How Slobodan Manić spends the summer
Short, inspirational, summer stories from your favourite people in the space.
It’s summer time (at least in the northern hemisphere), and things tend to be slower now. A good moment to check in with experiment-minded people about how they’re spending the season, what they’re learning, and what they’re looking forward to next.
For this first edition, I’ve asked Slobodan “Sani” Manić to reflect. You know him as the host of the No Hacks podcast, but also as a digital optimisation specialist with over 15 years of experience making websites faster, clearer, and more profitable.
Let’s go.
Thanks to Convert and Sitespect for their continued support.
What does your summer look like this year?
These days, few things excite me as much as deliberately slowing down.
It feels like since the world started heading towards the end of the pandemic everything has been moving faster and faster. On a personal level, I went through a burnout, recovered, started No Hacks, built an entirely new professional and personal network (at an age when they say making new friends is next to impossible), and we also moved to a new country.
Going for a morning run, getting my ten thousand steps before breakfast, playing NBA Jam with my daughter while she’s on her summer break. Slowing down to observe the world moving at a pace that doesn’t make sense.
No travel this summer, yet, but that’s what living next to an ocean will do to a person who spent nine years living in Scandinavia - no travel necessary. We’ll probably do a road trip in August, though. Last summer we did Galicia, we’re eyeing Asturias next.
What are you reading, watching, or learning that's feeding your thinking?
Iqbal Ali recommended a book about a month ago, The Empire of AI by Karen Hao. I started reading it, then told Erin Weigel about it. Now she’s not only reading it, but also told Lukas Vermeer about it… It’s about the history of OpenAI and its culture of secrecy and absolute devotion to the promise of artificial general intelligence, or their version of it. Some of the things in it are so disturbing you’ll catch yourself wishing it was fiction. Read it!
At the same time I’ve been learning a lot about practical ways we can use AI to help us all do the things we do in a better way. These skills are already important. There is no way to deny the fact that human-computer interactions are not going to be as prevalent in the future as they have been in the last few decades. I’m not saying websites are dead, but if the pie grows and one slice of it stays the same size, it does become less relevant, doesn’t it?
This is why I think everyone working in digital should learn about these new technologies. Not just the LLMs and how to prompt them, but things like AI agents, MCP, evaluations, etc. The best way to know when someone is trying to sell you hype (another reminder to read Empire of AI) is to know what the actual capabilities of the technology are.
And if you’d like to start learning more, I suggest attending the free AI Beyond the Chatbots webinar I’m doing with Iqbal on August 19th. We have both been building tools that implement AI for a while now, and for anyone feeling they are being left behind when it comes to AI but just can’t stomach the AI hype, this might be worth your time.
When it comes to movies and TV shows, ever since the peaceful protests began back home in Serbia last November most of my media consumption has been related to that. I haven’t even seen season 4 of The Bear or the last two seasons of Hacks (both easily among the best shows of the 2020s) so I’m planning to catch up on those soon.
What’s something you're looking forward to in the second half of the year?
So many things! No Hacks is evolving and I think the audience will really appreciate what’s next. The first 200+ episodes focused on “tell me what you did and how you did it”, but I think it’s time to start talking about how the world is changing around us and how we can adapt to those changes. There will be amazing guests, as always, but also solo episodes, and some new formats.
There’s a lot of value in sharing not only how something is done properly, but also figuring out how to do it properly and I’d like to do a lot more of that in the future, both with the guests and on my own.
There’s also the Porto Half Marathon in September and Porto Marathon in November that I signed up for, and I’m equally excited about the races and the training blocks leading up to them.
Thank you for sharing this Sani!
🚀 Job opportunities
Find 100+ open roles on ExperimentationJobs.com. This week’s featured roles:
Product Manager, Subscriptions at Dow Jones (New York, USA)
Engineering Manager – Ads Experimentation Platform at Reddit (USA)
Senior Optimization Manager, CRO Strategy at Launch Potato (Jersey City, USA)
Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Specialist at Smile White (Leeds, UK)
CRO and Web Developer at Virtuagym (Spain)
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Have a great week — and keep experimenting.
Thanks, Kevin
Thank you for having me on, Kevin!