Books I’ve read in 2022

By on December 29, 2022

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (Hunger game prequel)

There is a new Hunger Games movie coming out so I might have read the book first so I can be a book snob and say the book was better.

The book is the prequel to the original trilogy and tells the origin story of Coriolanus Snow the infamous president of the capitol in the original hunger game series.

We follow Snow trying to navigate the intrigue of the 10th hunger game as he tries to do his best to help his tribute Lucy Gray from district twelve wins the Hunger Games.

If you like the original series you’ll probably like this one. However, I do feel the previous book was better, Katniss and Petr was a more believable romance that the one they tried to do with Snow and Lucy. And let’s be honest, it’s hard to sympathize with Snow even though the situation is grim in much of the book .

Think and grow rich

My wife bought around a dozen Ikea furniture and I had the luck to assemble them while I took a week off. I decided to listen to an audiobook and since “Think and Grow rich” is freely available in most forms I decided to go with that one.

That book in audio form was kind of a weird experience. Written in the 30s and first published in 1937 following the Great Depression, it felt like hearing the thoughts of a businessman of that era. So there are a lot of references to god and Christianity, even a section where he talks about The Prophet and in another chapter he’s kind of an ass for not letting his deaf kid learn sign language.

However, there are some gems here and there in between that and the name dropping and storytelling. It’s probably one of the first instances of something that resembles the secret. Some call this affirmation, where you basically say out loud or write on a piece of paper 30 times your goal and it will manifest at some point. Channel your inner desire (read sexual energy) into something productive and you need to have persistence. There are other reflections that are retell over and over by other self-help authors like the giver receives more than the taker, the taker only receives once, but the giver almost always gets back his investment since people want to reciprocate, etc.

You can read of complete review instead of reading this here
https://thepoorswiss.com/think-and-grow-rich-book-review/

The Alchemist

When you really want something, the universe always conspires in your favor.
What if part principle of the previous book was written as a fiction book instead. Well “The Alchemist” is kind of like that, but better.
With all the hype around non-fiction books this short fiction book hit home far better that most self-help books you’ll ever read.
The story revolves around a shepherd in Andalusia (Spain) who dreams of finding a great treasure near the pyramid. We follow his journey to find this treasure and other learning he finds along the way.

Courage is Calling

If you read through my other book review you’ve probably noticed that I’ve read a lot of Holiday other books.
Throughout the book, he describes different aspects of courage, preparing to answer your call (preparation makes you brave), overcoming fear, recognizing the importance of obstacles, getting comfortable with discomfort, starting small and maintaining hope for something better.

If you liked his previous book you’ll probably like this one. However, my favorites are still the Obstacle is the way and Ego is the enemy. If you want something to start reading his work, these are probably good entry points.

Here are the takeaways:

  • Courage is a requisite quality for a full life
  • Courage is facing and fighting fear
  • Courage is not undertaken foolishly or frivolously, but reasonably and purposefully.
  • The other virtues require courage. You can’t have those virtues if you only express them when you’re not afraid.
  • Our society advances by acts of courage.
  • Courage emboldens others to be courageous as well.
  • Courage is not an attitude that you hold over a lifetime, but a choice made in moments and sustained for seconds.

The Almanac of Naval Ravikant

This book is a compilation of some of the best tweets by Naval Ravikant, including the famous ‘How to get rich’ tweetstorm from 2018, and includes extra commentary from Naval. He explains his ideas and the reasoning behind them in simple, lucid text and lays out his principles of generating wealth succinctly.
This book packs a lot of ideas, so I’d recommend reading it more than once to fully understand them.

Takeaways:

  1. Understand how to create wealth
  2. Build judgment
  3. Learn the skills of decision making
  4. Learn to love to read
  5. Understand happiness is a choice

Health is key. Physical, mental, spiritual.
Anger may or may not serve others, but definitely of disservice to you.
Read, read, read. “Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else.” Also reread. A 100 reread books is better than a 1000 “just read” ones.
Focus on one – then nurture & perfect.
The journey from “Freedom to” to “freedom from”.

Note : The free version of this book is available online in pdf, mobi and epub file format. So don’t be a dummy like me that bought the physical book.

100% right 50% of the time

The title reminded me of a devops meme we had at work: 60% of the time, deployment work every time.

The book is about making better decisions and the fallacies that we must be wary of, it mostly presents us with biases that lead to bad or non optimal decisions. The book is loaded with references to other books I’ve already read like sway, predictably irrational, nudge, thinking fast, thinking slow, etc. He managed to distill it a bit and made it more focused on decision making. There is some interesting information in there like how the Interpretation of stats can be unintuitive. For example, if there are 60 people in a class, what are the chances that at least two people share a birthday? Easy, it’s 60 divided by 365 days which equal 1 / 6. However, this is false, it’s actually 99.4%.

Even if most of the points the author talks about are from other books, it was surprisingly interesting and I might do a full review later.

Discipline is Destiny

Discipline is Destiny is the second book of Ryan Holiday Four Virtues series, the first being Courage is Calling that I’ve already read earlier this year and the next two (justice and Wisdom) will be in future book.

Like in Courage is Calling, Holiday draws on the stories of historical figures to explain the virtue of temperance (discipline). Sometime these seem almost biographical, which is not surprising considering he is a huge reader of biographies (check is reading list if you’re interested)

Here some of the takeaways:

  • Self-discipline isn’t about deprivation; it’s about being in control of your actions, thoughts, and emotions.
  • Live virtuously by working hard, thinking hard, and holding yourself to high standards.
  • If you fail, you’ll be OK. You’ll know you did your best, just picks yourself up when you fall and continue the journey where you left off.

Book that I’ve re-read, I will probably make a post to deep dive for each of them

  • Essentialisme * (2018 – https://cjacques.me/books-from-the-first-quarter-of-2018-sapien-digital-fortress-essentialism-ready-player-one/)
  • Bird by bird * (2015 – https://cjacques.me/reading-100-books-before-40/)
  • Backing up the wrong tree * (2017 – https://cjacques.me/the-20-books-ive-read-in-2017/)
  • How to be miserable * (2019 – https://cjacques.me/book-ive-read-in-2019/)
  • Obstacle is the way * (2016 – https://cjacques.me/reading-100-books-before-40/)

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How to gzip a file in Java using Files.copy

By on December 13, 2022

We needed our compress files generated from our apps at work and I went the old way using a fileInputStream and a fileoutputStream:

    private static void compressFileToGzipOldWay(File destinationDir, File fileToCompress) throws IOException {
        String compressedFilesName = fileToCompress.getName() + ".gz";
        File compressedFileDir = new File(destinationDir, compressedFilesName);
        FileInputStream fis = new FileInputStream(fileToCompress.getName());
        FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(compressedFileDir);
        GZIPOutputStream gzipOS = new GZIPOutputStream(fos);
        byte[] buffer = new byte[1024];
        int len;
        while ((len = fis.read(buffer)) != -1) {
            gzipOS.write(buffer, 0, len);
        }
        //close resources
        gzipOS.close();
        fos.close();
        fis.close();
    }

In the PR review a coworker let me know that this could be simplified with Files.copy. Strangely enough I haven’t found how to do it online, but I think it’s the superior way. 

    private File compressFileToGzip(File destinationDir, File fileToCompress) throws IOException {
        String compressedFilesName = fileToCompress.getName() + ".gz";
        File compressedFileDir = new File(destinationDir, compressedFilesName);
        try (GZIPOutputStream gzipOutputStream
                        = new GZIPOutputStream(Files.newOutputStream(compressedFileDir.toPath()))) {
            Files.copy(fileToCompress.toPath(), gzipOutputStream);
        }
        return compressedFileDir;
    }

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Idea #33 to #41: Wrapping it up altogether, fixing the food at home problem for good.

By on December 6, 2022

The last ten or so Ideas were all about food, managing it and potentially maximizing the customer’s food bills. You can encompass all these problems into one big problem, which is fixing the food at home problem. From that general idea a lot of related ideas were already talked about, but I think there can be more, but some of these ideas in a vacuum don’t really help but bundle together it might become something more viable.

What we have at home

With “Idea #35: What is in your fridge?“, knowing what you have at home can prevent you from buying unnecessary things and making something from what you got instead of going to the grocery or getting food delivered. Is that food still good?

Tracking leftovers (track them, plan them, when they are going to expire)

Except for Idea #36 (tracking expiry date), there are no ideas about tracking leftovers. Perhaps track what meal are left in the fridge with the Idea #35. Leftovers could be incorporated to your meal planning (Idea #37: A family Meal planner apps & Idea #38: specialized Meal planner apps) saving you make a meal or two.

When your food is going to expire

With Idea #36: Rotten or not, you can check when your food is going to expire and have meal suggestions to prevent spoilage.

These services could be used when we are grocery shopping, to know what is missing and how much we got.

What should we eat?

A service like my fridge food .com can help you create recipes from what you already have in your fridge. If you want to plan ahead you can use a service that plans your meal (Idea #37: A family Meal planner apps & Idea #38: Advance Meal planner apps)

If you’re looking for idea what to cook look around different recipe site or use Idea #40: A social network to share geotagged recipes.

What we can make out of the fridge and what missing (ingredient I have at home) to make X

A service like “Idea #35: What is in your fridge?” help you find what you have left and what is missing to do the meal you want. You might need grocery delivery service like in Idea #41: Do my groceries if you’re too lazy to go to the store.

Best place to buy these grocery (Where and what to buy)

Now that we know what needs to be bought for the week, how to know where the best place to have the cheapest grocery bill is.

Using a site that allows you to check the flyer for each store and Idea #32: A crowdsource grocery Apps you know in advance the price of the supermarket near your home and plan where to buy your groceries. With Idea #33: Coupon app for grocery and retail shopping you can know the best coupon and free product you can get while shopping.

Making extra money with your grocery shopping

While you shop you could scan item with Idea #32: A crowdsource grocery Apps and get community points and if the service is viable it could translate to coupons and saving. With Idea #34: Receipt scanning app for grocery, retail shopping, you could receive cash payment for sharing your receipt and shopping pattern. 

This is (almost) all the previous ideas related to food packages in one big story, what if an app could do all of this?

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Idea #43, #44, #45: Food related ideas that was on the list that didn’t make it

By on November 29, 2022

Here are some of the ideas that were on the original list that didn’t make it that might be interesting. The main reason they didn’t is that it’s either they’re already implemented in a way that is going to be hard to displace the first mover.

Idea #43 : Make your own restaurant review site.

I used to check restoMontreal to see if the restaurant was good or not before deciding if we should try it and it wasn’t perfect. I think that it wasn’t perfect and could use social networking principles to be more engaging. Then, came along Yelp that did exactly that. So unless you build a service better and get a network effect that catches Yelp size or the app cater to a niche that yelp can’t. It will be pretty much impossible to compete.

Idea #44 : A local restaurant apps with deal in it like the one we receive in the mail

Here we receive every week a bag full of deals for local restaurants and shops. Why is this still not in an app and save a bit of trees by not wasting paper that goes straight to the recycle bin.

They recently created an app that does exactly that, but if they don’t have this kind of app in your neighborhood, there is an opportunity for you to make the app for them if they’re willing to pay or do it for free, but have them pay for ads and placement.

Idea #45: Site to create efficient meal plan or recipes (efficient recipes)

Similar to “Idea #37: A family Meal planner apps & Idea #38: specialized Meal planner apps”, but with a twist. It focuses on only recipes that are easy and quick to do with a component of what you have available to do them. Since it doesn’t add more to the previous idea and didn’t think much of what I could add to be a more flesh out idea its end up here.

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Idea #42: Help supermarkets sell their food before they are wasted.

By on November 22, 2022

A while back I had a friend who was a manager at a grocery store. I was curious about his job and while he was telling me about it, he told me about how much food the supermarket was throwing away. They couldn’t send it to the food bank either because if they get sick with it they could sue the supermarket.

Up to a third of the food produced in the world is wasted, forty percent of food produced in America heads to the landfill or is otherwise wasted.

And this has an economic and environmental impact too. Every year, the average American family throws out somewhere between $1,365 and $2,275, according to a landmark 2013 study co-authored by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

According to the same study, 25 percent of freshwater in the US goes toward producing food that goes uneaten, and 21 percent of input to our landfills is food, which represents a per-capita increase of 50 percent since 1974.

This problem led several governments to pass laws to prevent supermarkets from throwing away food.

Others started apps to offer food that is going to expire at a bargain, like flashfood and Ubifood.

With recent rising food prices, Canadians are flocking to these apps in an effort to curb rising grocery bills.

Is your local grocery shop using this kind of app? If not you could build one for them, maybe have a deal to take a cut of the sale or a subscription fee business for the grocer, where he pays to send alerts to the app users. You could probably get some government funding for that kind of app too. 

More information & links:

https://www.flashfood.com/blog/why-grocery-stores-dont-donate-all-of-their-surplus-food-to-charity

https://www.vox.com/22559293/food-waste-expiration-label-best-before

https://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/sci-tech/canadians-flocking-to-food-rescue-apps-to-reduce-grocery-bills-and-waste-1.5751329?cache=yesclipId10406200text/html;charset=utf-80404/7.626236

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/leftover-food-flashfood-app-1.3704145

https://www.quora.com/What-do-supermarkets-do-with-food-items-that-have-passed-their-expiry-date

Supermarkets Dig into the Challenge of Food Waste

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Idea #41: The idea everybody though of during the pandemic. Have other do your groceries.

By on November 15, 2022

This idea was lingering on my list for so long that a service that didn’t exist back then has now seen an explosion of these services mostly due to the pandemic and how easy it is to create one. Almost all grocery stores do it nowadays, if they don’t you can always use a service like task rabbit to do it for you.

How to make a different grocery delivery services

However, there seem to be some caveats for these services, with the exception of task rabbit they seem to only work for one store.
Perhaps a way to have a unique offering for your app, it could offer delivery service from multiple stores. The logistics of that can be tricky though, especially with perishable goods.

Integrate this idea with previous grocery & food related idea.

You see that a store has good deal in your area with your crowdsourced grocery app (Idea #32), add a button to do your grocery online at that store and have them delivered at your place.

Need some ingredients for your meal plan (Idea #37 & #38) or for you recipe from your favorite foodie social network (Idea #40)? Have these ingredients automatically added to your grocery list via your app before making an order on your grocery delivery service.

If you can beat them, join them.

If the logistics of such a service is too daunting, our previous food related idea could be linked with pre existing grocery delivery services. You have to look up for a service that has an api. Perhaps strike a deal with them so your customer get a rebate for those service or you get an affiliate commission for those who register to those.

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Idea #40: Created a social network to share geotagged recipes

By on November 8, 2022

The idea

Geotagging on your picture can be a privacy issue, but can be a great way to find out where it was taken, can help recreate your trip (like what Instagram do). Through a social network it’s a great way to see what people are up to in that region/place/city.

So what not link both with food.

Everyone loves so much taking a picture of what they are eating on Instagram, you can take it to a whole other level

My wife used to follow a group on facebook where parents post images and recipes of what they are giving their kids for lunch. You could expand it and show what can be done depending on communities, you could look up what people are doing in other countries. It could be used to check out what local restaurants are serving and local food service can show what they can deliver for their client.

The closest I’ve seen that did something similar to this is Gigamunch for the local delivery part and for the recipe part like FoodPals.

How it works

They simply let you browse picture feeds like Instagram. When you see something you like, you can tap on it and it shows the recipe, where it was taken and if it’s a restaurant how to get there, could probably link to their full menu too. You can take a picture and from there tell if you took it from a restaurant or what are the ingredients if you did it yourself.

How to monetize

You could monetize it with ads and deals with brands to have their own recipes promoted on the network. Think of it as the recipe that comes with your cereal box, it usually includes other ingredients that the same company sells. Having a recipe on how to make rice krispies snack on the site promotes the cereal and brands could pay to have it on top of the list or search.

You could like the service with other services like blue apron or Instacart. You could select a recipe and use (Idea #35: What is in your fridge?) see if you have everything and use a service like Instacart (or similar service) to get the missing ingredients. In the case of a link with blue apron, you could have a recipe from blue apron and if there is an option to register or connect with you blue apron account to receive the ingredient for that recipe.

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Idea #39: Link wellness apps and food intake tracker with your grocery app

By on November 1, 2022

If you’re a bit health conscious you probably know that exercise and eating well are the most important things you can do to live a long and healthy life. It’s no surprise that this spawned a wealth of apps and tools to track. From Fitbit to halo including the apple watch and all those calorie tracking apps there is an endless supply of options. However, I’ve noticed that none of them seem to be able to link it to your grocery shopping habit.

What is the point of linking them together?

The wellness app keeps track of the exercise done, number of steps taken, heart rate if it’s linked to a watch and the user needs to enter its calorie intake and weight. Link it with a food app will help with the following. When entering calories in the app we already know what food is available and can suggest what is already in the fridge over something that is not available. Second, when trying to find a meal in a certain calorie range the food app could suggest a meal depending on that range, what needs to be eaten (protein, fat, veggies, etc.). And at the end of the day depending on how much calorie can be eaten, the app can suggest what is available for you.

Finally if there is a need to plan the meal in advance and these meals have a certain caloric threshold, the app can help choose what meal to pick, what you need to buy to make it and where to buy it.

How to make money with it?

It could be an extra service with your fitness and food tracking app. Has an individual app where you could limit the number of meals and service for free users and give everything to premium users. Example: the free version will suggest a meal, but won’t tell what missing from the user fridge.

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Idea #38: What if every diet had a meal planner apps

By on October 25, 2022

Follow up from the previous ideas, why not expand your meal plan suggestion to include a specialized meal plan. I’ve already told you about the dietary constraint my wife had when my first kids were born back in idea #15. My wife would search multiple forums and facebook groups to find recipes she could make that didn’t include beef, dairy or soy.

At the time I would have been great to have a service or app that did this for us.

How it work

Have one service that covers all the types of dietary constraint there is or make one for each of them. The service will have a pre pre-built meal plan depending on the dietary plan you want and recipe to change things up. Users could use pre-made plans or build their own from a set of recipes available to them. Building a community around the meal plans the app is offering would help create a more interesting meal plan. Have a crowdsourcing part where users can add recipes and suggest changes. From some similar service I saw, they usually provide personalized meal plans for a subscription fee. If you can cook or have a background in that kind of service you could even offer pre-made meals on a subscription basis. This should probably start local and see if it can be expanded from there.

What specialized meal plan can it offer?

There is a plethora of types of meal plans that can be offered, probably the best thing to do is to focus on one or two and expand from there.

Here a list of some of type of meal plan that it could cover:

  1. No dairy meal plan
  2. No beef /veal
  3. No soja
  4. No eggs
  5. Vegan meal plan. 
  6. Paleo
  7. Keto  

How to get user

You could gather interest by going through different facebook groups, subreddit and forums of people interested in the diet of your choice. From there, you can ask them if they would like that kind of service.

Those who are interested could sign up through a mailing list and receive a free meal plan.

This mailing list would then be used to launch the real product.

How to monetize

This service could work with a subscription model, users could subscribe for free to get a basic meal plan and the other tiers would offer personalized plans depending on their profile.

Another pricing model that could be used is to have a free tier where you could buy other meal plans that you need in a kind of ‘à la carte’ method.

Another way to get revenue would be to have affiliate offers for food inside the app or perhaps coupons in the app for local grocery stores.

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Idea #37: Build your own family meal planner apps

By on October 18, 2022

Making supper and kid lunch can sometimes be overwhelming. One of my friends used to fix that problem by preparing all her meals of the week on Sunday so they don’t have to worry about what to eat during the week.

I thought the idea was brilliant, but how to decide what to eat before your week. Why not use an app that creates a weekly meal plan for you. You could mix this idea with idea #35 and optimize your meal planning for what is already available in your fridge.

Feature

The user chooses what days and meals (breakfast, dinner, etc.) they want to plan a meal for and the apps or services would create a different meal for each. I could even have a leftover option where you want to keep the leftovers.

The apps could build your meal from what you already have and make suggestions on what is missing by giving a grocery list of what you need to buy.

Combine with the service from Idea #32, the app could predict what will be the cost for everything, maybe even calculate the price of each meal. It could suggest which grocery store will be the cheapest or suggest a list of possible meals and their average cost.

How can apps make money?

The apps could offer coupons on certain missing items for your meals since the user already needs them and it’ll save them some money while giving the service some commission. It’s a win win. 

You can always include ads in the app that can be removed. 

The app may suggest having premium membership where you can plan meals for the week and the free version can only plan for a day.  

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