People do book reviews, so we thought, why not do a blog review? We're going to look at Jason Shen's blog, 'The Art of Ass Kicking'.
First off, who is this guy?
At the moment, he's a product manager at Etsy. But he's had an interesting range of experiences for someone in tech. His background wasn't even in tech. He had two science degrees from Stanford, and also happened to be the Captain of their gymnastics team. That probably helped when he set a world record for the most number of Aztec push-ups completed in one minute. He was also the co-founder of Ridejoy, a Y Combinator backed startup that built a network of 46K+ drivers and passengers sharing rides in US and Canada. They ultimately had to shut down the startup after a year, but probably learned lots in that year.
Why is this guy worth reading?
Because he writes useful and practical stuff. Learning to code is all the rage, but how many success stories does code academy really have? Sure, they say they have hundreds of thousands of users signed up, but how many actually finish? This guy actually learned to code well enough to start his own side projects.
"It doesn't matter how much you know, if you don't apply it, your knowledge isn't worth anything"
That's his philosophy for learning. He learns via working on projects. If you've read Scott Adams' latest book, you'll be familiar with the concept of skill stacking. Every new skill you add to your repertoire improves your chances of succeeding in your endeavor. Provided you can combine these skills together. Take a look at Jason Shen's side projects and you'll see that he's building up useful skills that he's combining together.
He's learned to code, which lets him do interesting stuff on the web. He's written a blog for years. You can tell he's met interesting people through his blog interviews, building up his network while providing value to them. He speaks at public events and learned some things at Toastmasters. This is skill stacking.
Ok, you've kind of convinced me. What articles should I check out?
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As of this moment, we don't know the guy. We just think more people should check out his blog.
