Morfternight #91: Written with love

The one from the week after the week before.

👇 tl;dr

Today we talk about why there was no Morfternight last week. We look at a photo of a roof that doesn’t offer the usual protection but is very beautiful nonetheless, and we dive deep into a collection of 10 articles to become better managers. Also, for the first time, we are more than two thousand!

👋 Good Morfternight!

If you follow closely enough, you may have noticed Morfternight skipped one week. No warning, no specific reason. I didn’t know in advance it would happen, so why would you?

Here’s the thing, last Sunday, I didn’t feel like writing.

“You could prepare Morfternight ahead of time, so you don’t have to write it just before sending it,” I hear someone yelling.

But then, if I did that, it wouldn’t be the same. Morfternight is not a product, it’s not polished, and it’s not something I build. It’s something I share. It’s genuine, it comes from my heart (and my brain, too, come on, let’s not get too emotional here), so it can’t be scheduled too much ahead of time.

Why? Because I am constantly changing.

If I write something on Thursday, I gotta hit that publish button immediately, or I risk deleting it on Sunday because I don’t like it anymore. Then I’d be back to the same problem, just having wasted a bunch of words that would never see the light of day.

“You could write something even when you don’t feel like it!”

No, I can’t.

I can’t because I know that being invited to your inboxes is a privilege, not a right—a privilege I cherish and respect. So there’s no writing Morfternight if I don’t feel like writing, only to waste your time and attention.

The bright side is, this will not often happen because I love writing Morfternight, most of the time. If ever it happens again, though, now you’ll know why.

If you didn’t follow closely enough and had no idea I skipped a week, well, I have to be honest, it stings a bit, but good for you! If I am allowed not to write occasionally, you certainly have the equal right not to read!

📷 Photo of the week

Roof? — More Photos

🗺️ A few places to visit

• We thought the social era was going to be all about ephemeral content. We collectively produce way more information than any single human can consume, so most of us ignore most of it. Then Large Language Models started being trained on larger and larger data sets, and some companies discovered a newfound value in the corpus of content they manage. What is a “corpus”? And why is everyone in AI suddenly talking about it? Here’s what you need to know.

• I mentioned “Promp Engineering” a few times as a new professional role. Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting opened my eyes to the fact most of us aren’t truly engineering prompts but learning by trial and error.

• “Feeling younger than your age may be good for your health,” published the Washington Post. If this article is even remotely correct, I’ll live to be 100 years old.

🎯 Better Management

My friend Luca curated a “Deep Dive” on Refind. A collection of 10 articles on becoming a better manager. He was kind enough to feature one of my blog posts in this collection: Fewer Managers, More Leaders: a Template for the Future of Work.

I strongly advise checking it out if you are a manager or have a manager. You can access the curated collection of articles here.

🩶 A personal recommendation

I usually am cautious in recommending products or services offered by Automattic, my employer, because I don’t want Morfternight to be a promotional newsletter. So careful, in fact, that I sometimes refrain from recommending genuinely excellent tools.

This time, though, it’s a bit different, and I want to plug this recent post from the WordPress.com blog: Get Paid on Any Plan: Introducing Payments for the Free Plan and Up.

Why is it different? Because we just made free something our customers had to pay for in the past: receive payments from their customers.

Why is it important? Because it means that if you have an idea for a product or a service and are ready to put in the work but have no money to invest upfront, now you can start selling your product or offering your service with a free site, taking no risk.