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On fixing things
Jan 30 ⎯ Seneca pointed out that people tend to be reflexively stingy with their money, but almost comically wasteful with their time. There are at least two ways to take this. One is that Seneca thought he used his time better than you and I do, and maybe he did. Another interpretation is that everyday life, for most people, is an untapped gold mine. Things break all the time, and we get used to it. We accept a decreased quality of life when most things just require a little time investment to be fixed. This article is a short and sweet reminder to invest your time in fixing stuff. A message that resonates a lot with developers, which spend most of their time fighting brokenness.
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DBs vs sheets
Jan 30 ⎯ Yet another exploration of bridging the mother of all software (excel) with databases. I'm curious to see the UX, since there are definitely challenges to trying to square the circle. It is true that Postgres, with RLS, can get closer to an excel experience, since authorization is one of the biggest gaps to overcome.
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Ockham's razor is losing it's edge
Jan 29 ⎯ Very interesting study that explore what we've been preaching for a long time: nature is complex, and so ought to be the models that explain it. Medieval friar William of Ockham posited a famous idea: always pick the simplest explanation. Often referred to as the parsimony principle, “Ockham’s razor” has shaped scientific decisions for centuries. Humans are obsessed with simplicity. After all, there is beauty in compressing. But also, our brains are rather limited, so we overindex legible models over illegible ones. But with AI taking over science, this limitation may be gone.
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RSS Search
Jan 29 ⎯ Very interesting feed aggregator. You can search any term and it returns results from all the feeds they have indexed. The searches themselves are also RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to “topics”. Perhaps I should integrate this to fika to help people discover new feeds? Once I do tag and topic extraction, we could automate this to add a bit of entropy and kickstart the recommendation flywheel.
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Coding without planning
Jan 29 ⎯ Another example of plan to start vs plan to finish. Like writing, or playing music, there are different characteristics to a planned strategy to an improvised one. As one gets more experienced, intuition based approaches tens to have better outcomes than rational ones.
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Deepseek and the Jevons Paradox
Jan 28 ⎯ Nvidia is down 17%. Deepseek has released their latest R1 model which they claimed to be trained very cheaply. Half the internet is calling it a bubble burst, the other half are rushing to buy the dip. Who is correct? Well, that's not so easy. What would Charlie do? At this point, it's not about the fundamentals anymore. It's just to speculate about AI and the role of Nvidia. One thing is clear, though: efficiency gains in tech tend to increase consumption. Let's see if AI also follows the Jevons Paradox.
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IP query
Jan 28 ⎯ Interesting service to query anything about a given IP. I’ve had to implement this at every single company, mostly for marketing reasons. This service seems to be free, so it’s a good bookmark to have around.
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Building on top of ATProto
Jan 28 ⎯ An exploration about building a side-project app on top of ATProto. I’m saving this since at some point, I want to integrate fika with Bluesky. I enjoy a lot the “captain-log” kind of articles. It’s always interesting to see how people build and learn. As usual, it’s also comforting to see people sharing the same struggles: As always, the hardest part of this project, as with any project, was understanding the data model and the business logic, and parsing out those objects correctly. The second-hardest was aligning elements in CSS.
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Like Scratch, but textual!
Jan 28 ⎯ Very interesting project to teach programming to kids. The main difference with Scratch is that Hedy uses Python (yuck!) on a textual environment. To be able to reach kids around the world, they’ve open sourced a python-like language that is multi-lingual. There is of course the eternal debate to whether kids should learn to program or not, exacerbated by the advances in generative AI. But I still think it’s a valuable skill, the same as calculators didn’t deprecate mathematics. I would even go as far as to claim that it probably should displace some of the maths, since it’s clear by now, that the Newtonian way of describing the world through formulas is perhaps not the best one. Perhaps Wolfram’s point of view, that nature is perhaps better described through programs, is one worth exploring. I will definitely give it a try!
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Platform teams: the eternal debate
Jan 27 ⎯ As a CTO, one of the unsolved challenges is whether to have a platform team or not. This article explores the downside of building platform teams. I think the article is a little bit biased and presents only one way of implementing platform teams. I still believe that platform teams are a net-positive, but only when they use golden paths to achieve their goals.
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Web Monetization
Jan 27 ⎯ A web3 way of accepting payments on the internet. Looks pretty cool, and could be a good way to counter the SaaS models of medium and substack. As usual, though, the challenge would be for adoption to go mainstream.
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Doc Publication
Jan 27 ⎯ There is a revival of publications. Individuals join and curate and write content. And you, instead of letting an algorithm determine what you read, subscribe to those publications. In this case, the people of UX collective decide to own their own publication and monetize it with Web Monetization, a web3 way to accept micropayments. I hope fika allows people to create such beautiful publications.
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A list of long-form articles worth reading
Jan 27 ⎯ When I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. This was fueled by an intense reading habit: I would spend hours on the library looking for more Roal Dahl books, and later on, Tolkien and Ursula K. Le Guin. Nowadays I don't read as many books, and mostly non-fiction. I guess I’m more time deprived, and have a more utilitarian habit. Long form articles strike the right balance for me. They are longer and richer than a dopamine-inducing social media post, but I can still read them while in the toilet.
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The source of truth shouldn't be figma, but the code
Jan 25 ⎯ Nth attempt to solve the designer/developer problem. An open source tool for designers to work with react components. Figma has been trying to convince designers that they are the source of truth, therefore, a handover process is required. And it's the developer job to translate designs into code. But the reality is that developers are convinced of the opposite. Figma is the just theory, but truth is whatever you ship to customers. And that’s code. This is another case of Segal’s Law: A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure
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C02 consumption from your daily tech usage
Jan 24 ⎯ I love this kind of sites. It’s the deepest article I’ve seen on the topic of CO₂ emissions in tech, with interactive bits, graphs and calculators. It starts with this shocking calculation. A seemingly normal tech consumption is actually pretty costly in terms of CO₂ emissions. Last week, I streamed 20 hours of videos on Netflix, YouTube, and Canvas. I asked 50 questions to ChatGPT and made 532 Google searches. I sent 25 emails and 325 WhatsApp messages. From behind my screens, it did not feel like I was contributing to greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, the environmental impact of my online activity was real—it amounted to 1,447 grams of CO₂ equivalents[…] Over a year, this would add up to approximately 75 kilograms of CO₂ equivalents. To put that number in perspective, that is like: Driving 183 miles in a gas-powered car. Eating 6 servings of beef (25 grams of protein each). Charging a smartphone every day, until the year 2070.
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Clickless search and the internet of machines
Jan 23 ⎯ Interesting read about the repercussions of a “clickless search” world. We no longer use search engines to navigate through the web, but to get answers immediately. The author content ponders: The interesting question isn’t how to optimize for AI agents, but what kinds of human experiences are worth preserving in a world where machines do most of the talking.
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Iconic: An alternative to Lucide Icons
Jan 23 ⎯ They seem to be optimized for smaller sizes. Only 200 are free, the rest are pro…
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Show me your calendar!
Oct 24 ⎯ It’s Friday afternoon, and Jakub is at home preparing his third cup of coffee. He runs on caffeine because either the kids, or Pager-Duty, keep him up at night. He sprays the coffee beans with water since he saw it in a YouTube video, but he can’t tell the difference. “Moisture,” he thinks, “such a friendly word.” He checks the kitchen clock and realizes he is 1 minute late for his one-on-one meeting with Mike “The Fly”. Jakub is the director of Infrastructure at a large tech company in Illinois. Mike reports to him, and also happens to be a friend of his. “It’s not nepotism,” he always justifies. “Mike is solid, and he was the best candidate for that position.” They always start the one on one with some small talk. “How was your weekend?”, “And the kids?”, “Nice, send my regards to Angela.”. All very cordial, like when they were in college. But past the pleasantries, they both adopt their roles extremely seriously, like that Stanford prison experiment. And this week, Jakub has something important to discuss with Mike. Costs keep racking up, and Mike is not doing anything about it. “Look Mike, I know you are trying, and you are a good guy. Yeah, great guy. Very solid. But if you don’t put your shit together, I will have to let you go. And trust me, this is the last thing I want to do.” Jakub is originally from Poland and learned English by watching American TV. His way of speaking is very cinematic. He squints his eyes and talks with that whispery voice that no one uses in real life. “The costs keep being higher than expected, and management is not happy. My ass is on the line here.” Mike is not sure what to say. He rubs his hands nervously, and then he covers his face with them. The Fly. This is how he got the nickname, but no one ever told him, so he keeps doing it. “I am trying my best, Jakub. Really. I’m just swamped with meetings, you know? Keeping The Lights On and all that.” Jakub sighs. He will have to pull a Coaching Move on him. He hates doing this, but desperate times call for desperate measures. “It’s all-right Mike, I’m here to help. Just... Show me your calendar.” The air in the room is heavy. Mike is clearly tense and uncomfortable and hesitates for a moment before clicking the share screen button. “Can you see my screen?”. “Yes, I can. We always can. Why do we always ask?” A horrendous calendar shows on the screen. It’s a mess. Like an enraged Mondrian. “Jesus Maria!” Jakub yowls. That’s a common Polish way to express dismay, but they pronounce it like “MA-ree-ah”, not Maria. “This is a problem, Mike. This is a big problem. But we are going to fix it. We are going to fix it together.” Mike nods. He is ashamed. “I’m going to categorize all those meetings and see what we can do about it.” Jakub opens Google Sheets and starts typing stuff. “Can you see the problem?” “I can’t see anything, actually.” Mike interrupts him. “Oops, sorry. I’m sharing the wrong screen. Now… So, you know that your number one priority is to fix the costs. We agreed on this one month ago. And yet, you only have 13 hours a week for it. And most of it is divided into blocks of 30 minutes scattered here and there. You are not in control. The calendar is.” Mike looks down. “From next week onwards, you are going to block 5 hours every day, from 9am to 2pm. And you will tell everybody that you are not available during that time. Screw them. It’s your calendar, and if your calendar does not reflect your priorities, then they are not your priorities. Time is the most precious resource we have.” “Got it, Jakub. I will try. It makes a lot of sense when you put it this way… Now, just be honest with me. Is this some sort of Coaching Move?” “Sorry Mike, I have to leave you. I have to pick up the kids and I’m late already.” Fall came in, and the leaves turned yellow, orange, and brown. Mike The Fly successfully cut down the costs, and Jakub kept his job, but not for long, since Google poached him with a better offer. “That’s a hell of a logo. It will look good on my resume,” he thought. “And their offices are nice, too.” He brought in Mike and cashed $10.000 from a referral bonus. “He is solid,” he told the recruiters. “I’ve known him since college.” This time around, though, he would not report to him, which is better, since their friendship has weakened over the last year. Jakub started to drink more and more coffee, but he is not moisturizing the beans anymore: time is too precious. The job is more intense than ever, and his third kid is on the way. He is always stressed. Running late, running crazy. One day, they both met by the water cooler, “where serendipity happens,” as management would say. They started to do some small talk. All very cordial, like when they were in college. “How’s it going, Jakub?” “Pretty good, Mike,” he lies. “How about you?” “Much better, Jakub. Things are going great here at Google. Thanks for the referral, mate.” “You’re welcome, Mike. The bonus helped, but you know, I would do it anyway.” “I know... I know. Are you sure you are ok? You look tired.” “Yeah... you know, the kids.” “What about them?” “They are great. I love them above all else. But work is work, you know? I don’t find the way to balance it. I am trying to be a wonderful dad, but every day something else comes up. A conference, a meeting, a call.” He is mumbling, like he is trying to convince himself. Mike has never seen him like this. He starts rubbing his hands again, but this time he doesn’t cover his face. The Fly is gone; he is just The Mantis now. “This reminds me of something I read once,” Mike says. “The correct way to fill up a jar is to start with the rocks, then the pebbles, and you finish with the sand. If you do it the other way around, the rocks won’t fit. It looks like you know what’s important to you, but you are leaving it for the last.” Mike is not rubbing his hands anymore. He is smiling. They both know what comes next. “Jakub, why don’t you... Show Me Your Calendar?” The room goes dark and a lightning strikes across the room. A droplet falls from the water cooler, somewhere a bird takes off and flies away, and a leave falls from a tree. Jakub has been Counter Coached. Show me your calendar was one of the most interesting prompts I’ve been using as a CTO. Time management is one of the harder skills for managers to master and one of the most important ones. You can raise money, you can save it, you can invest it, and make it grow. But you can’t do any of that with time. Time just goes away, like water in a river. You either use it wisely, or waste it. In your one on ones, ask what the priorities were for the upcoming month. That already triggers the most interesting conversations. Top-down priorities are not always the same as bottom-up ones, and the truth often lies somewhere in the messy middle. Once you agree on the priorities, you can ask to see their calendar for the upcoming month. Things will get ugly: Business As Usual eats time like a black hole. People set up recurring meetings with good intentions, but when you let other people set your schedule, it’s not your schedule anymore. Ironically, at a personal level, I was failing at time management myself. It’s easier to solve someone else’s problems than your own, I guess. In my case, work was creeping up and taking over my calendar, despite telling myself that it was not my number one priority. This lead to neglecting health, friendships and hobbies, so I applied what I preached and contrasted my priorities with my calendar. I’m still trying to figure things out, but that’s for another story.
