Recent Posts

I’m a big fan of Cal Newport and his books. Currently, I’m reading his latest one: “A World Without Email”

Every email comes at a small cognitive cost to the sender, and a small cognitive cost to the recipient. It has become easier than ever to “just send an email”, instead of diving deeper, solving the issue, or using a more appropriate, more efficient, or less stressful way of communication. Multiplied by the amount of companies, employees, emails per employee, the wasted time and cognitive cost of (over)using email for everything has become enormous. And instant messaging only amplifies the problem again.

I’ve become very good at filtering and processing email over the last years. But this is just trying to solve the receiving end of the problem. Now I’m curious about learning ways to fix the problem at the source. Not just for me, but for my colleagues, too.

Kevin Kelly, co-founder and executive editor of Wired magazine, recently turned 70. Happy Birthday!

His birthday gift to us all is “103 bits of unsolicited advice”. Each one brilliant and full of wisdom. And all are free.

The paradox of “free” is that people tend to not value the “free” things, exactly because it’s free: If it didn’t cost much, it’s probably not worth much.

If somebody took these and added an anecdote or two to each one, plus some background, they could turn this into a bestseller. Probably a series of bestsellers, too.

But here they are, hard-earned lessons for all of us. Free for those who care, and who recognize the value of great advice.

Don’t underestimate “free”. Free can be valuable.

In my current job, I occasionally mentor people and one of the questions I often get is: “How do you find good opportunities?” By which people mean cool technologies to explore, great projects to be part of, opportunities to talk at conferences, great companies to join, interesting people to meet, …

When writing my post on renovations, while mentioning automatic link checking and automatic HTML checking, I thought to myself: “Hey, how about automatic spell-checking?”. After all, OSes, word processors, etc. come with some built in spell checking.

Some research pointed me at LanguageTool. It’s free for basic use, open source, built in Europe, and has credible customers. It also supports multiple languages. And Markdown. What’s not to love?

(BTW, this is my first post in the “link post” format, popularized by John Gruber and others. These are short posts about cool, useful, or otherwise interesting links I found on the web. Just click on the post title to check it out.)

When I started blogging in the early 2000s, RSS emerged as an open standard for spreading the news. New post? Blam, everybody interested got a notification in their favorite newsreader. Back then, building a proper RSS feed was more of an art than an exact science: Crafting proper XML while taking a…

A long time ago (2017), I wrote about modernizing my blog’s infrastructure. Guess, what: Time to modernize again! Back then, I migrated from Drupal to a self-written, Jekyll-inspired static site generator written in Python (my current language of choice for most projects). I spent the majority of th…

A lot has happened since I changed my job more than 5 years ago.

I learned new stuff, met a lot of customers, blogged and podcasted (though on other platforms), and I didn’t get to give this blog much care.

In the last few articles, I shared a few thoughts on how I think the world of IT is changing, which became the context for my good-bye to the world of physical IT altogether.

As of last week, I started working for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Solutions Architect, helping customers architect systems and solve technical problems using the latest cloud computing technologies. I’m very thankful to be able to work here, as it brings me back to the very center of IT innovation and gives me the opportunity to do lots of new and interesting things.

In the last weeks, I’ve been digging around AWS and its services, playing with stuff and meeting lots of inspiring people. So I thought I’d put together a few links for those interested in exploring the world of the AWS cloud computing platform for you to learn more about AWS:

A while ago, I argued that the world of IT is changing, and that change is good. And that as a result of change, many people would need to change their jobs.

Well, I did it. Last Tuesday was my last working day at Oracle.

The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. (Marcus Aurelius)

If you have a job in IT (and who among my readers hasn’t?), then it is going to fundamentally change soon.

Why?

In my own job, I see the full spectrum from where IT innovation is created to the very last laggards who are still depending a lot on mainframes and other ancient technology. Some things in IT are new (like, every week there’s a new startup/technology/trend that is shaking up the industry), and some things are just repetitions of stuff that has happened before, albeit in slightly different colors.

So now, the world of IT as we know it is changing (again) and this time, change will impact organizations, roles and jobs.

Let’s dive a little bit into what’s happening. Don’t worry, change is good, but only if you prepare for it.