Studio711.com – Ben Martens

I distinctly remember sitting in a Computer Science class at Purdue around the turn of the century (I might as well own it, I’m getting older) where a professor was trying to convince us that the model of paying once for software was going away. He certainly was right. Everything is a subscription now, and those subscriptions can be a huge drag on your financial future. I feel like we are pretty careful about any recurring subscriptions, but let’s review them and see how we’re doing:

• Amazon – At $139/year, this isn’t cheap, but we use it a lot. I know there are various feelings about shopping at Amazon, but I love all the extra family/hobby time it gives me because I can just have stuff show up instead of driving around in traffic trying to find some random item.
• Monarch Money – After Mint closed, I was looking for new personal finance software and I’m happy that I landed on Monarch. It’s $100/year well-spent. It’s what I’m using to write this post because I can easily find recurring bills. If you only do one thing for your financial future, spend time every month categorizing your transactions and keep a solid understanding of where all your money is going. If you want 50% off your first year, consider using my referral link.
• Comcast Internet – I keep costs low here by buying my own modem, getting the cheapest plan I can find, and setting an annual reminder to sign up for a new one year contract at a lower price. We currently pay $56/year for 500/30 service. That’s way more download speed than we need (I lived fine with 100Mbps until very recently) but this was the best deal when it was time to renew. Pro-tip: don’t let them upsell you on speed. You will almost never notice the difference between 100Mbps and 500Mbps. This is coming from someone who works fully remotely and has over 50+ devices on the network.
• Xfinity Mobile – Our total household cell phone bill each month is $25. No that’s not a typo. Xfinity Mobile operates on the same network as Verizon and I can’t tell any difference from when we were paying $80/month for Verizon. That $25 includes two lines with 1GB of shared data. Yes that’s ridiculously small but since I work from home, I rarely need cell data, and, more importantly, knowing that we have almost no data available means that we do not spend any time surfing around on our phones when we’re out and about. If we need to bump up to unlimited data for a month, it’s only $65 total. If you don’t want Xfinity Mobile, there are plenty of other similar companies like Mint Mobile, Boost Mobile, Straight Talk, etc. I don’t understand how the big companies still exist.
• Spotify – Tyla and I both listen to music for much of the day and so we have a the $15/month family plan. It’s integrated into our Tesla too so we get access to our playlists and the full library anywhere we go. And since we have the family plan, it was easy to add Elijah and keep his musical tastes out of our recommendations.
• YouTube – We pay the $15/month to have no ads on YouTube. I’m allergic to ads. Unless there’s no other option, I’d rather not watch something than watch something with ads. This YouTube subscription is permanent. We carefully manage our other streaming TV services, but YouTube is a constant. For now we just share my account, but when Elijah is old enough to get out of his kids account, we’ll upgrade to the family plan. This does include YouTube Music which theoretically should be as good as Spotify but my attempts in the past to switch over have fizzled out. If you love YouTube Music, I’d love to learn more about why you love it.
• Prime Video – I was very frustrated when Amazon nickel-and-dimed us by making it an extra $3/month to get rid of ads on Prime Video even with a Prime account. It still feels very cheap to me, but we’re currently playing it. This is one of the temporary subscriptions. We’ll drop it and move on to something else soon.
• Disney+/Hulu – Again, I pay for the no-ads version at around $21/month. We’ve had this for about the last six month while Elijah and I are plowing through tons of Star Wars content. I’ve canceled our subscription though and starting in December I think we’ll switch over to Netflix for a while.
• Trakt – This $60/year service that helps us keep track of the TV and movies that we watch. It’s especially helpful since we hop around services. When we come back to a service, I can easily see what episode we were on in each show. It’s also a good way for me to remember shows that I want to watch with just Tyla or as a family. There are a lot of different front-ends to Trakt but I just use the standard app.
• Duolingo – I’m almost up to 1900 days on my Duolingo streak. I pay $80/year for this and I’m most of the way through the Spanish program. Once I complete it, I think I might drop Duolingo and switch to another language app that is a little less gamified.
• Tesla Premium Connectivity – This is another splurge that costs us $100/year but it means that our Tesla has a lot of additional features such as streaming music (Spotify!), live traffic, satellite-view maps, live sentry mode cameras, and when we are parked, we can watch video streaming services (with separate subscription) like Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube.

I’m pretty quick to drop services that I don’t think are worth the money, and I know what I would drop if we needed to find a little more room in the budget. If you’re curious to learn any more about these services, I’m happy to share why we like them!

If you’re curious about what I’m thinking about at work, three recent videos will help give you a taste.

The first one is a presentation by my manager at the Open Compute Project Global Summit. He talked about how AI training data centers cause massive and rapid power fluctuations which are problematic for electrical grids and introduced the shared approach taken by Microsoft, Nvidia, and OpenAI to solve this.

The second one is Satya. He talks about the development of the Fairwater 2 data center and the path to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). While his scope is obviously way bigger than my team’s, we are closely involved in the projects he discusses.

Satya says that this AI revolution might just be the biggest thing since the industrial revolution. It’s an amazing time to be in this industry and I’m super thankful to have a behind-the-scenes seat for it!

Mark Russinovich is the CTO of Azure. He’s one of the smartest people around and when he gives talks, it’s usually worth a listen. At the recent Ignite conference, he talked about recent Azure innovations architecture and a lot of these (especially the ones dealing with compute resources) are in my part of the company. This one is definitely the most technical of the three videos that I’ve shared here.

In 2020, I built a PC right before COVID hit and all the prices went sky high. This year I built a PC and… prices are going sky high (but thankfully no global pandemic yet.) The PC that I built in September was right around $1500 but now those same parts would cost me over $2500! I knew I was getting a great deal on the video card, but the real shocker is how much memory prices have increased. I paid $240 for two sticks of 32 GB DDR5-6000 memory. That same purchase now would cost $880! RAM prices started increasing almost immediately after my purchase and haven’t stopped.

Prices are climbing because the memory and storage market has been hit with a perfect storm. Manufacturers have cut back on consumer production while shifting more of their supply toward enterprise customers who are trying to meet the massive AI demand spike. At the same time, consumers started increasing demand for new parts.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this issue to get resolved, but I’m thankful to be writing this on a brand new machine that was bought literally days before the price increases started!

It has been just over 10 years since I was first introduced to a team process called “Golazo”. It as developed inside the company and there wasn’t much information available on it publicly… until recently. I’ve been spending time gathering various documents and recordings about it, attempting to remove any internal jargon, and then publishing it on GitHub. Today I also made a blog post on the official Azure Compute blog.

It’s a bit difficult to get people excited about a team process, but this one has had such an enormous impact on my job trajectory and satisfaction that I’m happy to get to share it externally. I won’t go into the full sales pitch, but here are three of my favorite parts:

• I’m limited to working on two things at once. Context switching and multi-tasking is not only proven to be inefficient, but personally it also adds a lot of mental weight. Focusing deeply on only one or two tasks at a time keeps me from feeling like I’m getting buried and also lets me do better work because I’m not having to reload all the context.
• It’s hard to get people to write documentation, but writing down what I’m doing, how I’m doing it, and why I’m doing it does amazing things for not only helping me sort out my own thoughts but also for getting feedback from others, teaching newer team members, and keeping a written history of our decisions. We do this for every task (where a task is something that takes between 1 day and 2 weeks.) It has made the code reviews at the end much more enjoyable because we’re not having architecture arguments after someone spent a bunch of time writing code. Plus, we have a huge knowledge base of information that has just grown organically. I don’t have to waste brain space trying to remember it all because I know I can look it up at any point (and increasingly, I can ask AI questions about it.)
• We succeed and fail as a team. Generally this is fun. Sometimes it is awkward. But forcing yourself to take shared responsibility for everything on the team improves design discussions up front and encourages more ideas about how to make improvements to avoid problems in the future.

This is by no means the most common method of working inside the company, but it’s the best one I’ve seen. There have been a few points in my career where I’ve had the unique experience of starting up a new team or working by myself for a while, and even when I’m working on my own, I still follow this process. It helps me visualize the work that needs to happen, stay focused, and keep a log of my past decisions.

While I tried to organize the GitHub docs into something consumable, I know that it can be intimidating to try to make sense of it all so please feel free to contact me directly for more information!