At 54 years old, I just started a YouTube channel.
This is an experiment. I recently read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s book Tiny Experiments and decided to try something I haven’t done before: creating my own videos, not for a company or conference, but for anyone who might find them useful.
A few days ago, I had a conversation with a former colleague who interviewed for a new job because she couldn’t stand her current one. Getting a new offer made her feel relieved and optimistic again: She had escaped.
Many others may not be so lucky this year.
Tech layoffs are accelerating. The economy—if we’re honest and look past the AI boom—looks shaky. Gold prices are spiking, which historically signals uncertainty ahead. And if you’re reading this feeling worried about your job, your future, or the general state of things, I know well how you feel.
Over 27 years and five major crises, I’ve learned one thing: the difference between thriving and drowning isn’t luck—it’s knowing what you can change and what you can’t.
A while ago, I mentioned an executive who admitted they didn’t use AI tools themselves. In Admit You Don’t Know: Reverse Mentorship With An AI Sherpa, Jeremy Utley recently blogged about a similar observation, but turns it around by challenging leaders to admit they don’t know, then to do something about it.
His core insight is powerful: “Most leaders think credibility comes from always having the answer. In the AI era, it’s the opposite. Credibility comes from admitting you don’t know—and doing something about it.”
Acknowledging that execs and other senior people might struggle with justifying the time to spend learning, he offers two solutions:
Find a junior mentor who is fluent in AI, and let them teach them. He calls it “reverse mentorship”, but I disagree on the “reverse” part: a mentor is someone who shares experience they have with a mentee who lacks that experience. The concepts of “junior” or “senior” are related to experience, not age. Just because a mentor is less senior in one dimension (like tenure, age, or business experience), doesn’t mean they may not be senior in another dimension (like AI experience).
An “AI Sherpa”, an AI-experienced co-worker acting as a shadow who analyzes the day-to-day work of an executive, then builds custom AI experiences (i.e., with ChatGPT’s “Custom GPTs” feature or Claude’s artifacts), tailored to the exec’s workflow and specific needs.
What makes Jeremy’s approach particularly compelling is a real example he shares: Don from PCCP, LLC publicly asked for an AI mentor at a company conference, saying “I raised my hand and asked for a mentor, even though I run the firm.” When Don shared his positive experience the following week, several other senior leaders immediately stood up asking for AI mentors on the spot. One act of leadership humility sparked a movement. I wish the exec I observed had the humility to do something about their lack of AI experience!
I’m still not a fan of shortcuts, and the concept of an AI Sherpa sounds like an excuse for not doing the learning. But Jeremy positions it cleverly as making transformation “irrefusible” for resistant leaders—if they refuse world-class AI mentorship designed specifically for them, that reveals something about their commitment to change. It’s certainly better than doing nothing, and it removes the typical barriers that prevent executives from getting started.
The bottom line remains: you can’t require what you won’t do. And in the AI era, admitting “I don’t know” might be the most credible thing a leader can say.
It’s December 2024. I’m at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, coaching speakers on how to communicate effectively with technical audiences. Meanwhile, 9,258 kilometers away in Munich, a room full of homeowners is debating whether my 7.6-kilogram solar panels will blow off my balcony in the wind. This story…
The weather forecast for this weekend doesn’t look too great (at least for where I live in), so why not visit some strange and fun places on the internet?
Here’s something weird I recently found: Wplace. The idea is simple, but powerful: Overlay pixels on top of a world map, then let anybody edit those pixels, one pixel at a time.
The result is fascinating: from simple logos and drawings, through meme imagery and icons to the most complex and artistic pixel drawings. Though the terms of service do forbid the use of bots, I can’t imagine some of the images having really been painted pixel by pixel. There’s a 1 pixel every 30 second throttling, probably to prevent misuse or bots, too.
Some of the stuff is quite breathtaking, some just crude or immature. Kinda like the whole internet.
It reminds me of of the Million Dollar Homepage from 2005, remember?
“To me, you’re not just Systems Engineers—you are Speaking Engineers. I’ve got plenty of engineers working on great products. However, I need you to speak to customers and earn their trust in our technology.” That was Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, talking to a room full of technical profes…
Just finishing this course by Seth Godin on Udemy, and it’s great!
Udemy: Thriving in an AI future
The best insights on AI don’t come from the technologists. They tend to be too deep inside the matter, often missing the human connection, the creativity angle, or the bigger picture.
And that’s exactly what you’ll get from this course.
Fun fact: Seth Godin used to work with SF authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, building interactive computer games and early digital media projects in the 80s. He says he’s basically preparing himself for the advent of AI for decades, so he has some good insights here.
Disclosure: I got access to the course for free as part of a different project Seth is working on (more on that, later). I do think the price of € 69,99 (or whatever it is in your local currency) is worth it.
Any opportunity to learn from people like Seth Godin is priceless. Don’t miss the final Q&A sections, they contain lost of nuggets of wisdom!
Update (2025-09-19): Changed the generic post picture to a screenshot of Seth Godin from his course.
Quite literally: this blog is now officially in autumn mode! 🍂
During our summer vacation, while watching over our dog Elvis, I spent some time doing recreational coding on the balcony of our vacation home in Sottomarina, Italy. The result is a seasonal bit of JavaScript/SVG animation for this blog’s header, which you can now enjoy on the main page, constantin.glez.de. But only during the autumn months, of course!
What started as a simple idea to add variety to my header turned into a 903-line journey of learning physics, mastering SVG patterns, and discovering just how much fun coding can be when there are no deadlines or requirements—just curiosity and Claude as my sparring partner. 🎯
Here’s what I learned along the way:
All I wanted was to press a button and hear SomaFM Groove Salad through my home stereo. 🎵
What I got instead was six weeks of diving into AV receiver telnet commands, Raspberry Pi power mysteries, and NFC webhook proxies. Sometimes I spent an entire week debugging my Home Assistant setup only to discover I’d been using the wrong IP address the whole time 🤦♂️.
But here’s the thing: the journey is the reward. Sure, I could have just lived with telling Alexa to turn on my AV receiver, connect to it over Bluetooth, then asking it to play what I want. But then I wouldn’t have learned how UPNP broadcasts get mangled by WiFi bridge modes, or that a 2.2W Raspberry Pi can teach you more about power supply stability than any electrical engineering textbook.
This is the story of how a simple goal—press button, get music—led me down some of the most beautifully complex rabbit holes I’ve explored in years. And why that complexity is exactly the point. 🐰
Working for my then employer’s Munich office in 2011, I felt it—that hollow sensation when your career becomes a treadmill. The acquisition of the company I originally joined had stripped away the technological beauty and purpose I’d thrived on for more than a decade. The rigid culture, the pure commercial focus, the loss of autonomy.
I wasn’t incompetent, broke, or irrelevant… I was just bored.
And boredom, I realized, was the first horseman of a dying career.
Jeremy Utley, who we met here, talking about working with AI vs. “using” AI, just posted another article titled Innovation Doesn’t Have to be Hard (I Just Watched AI Turn Torture Into Play), with some great use-cases for AI during innovation workshops.
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
Specialization is for insects.
— Robert A. Heinlein
When I read a recent article about Expert Generalists on Martin Fowler’s blog, I immediately changed my LinkedIn title. Finally, someone had named what I’d been doing for 27 years without realizing it!
My favorite search (or rather “answer”) engine is Perplexity, and my favorite way to interact with computers is the command-line, so why not combine the two?
Here’s how:
Great intro to the “why” and “how” of using AI in your everyday life by Stanford adjunct professor Jeremy Utley. His background is design, not tech, and thus, he has a very different, human-centric view on AI, which I find refreshing.
“How can we become a digital company?” The manufacturing executive looked genuinely worried. “We make physical products, but everyone says software is eating the world.” I’ve heard variations of this question hundreds of times over the past decade. Sometimes it’s about cloud computing, sometimes mob…
Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting Elvis, our Dachshund, onto this blog’s banner. The goal was to create a smooth animation where Elvis appears by rising from the bottom of the banner, then leans his paws over the border—adding some personality to the site while exploring modern web animation techniques.
What happened was that last weekend, my family and I played Exploding Kittens: Good vs. Evil, which we were recently gifted. What a fun game! A random idea struck me: why not ask Claude to put together a playlist for us?
Hi Claude, we‘re about to play a few rounds of Exploding Kittens (“Good vs. Ev…
What are office hours? Office hours have their roots in academia, where professors would publish certain hours at specific days of the week where students could simply come in and ask questions. It’s an easy way to meet without the back and forth of finding a date/time that works. Why office hours? …
Here’s a secret: after almost 13 years at Amazon Web Services, I still felt like most people around me were smarter and more capable than me. And now, as a blogger looking at other writers? That feeling hasn’t gone away. If this sounds familiar, you’re experiencing imposter syndrome—and you’re in ex…
Refactoring my banner into SVG was only the beginning: the next step was animation. I continued with the “AI as a teacher” model and asked Claude to explain to me concepts like IIFE, how the browser’s DOM processes SVG elements, which SVG properties are GPU-accelerated and other CSS performance conc…