I remember a colleague, let’s call her Sarah, who was checking her phone every minute during our 30-minute meeting, apologizing for being distracted, mentioning her endless to-do list. She was drowning, and she didn’t even know it. Sounds familiar? Here’s what I learned: overwhelm is not a time mana…
154 months of building solutions at AWS taught me something unexpected: the most resilient professionals are people who can build cloud architecture, debug a cultural problem, coach a group of executives, mentor a struggling colleague, and learn something entirely new by Thursday. Think Robert Heinl…
It’s been a while since I was up to date on image formats for the web. Back then in the 90s, I actually read the original JPEG paper in order to understand how it worked, because I was preparing a presentation to my study group on the MPEG paper and needed to understand how I-frames were encoded. At…
While refactoring my blog, I discovered the IndieWeb community. From the website:
We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning…
About two weeks ago, Zed, my favourite code editor, introduced agentic coding, replacing its previous assistant panel on the right of its UI. A blog post walks through the way agents work in Zed now. The documentation now has an Agent Panel section. I’ve used it a bit for tweaking some stuff around …
So, I did it again! In the near future, I plan to blog more often (this time for real). But, meanwhile, my blogging setup felt a bit dated. So I re-factored it again. How?
I used Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet (first 3.5, then 3.7) to help me refactor stuff. Claude lives inside my new favourite code edi…
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.)