Rian van der Merwe

👴🏻 Product management old-timer.
🧑‍💻 Product (Data team) at @cloudflare.
✍️ Product management, software development, leadership, technology, internet culture.
🎸 Music fanatic.
🇿🇦 🇺🇸

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-10-13

@simon Cloudflare employee here đź‘‹ Cool to see this write-up!

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-10-12

This post about news feeds by Lauren Goode at Wired resonated with me a lot:

“For those of us who came of age on the internet some 20 to 30 years ago, the way these recommendation systems work now represents a fundamental shift to how we long thought of our lives online. We used to log on to tell people who we were, or who we wanted to be; now the machines tell us who we are, and sometimes, we might even believe them.”

link.wired.com/view/5cec2fe23f

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-09-18

I bet you didn’t think you’d want to read about pennies today, but...

“Most pennies produced by the U.S. Mint are given out as change but never spent; this creates an incessant demand for new pennies to replace them, so that cash transactions that necessitate pennies can be settled.”

And here’s the kicker:

“One thing we know for sure about America’s 1-cent coins, however, is that just one of them costs more than 3 cents to produce.”

nytimes.com/2024/09/01/magazin

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-09-09

As always, this is so worth it. I clicked on too many things, and have no regrets about it. saturation.social/@clive/11310

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-09-08

@andy Woah that feels like a first.

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-09-08

Oh, as a topic wanderer myself (I don’t like the word “generalist”), I love and endorse this comic.

(via @simondlr’s newsletter).

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-09-07

Is it even a never-done side project if you don't accidentally purchase a domain for it? elezea.com/2024/09/introducing

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-29

@cory I saw that when I looked at the Kendrick page! I'm positively smitten with what you've done here 👏

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-29

@cory Well you just gave me a whole new set of ideas, so thank you! An hourly build seems like something I should try to figure out as well.

There are worse rabbit holes to be in, so I say go for it. I'll join you.

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-29

@cory "Plex is sending webhook events to a worker that inserts listen records to Supabase."

Ok I thought we could talk shop but this is a whole other level, I'll just stay over here at the kids table đź« 

That is really cool though. I sped my stuff up quite a bit with KV entries, but the cron trigger is a great idea, I think I'll look into that next.

How is this so fun!?

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-29

@cory I finally moved my stuff to Cloudflare Pages/Workers/KV as well: music.rianvdm.com/

One question for you as I was looking at your site, how do you get your most listened genres? I don't see an easy way to do that in the Last.fm API. Or do you do some nested API calls? If so, how is your site so fast!? Ok I guess that's enough questions for now...

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-28

This is good advice for remote work. I like “no agenda, no attenda”!

switowski.com/blog/no-hello-no

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-25

@andy Not familiar with it but going to dig into it a little bit on Monday…

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-25

Initial impressions (and not just because I work there)—Workers are amazing, and if you’re a developer I think you should check it out.

This is going to be a bit of work but it’s fun and in the end it’s going to be way more performant, which is my biggest issue with the Netlify site.

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-25

This is where we talk about weird side projects, right?

I like music.elezea.com/, a site for my music listening stats. But it’s built on Netlify, and now that I work at Cloudflare that’s a bit embarrassing.

So today I finally started rewriting the whole thing on @cloudflare Pages and Workers. It has a long way to go but the bones are there and now it’s time to take a break. music.rianvdm.com/

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-23

Great interview with that guy who posts the weird app idea designs.

“Iverson follows a simple formula: What if you identified a problem with an app or app experience, and made it worse?”

embedded.substack.com/p/the-ev

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-22

A quick 4.5 star review of "Service Model" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, which features one of my favorite robot characters in a novel in a very long time. elezea.com/2024/08/quick-revie

Rian van der Merwe boosted:
flexghost.flexghost
2024-08-21

This Kamala Harris campaign video is absolute fire

🔥 🔥🔥

Rian van der Merwerianvdm@pdx.social
2024-08-21

I loved the story of the honking Waymos, and so glad it got the classic “but what does it all mean!?” treatment from The Atlantic.

theatlantic.com/technology/arc

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