Hana

Record yourself answering the four questions you get in every final round and watch it back. I did this and discovered that my answers averaged something like four minutes, wandered into implementation detail nobody asked for, and ended without a conclusion. That is invisible from the inside and screamingly obvious on video. I cut everything to ninety seconds with a clear ending and my final round conversion changed within two months.

I did an improv course for eight weeks, which cost about the same as a couple of months at a gym, and it was the most useful thing I have ever done for this. Not because of anything performance-related, because every exercise trains the same reflex, which is accepting whatever the other person just gave you and adding to it rather than replacing it with your own idea. That is the entire mechanic of a conversation that flows. I was terrible at it and it worked anyway.

I would put these in sequence rather than in opposition. The linked list walk is brutal without a mental model to hang it on, and it is superb once you have one.

I own all three and they solve different problems. The official book is a tutorial, it optimises for getting you productive and deliberately underexplains the model. Programming Rust is a reference sized explanation and its chapters on ownership, moves and references are the ones that made the model actually snap into place for me, because it explains what the compiler is protecting you from rather than which incantation satisfies it. Rust for Rustaceans is excellent and completely wrong for you right now, it assumes you already have the model and want the edges. Programming Rust, chapters four and five, slowly.

The sceptical case for doing nothing: regional pricing doubles the complexity of every future decision you make. Every price rise, every new tier, every annual discount, every grandfathering question now has a matrix instead of a number. For a solo operator that compounds.

If those markets are a third of signups but a small share of revenue, and you are otherwise healthy, leaving one price and accepting a lower conversion rate from those regions is a legitimate choice and not a lazy one.

Since you will hit it eventually: the US works on a completely different principle. There is no national registration, each state has its own economic nexus rule, and the common pattern is around 100,000 of sales into that state or a couple of hundred transactions, with several of the bigger states using higher figures.

The trap is that crossing a threshold and owing tax are separate questions. Nexus means you may have to register there. Whether your product is taxable at all varies by state - software delivered as a service is taxable in some and not in others. So the answer to do I owe sales tax in the US is genuinely it depends on which state, and that is exactly the kind of question a merchant of record exists to absorb.

Add a check so it can't recur. docker history --no-trunc piped through a few regexes for ghp_, npm_, AKIA and a generic high-entropy match runs in seconds and fails the build. Ours caught a teammate pasting a token into a Dockerfile comment two weeks after we added it.

Check whether staging carries any load at all. Ours got no traffic except deploys, so nothing warmed up, no cache eviction, no connection pool pressure, no interesting concurrency. We started replaying a sample of production traffic at it and it immediately started finding things.