Jens Oliver Meiert

Misc (2)

On Ageism

One may argue that the big “-isms” go back to speciesism, the idea that one was “better” than other living beings, or that others were inferior. With that idea warranting a post by itself, there are two things that make ageism particularly stupid.

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Highlights From “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” (Max Weber)

“The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development: the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.”

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2022

Release of my next book, a new apartment in downtown Hamburg, good news from the football club, a political adjustment, some travels, and preparation for a professional change—some of my highlights in 2022.

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Website Optimization Measures, Part XVII

Encoding declarations. Conditionals. Ahrefs. ErrorDocument directives. Mastodon links. Mastodon citizenship. Bitbucket. Eleventy. Action.

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The Reverse A-Hole Rule of Social Media

A delayed note about that point at which our defense against disagreeable viewpoints and people becomes an offense.

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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.

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Vegan Web Developers

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

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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.

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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.

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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 that, too. And you may wonder, how would AI depict frontend developers?

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“The One With the Biggest Hammer Wins”

On a game we could stop playing.

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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.

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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.

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2021

Professional and personal highlights and data.

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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.

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CS:GO on macOS, an Amateur Setup

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

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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.

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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.

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2020

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

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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.

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A Day Is a Day

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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Highlights From “An Introduction to Psychology” (Wilhelm Wundt)

“There cannot be the least contradiction in the idea that physical and psychical phenomena follow different laws, as long as these laws are not irreconcilable with the actual unity of the psycho-physical individual.”

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Round Table

I was late to discover Round Table, but joining this fine service association was one of the greatest decisions and experiences I’ve made in my life. Here’s my story co-founding and accompanying a new table, RT 233 Alster-Milchstraße, for almost four years.

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2019

Another year, another retrospective. Factoids and data on life and work.

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On Codes of Conduct

On the idea, the wish, the vision of us treating each other well.

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Sources 2019

In 2014, for idealistic transparency and enthusiastic link love, I’ve shared the feed sources I was following at the time. I’m still a huge believer in and user of feeds. As I also still like to be transparent I thought to share an update.

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3 Reasons Against Ad Blockers

Ad blockers are popular. Yet, they’re also a problem. They’re a problem that can be broken into three sub-problems, sub-problems that speak not only against the use of ad blockers but argue against their existence.

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Cover: 199 Love Haiku.

199 Love Haiku (the Book)

In 2016, I wrote 1,000 short poems, haiku-style. I wrote those poems to challenge myself as a writer. I launched a website for the haiku and I shared the story. Today, I’ve published the 199 haiku that a few friends and I liked the most as a book.

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What Happened on Google+, the Philosophy Archives

Google+ is shutting down, pulling everything with it. I’ve used Google+. And although I’ve changed and would put a few things differently now, I decided to archive a few of the somewhat philosophical Google+ posts.

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2018

A retrospective.

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Survival of the Primitive

Is ours a highly evolved culture?

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Why Being a Digital Nomad Sucks (to Me)

For countless years has it been a thing to romanticize the lifestyle of digital and global nomads, of people who live and work remotely. I believe there’s also much to question.

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Highlights From “Advice to Young Men” (William Cobbett)

“The first thing to be required of a man is, that he understand well his own calling, or profession; and, be you in what state of life you may, to acquire this knowledge ought to be your first and greatest care.”

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On Loyalty

We should be protective of our greatest possession—our values.

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Oh WTF My Tone, or: On Germans Speaking English

Anecdote. When I was working at Google, shortly after I had made one of my first bigger contributions, I experienced one of my more memorable performance reviews. You’ll never guess what happened next.

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Highlights From “The Elements of Style” (William Strunk Jr.)

“Consciously or unconsciously, the reader is dissatisfied with being told only what is not; he wishes to be told what is.”

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On Meeting and Leaving People

Humans are social. Cooperation got us where we are. There are several ways to get to know new people, and, in relationships, to leave them. A few thoughts.

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On Writing 1,000 Poems

A story of venturing into an entirely different genre.

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Privacy Experiments: How to Auto-Generate Random Web Traffic

I believe that privacy, which has never been about “hiding something,” is a fundamental civil right, one that is but must not be infringed on; so I once more played with randomizing personal web traffic.

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What Happens When You Email the Companies That Are Responsible for 71% of All Greenhouse Gas Emissions

A few months ago I ran into an article referring to data from the Carbon Disclosure Project. I realized that the data may have been inaccurate and incomplete but also that it presented an avenue for us to actually do, a little.

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What Happens When You Email Each of the 1,380 Members of the German and European Parliaments

Over the last couple of months I have emailed, each individually, all the 631 members of the (departing) German Bundestag as well as 749 members of the European Parliament (I was short two MEPs).

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Why It Would Be Bad if Jesus Was Here

Arguing is something we have to learn. I observed this particularly in recent years when I started studying philosophy and went through courses for logic and argumentation theory. These courses…

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Living Websites, Living Books

To me, websites are living objects. They require regular care and maintenance. Such care starts with monitoring, from uptime control to visual site tests, demands technical quality control, and ends with content checks…

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Highlights From Martin’s “The Behavior of Crowds”

“When most of our neighbors are motivated by certain ideas, those ideas become part of the social environment to which we must adjust ourselves. In this sense they are ‘real,’ however ‘crazy.’”

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Why I’m Suspending Interviews With U.S. Companies

Over the last few quarters I was in conversations to move back to the United States. Over the last few weeks I noticed that that would feel like endorsing U.S. policy, and contradict my principles and values.

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