10 Quick Tips for a Great Mastodon Experience

Mastodon is a great alternative to Twitter, feeling refreshingly healthy. Here are 10 things that can help you get off to a great start—from finding a suitable server and interesting people to follow, to useful tooling and mindsets.

Post from November 8, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

Vegan Web Developers

If you’re a vegan and a web developer, why not join us on a humble list of vegan web developers?

Post from October 24, 2022, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

A Short Story of the Google Error Page

Why is the Google error page the way it is? Why is it so plain? What drove development and design decisions? Anecdotes and notes from the time when the page was built.

Post from October 6, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

11 Tips to Read More and Read Faster (After Reading 791 Books in 9 Years)

Are you content with your reading? Here’s a collection of tried and tested ideas to help you read more—from switching to ebooks to reading everywhere to establishing routines to embracing short books to varying your reading speed.

Post from August 17, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

The Machine-Illustrated Life of a Frontend Developer

You may know DALL·E, what you can do with it, what others do with it, and… be intrigued by it, too. And you may wonder, how would AI depict frontend developers?

Post from June 20, 2022, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

“The One with the Biggest Hammer Wins”

On a game we could stop playing.

Post from May 24, 2022, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

4 Books to Become a Greater Person

We may be quite fine as we are, but—we can probably still cultivate our character, our values, our conduct. Summoning Character, Advice to Young Men and Young Women, Profiles in Courage, and The Continuum Concept for inspiration.

Post from April 21, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

4 Books to Become More Efficient and Effective

The start of a four-post mini-series about some of my favorite books, here featuring The One Thing, Getting More, Getting Things Done, and The Intelligent Investor.

Post from April 19, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

Reduce the Pressure on Young and Inexperienced Developers

Lower the expectations on young and inexperienced developers, and raise the expectations on their mentoring and coaching: on running gags, unrealistic expectations, and healthier hiring.

Post from January 6, 2022, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

2021

Professional and personal highlights and data.

Post from January 1, 2022, filed under Everything Else.

Reasons to Listen to Whom You Don’t Agree With

Our culture has become one of canceling, of reacting to what we disagree with and whom we dislike by ignoring, unfollowing, blocking, banning, ostracizing. Camouflaged as non-violent protest, it can well be passive-aggressive intolerance of views and people.

Post from June 8, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

Thoughts for the Aging Web Developer

There may be a time when you’ll feel “too old” for web development. When you begin to feel that, here are a few thoughts. They might not be all you need but—maybe they are of use.

Post from May 31, 2021, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

CS:GO on macOS, an Amateur Setup

After a 20-year break, a collection of settings and thoughts on Counter-Strike.

Post from May 25, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

Engineering Management ×12

Ideas and principles for managing engineering teams: From “googliness” and “competence, caring, conviction” to systems and processes to communication and delegation to team focus and health to trust and humility.

Post from May 11, 2021, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

The Choice to F Up

On the things we are doing and not doing, how these things are not and cannot be accidents, and how it all revolves around choice.

Post from March 6, 2021, filed under Philosophy and Everything Else.

5 Tips for Your Next Promotion or Salary Raise

How do you approach promotions and salary raises? Are these tied to a cyclical event or do they depend on your initiative? Do you invest into building your case, or do you wing it? Here are a few ideas on what can improve your position and chances.

Post from February 3, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

The Internet Shedding a Free-Rider Problem

With more and more software and regulation limiting the data that we pay with for contents and services, we are, in a way, requiring these contents and services to be made truly free. This doesn’t appear sustainable, and the Web is likely to change.

Post from January 28, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

2020

2020 has been a strange year, a year of challenges, but overall a—good year. Personal notes, professional highlights, a few numbers.

Post from January 1, 2021, filed under Everything Else.

People Care

It seems easy these days to lose faith in people. We’re destroying the planet, elect the least competent and least humane of our peers for presidents, kill our own people when we don’t kill people in other countries, etc.—and yet we all care.

Post from October 22, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

A Day Is a Day

On a personal preference for Inbox 0, and doing, delegating, and deferring.

Post from October 11, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

Love

Love is the essence, love is the emotion. Yet it’s striking how we talk about love, as if there was just one type of love. Aldous Huxley comes to mind, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Post from September 13, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

Caring About Comments

Maybe you’re like me, and comments have begun to mildly scare you. Maybe you’re skeptical about popular discussion culture, too. Maybe you can relate because you, too, have found yourself write something reasonable you care about and a shitstorm broke out. And yet you and I love feedback.

Post from July 2, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

On Disclosing Our Salaries

For a year now I’ve been toying with the idea of publicly disclosing my salary, as well as my financial assets. Not because of me, but because I’ve come to believe that this step, if taken by others, too, would be a step towards more transparency.

Post from June 18, 2020, filed under Everything Else.

5 Tips to Get Your Dev Blog Running

If you know what you can deliver, if you keep at it, if you make it easy for your peers, if you talk about the effort, and if you measure and improve and employ a process, you’re likely to do well: thoughts on technical outreach.

Post from May 6, 2020, filed under Web Development and Everything Else.

Highlights from “The Crowd” (Gustave Le Bon)

“Crowds are only cognisant of simple and extreme sentiments; the opinions, ideas, and beliefs suggested to them are accepted or rejected as a whole, and considered as absolute truths or as not less absolute errors.”

Post from March 11, 2020, filed under Everything Else.