great episode guys. Listening from New Zealand, the only stuff we hear about the US election is just Donald Trump memes and piss takes… By the way, loving the new featured image artwork on the blog @fizzle-1679091c5a880faf6fb5e6087eb1b2dc:disqus!
Merci Paul!
Thanks for all the information! As a US citizen spending a lot of time in Mexico and having a partner who is of Mexican-German heritage we listen/read Mexican, German, Spanish, US and BBC news. The political analyst are shocked and of course dismayed that the US citizen support of Trump seems to be growing -fascist and racist vitriol. Mexico is a friendly neighbor and we have a long border and increased multinational business ventures. So where are these guys?? Would love to see a boycott of Coca Cola!!! (Not an endorsement for Coca Cola-ha)
Haha, I about fell off the treadmill when I heard the word “Vagrant”! But I did a quick fist pump and recovered.
If anyone is interested, I’ve been using the VVV set up found in the article link above. If you’re a WP developer, this gives you access to things like the nightly build, etc. Totally changed the way I spin up new test sites and develop. 🤓❤️
Fist pump! Glad to hear you’re onboard with VVV Nate. Back in the old days things weren’t so easy ;)
Thanks @corbettbarr:disqus and @disqus_LlEdlbnCrv:disqus This got me started with Vagrant (VVV specifically), and I love it so far! I use it to test how a post looks before publishing, and making changes to the look and feel of the page. What I do not understand yet though: how to get the changes on a vagrant wordpress site, to your production site? Is there an automated way to push it into production, or just copy-paste into the “production” wordpress site once you are happy with the results?
Hey Arno! You can do a lot of different things but my typical set up is to use Git for pushing code live and WP Migrate DB Pro for the database (posts, pages, basically everything you save in wp-admin).
There’s a free version of WPMDBPro, but the paid version is way worth it.
For Git, I like Pantheon’s workflow, which you can find here: https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/sites/code/using-the-pantheon-workflow/ The idea can be applied to any site. Hope that helps!
Thanks Nate, I will look into that. I am very familiar with the whole proces flow (software tester by trade and currently “redesigning” the DTAP proces at my dayjob), but never worked with Git before :-) Very helpful, thanks again!
Hi Nate, could I contact you by email or something to ask a few questions regarding your workflow, please?
Sure: [email protected]. I keep it pretty simple, but happy to share whatever.
I’m from the Philippines– and I am kind of terrified too (I mean, we have our own meltdown politics show ongoing here too, so that’s double the terror!).
Glad to see vagrant is getting around! It’s a much improved workflow that encourages best practices. It’s a bit more work, but it’s worth it in the end.
One common issue is slow sites when using shared folders. A trick to speed them up is to enable NFS for the mount. It makes a big difference. If you suffer from chronically slow page loads, try a quick search for “vagrant nfs”, follow the instructions, and you should see a noticeable improvement.
For mac it’s just one change in a config file, but ff you’re using a Windows machine it’s a tad more difficult as it requires setting up a local NFS server.
I’d also recommend using a front end Git client for people not familiar with source control already. It makes it very friendly to use Git, which is essential. I use SourceTree, but you could use Github Desktop instead.
LOL!!!
At the weekend my wife and I were recording videos here in the UK at the biggest Caravan, Camping, and Motorhome show this year. So there we had to do plenty of pieces to camera about RVs and stuff.
Some needed quite a few takes…..but we kept it together more than this guy!! :-)
@fizzle-1679091c5a880faf6fb5e6087eb1b2dc:disqus Loving your hand drawn graphics. I also tried some hand drawn graphics recently, which went down really well with my audience. See here http://www.getoutwiththekids.co.uk/camping/camping-tips/types-of-campfire/
Did it old school though. Drew on paper and scanned it in! However, that iPad and Apple Pen combination has me dribbling for new tech!
@corbettbarr:disqus Your mention of Vagrant couldn’t have come at a better time. I’m also a developer and have a number of custom plug-ins on my site to hold it all together. I used to use MAMP but ran into issues.
I was starting to look at Desktop Server (https://serverpress.com/get-desktopserver/) and one of the tools that can clone production sites to dev and back, but will now have a good look at Vagrant and your set-up.
I was wondering if you looked at Desktop Server at all and if so, how Vagrant is better?
Cheers,
Gav
You put great stuff altogether at one platform. Awesome.