You have headphones with noise cancellation. But what about the noise within your head? Here’s a great bunch of tips: 28 Ways to Find the Stillness You Need to Thrive

Weeknote 45/2019

Joining the IndieWeb

After hearing and ignoring the term many times over the years, I finally got the importance of the IndieWeb movement. Which information we find on the web and how others find the information we put on it should not depend on the goodwill of mega-corporations and algorithms. Huh, that sounds quite cyberpunk; maybe it was my recently rekindled interest in Shadowrun helped the coin to drop for me. But it was Tantek Çelic’s talk “Take Back Your Web” that pushed me over. I’ve already left Facebook a while ago and (obviously) revived my own blog. Even though I now wanted to integrate it with others using modern standards like webmention.io and microformats2, I felt I’d rather spend my time writing. That’s why I decided to save time and move my blog to the micro.blog platform. I used this opportunity to give my blog the simpler domain name “geewiz.dev”. Welcome to my new digs!

Writing workflow update

I’m now using Drafts not only for short notes but also for writing posts, email and other text. Most texts start as a quick brain dump of only a few keywords. When I get to write, I flesh them out more and more. When a text has matured enough, I copy it to its final destination such as a Jekyll git repository, the micro.blog web form or my email application. After a few finishing touches, I publish the content. Simple.

“My web team told me about your Drupalcon talk and I watched the YouTube recording yesterday. I just wanted to say that I really appreciated your talk, your honesty, humour, concrete advice, thank you.”

This made my day.

DHH tries Windows, goes back to Mac begrudgingly

I can relate to DHH trying to drop the Stockholm syndrome. Apple machines are a very mixed bag. But they’re still the best desktop experience I can find. I’m now pairing my iMac and iPad with a Linux dev server and get both best worlds (i.e. desktop pleasure and open source power).

Weeknote 44/2019

I haven’t written any weeknotes lately, so let’s catch up with things.

In my old office box, I found the old HP 28S calculator that I bought in 1991 and that converted me to RPN for life. It still works, despite one of the batteries I stupidly left in having leaked a bit. I wish I had more math to do at work because I’d love to use the this nice piece of hardware some more again.

The upgrade of my iPad Pro to iPadOS 13 got stuck and none of the recommended solutions worked for me. In the end, I resorted to restarting it in Recovery Mode and that got things rolling again.

I built my first two custom mechanical keyboards. That’s going to be a separate post.

At work, we’ve been using Notion as our knowledge base for a few months. However, it wasn’t until watching a recent Notion Office Hours video that I realised how powerful this platform can be. The article on the PARA method mentioned in the video inspired me to put a lot more information into Notion than just text content.

An email recently informed me that “You’ve been on Drupal.org since 10/10/2008”. Wow, it’s been a while! And I still enjoy being a member of the Drupal community.

I’ve downloaded all the videos of RailsConf 2019 to my Plex server so I can watch them at the office or, thanks to Plex Sync, anywhere I have my iPad with me. Right at the top of my list was “Programming Empathy: Emotional State Machines” by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Reflexively, I was about to skip that one because I remembered that listening to her on podcasts had made me feel uncomfortable. But I decided to challenge this reaction and I’m glad that I did. I learned a lot about empathy from her talk and recommend watching it.

Weeknote 38/2019

At the end of last week, I was feeling pretty exhausted. That’s why I’m publishing this weeknote late on the following Monday. I have to have high expectations of myself, otherwise I’ll easily fall into slacking off and looking at keyboard porn all day. But I have to stop put too much pressure on myself. That’s the best recipe for burnout because I’m setting myself up for frustration despite of all the stuff I actually get done.

Speaking of keyboards, I’m still not sure if it’s self-improvement or self-sabotage, but on top of the previous changes to my keyboard layout, I’ve now adopted also the other important improvement of the HHKB layout by swapping the Backspace and Backslash keys using Karabiner Elements; now it’s much easier for me to reach Backspace with my right pinky. I was even about to buy an actual HHKB, but faced with its hefty price, I’ve decided instead to build myself two custom keyboards (one with a plastic case for travelling, one with a heavy aluminium case for my desk) that sport the “split backspace” (Tilde and Backslash) at the top right, with Backspace below, and a “split right Shift” with a small Fn key at the right edge. Until then, I’ll retrain my muscle memory with a software-defined layout. So, in short, I’m obsessing over mechanical keyboards as a way to combat both RSI and Alzheimers (that’s what I tell myself anyway). You can find my Karabiner rulesets in my dotfiles repository, by the way.

After returning from my holidays on Ibiza, I had lost all interest in playing World of Warcraft. And it still hasn’t returned. The parts of the game that I enjoy the most require group play, and good groups are hard to come by. Especially for me with my very narrow window of disposable leisure time. And people focusing on WoW Classic didn’t help my frustration either. Last month, I canceled my WoW subscription (it’ll still run for a few months) and took the opportunity to buy the three Shadowrun RPGs on Steam when they were offered as a Humble Bundle. Being able to play at my own pace is neat but I admit that I haven’t played SR much either.

Somehow, I’m finding live coding much more appealing than playing any games. In one of my streams this week, I did for the first time answer a question that someone had posted to my Discord server. That was fun and I’d like to make this kind of live-coaching a regular thing. If my brain wasn’t more or less fried come dinner time, I’d even do a few evening sessions on top of my regular slots on Tuesday and Friday morning. My next goal in this space will be to build myself an efficient toolchain that lets me churn out screencasts that aren’t live but instead more polished.

Embracing the dystopian future

1984 is just a bit late.

Weeknote 36/2019

Weeknotes could be an easy way to get back into writing more regularly. Friday will now be weeknote day.

• Karabiner-Elements is an amazing tool for remapping a Mac’s keyboard. It not only provides me with a more useful keyboard layout, it now also forces me out of bad habits. Among other things, it turns the useless Caps Lock key into an easier to reach Esc (or Ctrl if held with another key). My right Command key has been promoted to Hyper (Ctrl+Shift+Option+Command) for a whole new layer of hotkey definitions. And as of today, the left half of my alphanumeric block doesn’t work with the left Shift key anymore.
• Speaking of keyboards: If you’re looking for me, I’m down the custom mechanical keyboards rathole. This morning, I swapped the springs and lubed the keys of the Cherry MX80-11900 I got cheaply from Ebay. Now I can finally type on it for longer than 5 minutes. Lots of soldering and waiting for group buys in my future.
• This week (geez, that T took me three attempts), I finally got to do my personal retreat for this year. For two days, I booked myself into a hotel, disabled most notifications and roamed the Mount Usher Gardens thinking about the really important stuff. I’m very happy with the results.
• Doing my live coding late in the day to reach more viewers was a stupid idea. The quality of the little code I was able to produce recently (when my weary brain wasn’t blanking completely) is embarassing. From next week on, I’ll be streaming right after my morning coffee.

Have a great weekend!

Keeping the old gears grinding

Video games good for building focus create environments that are fast-paced, interactive, adaptive and have complex reward and gaming structures. Like a brain playground.

So at my age it’s basically mandatory to keep playing WoW!

Stephen Wolfram's productivity systems

I’m amazed, especially by the amount of things you can do with Wolfram Notebooks.

How to automate posting to Jekyll from iOS

I am so stealing this clever workflow using the Shortcuts and Working Copy apps.

Star Trek TNG intro, the missing lyrics

Wil Wheaton:

When we worked on Next Generation, Brent Spiner and I would sit at our consoles on the bridge, and make up lyrics to our show’s theme song. I vaguely recall coming up with some pretty funny and clever stuff, but nothing that held together as perfectly as this

Expect me to sing along from now on.

Live coding on Twitch

After migrating my blog from WordPress to Jekyll (which was long overdue), I’m going to pick up writing again. This first new post is easy, because I’ve already written it for my company blog. It’s about my live coding stream on Twitch that I’ve been doing for a while now. It’s called “Full Stack Live”, a fitting name (I think) for a stream that covers all kinds of DevOps topics from Rails coding to operating Kubernetes (coming soon!).

If you’re interested in why I’m taking my daily work to the digital stage, you can read all about it in my article “Turning ‘Working Out Loud’ to 11: Live coding on Twitch”.

So, if you’re interested in DevOps topics and/or would like to watch me struggle and (sometimes) succeed, hop on over on Twitch and follow my channel! When I’m back from my holidays in late July, I’m going to be live coding again every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

Assembling the plane on the way down

Managing people is an ability that requires practice and learning, just as any other. As the German proverb goes, "No master ever just fell from the sky."

Regardless of how much you've thought about the topic, how much you've read about it or even taken courses, it's a fact that no amount of theory can compensate a lack of management practice. As Jason Fried says in "On being a bad manager":

"Sure, you’ve listened to music for decades. But your first day on guitar sucks. Just like you may have watched people be managed — and you were likely managed yourself. That doesn’t prepare you to pick up the management instrument and strum a beautiful melody."

People are messy. That's why leading people is messy, too.

The problem with getting better at management is that there's no --dry-run option. It's like learning the guitar on stage. You'll get better over time but it comes with screwing things up in public, getting critical (or even devastating) feedback, and leaving the place feeling ashamed for not meeting your own expectations.

Getting better as a manager is like assembling the plane after you've already jumped off the cliff. You might land as a master. Or crash spectacularly.

There are people who are willing and able to deal with this kind of challenge. They're the right candidates for switching from being an individual contributor to a management position. For all the others (probably the majority), we'll have to provide other avenues for growth.

Friendly, stretchy, prescient

Ms. Marvel is awesome.

I say we should reach higher

In "Who can blame Melania for resisting her Easter egg role?", the Irish Times suggests using the vacant East Wing of the White House to install a First Shrink. I suggest launching a Center for Megalomaniac Studies. He did promise lots of new jobs, didn't he?

Computer science to be Leaving Cert option

The Irish Times reports that computer science gets an upgrade in secondary education. That's very good news.

Simon Sinek on the game of empathy

I have a man crush on Simon Sinek. I consider his book "Start with Why" essential reading for every entrepreneur and leader. I also did his Why Course and found out amazing things about what drives me.

He's even better in person. Go watch his talk "Understanding the Game We're Playing" at Creative Mornings and get some inspiration to practice empathy:

Here's the follow-up Q&A, too:

Keyboard One

Marco Arment:

“What I hadn’t considered was that even though I had common tasks that could fit within the MacBook’s limited specs — email, writing, chat — all of them required a lot of typing. Oops.”

That’s one of the reasons why I decided to go for a Macbook Pro 13" as replacement of my old MacBook Air 11", despite of the weight. All my work has to do with typing, be it in a browser, a terminal or even in Word.

These podcast thingies seem to be all the rage

In recent weeks, I've seen articles about how podcasting is the new radio popping up everywhere. What has happened? It’s been years since I’ve unsubscribed from Adam Curry’s Daily Source Code after years of listening to it. Over time, I’ve spent my children's college fund on buying every new podcatching app I could get my hands on. Has podcasting really been that obscure that mainstream publications now regard it as a new sensation? 

Mindful breaks

Supported by the little BreakTime app, I’ve been breaking up my work into chunks for a long time now. I’ve started with the common Pomodoro intervals of 25 minutes of work followed by a 5 minute break.

Recently, I’ve switched to a 50/15 rhythm. This gives me longer time to focus on what I’m doing and I get more options for what to do during my breaks. For example, I can now move around the house a bit (sitting kills, as we know), make myself some tea and chat with my family.

Today, I’ve started to do short mindfulness exercises during my breaks, too. I got the idea while testing the Calm.com iPhone app. When I meditate in the morning, I use a wooden meditation bench on the living room floow. But while listening to the “7 steps of Calm” intro sessions, I realised that if a chair is okay, why not a desk chair, too?

During my 15 minute breaks, I can now do a short mindfulness exercise to regain my focus and still have time to lift my ass around the house.

A Simple Place to Live

“I can be at home anywhere because feeling content and safe and loved has nothing to do with the stuff that surrounds me.”

What Courtney Carver describes as “A Simple Place to Live” resonates quite a bit with me.

The Ireland of the land and the people

“Having seen quite a bit of the country in the past three years, we agree with those who say you don’t have to leave this island to know Ireland boasts one of the world’s most stunning ensembles of landscapes. And all of it decorated in an eye-soothing colour that is the Irish green.”

”But what really makes you feel you will never leave Ireland is the Irish people. In the course of our three years here we had numerous visitors who took trips throughout the country. All returned with very fond memories of the Irish they had met. And they had met many!”

It's nice to see two of the main reasons why I moved to Ireland shared by Eckhard Lübkemeier, departing German ambassador to Ireland. Read his full farewell message in the Irish Times.

It's Movember!

Up until this year, I’ve never paid much attention to the Movember movement. People growing facial hair in a way that should have been banned since the 80s, what’s that all about? But this year, it dawned on me that I really should look into the issue the Movember movement tries to shed more light on: Men are getting cancer. And with cancer victims in both our families, that topic is far from irrelevant to me.

When I saw a friend’s Facebook post about him taking part in Movember, I spontaneously decided that I’ll join the fun, grow a mustache and finally learn about the health issues I may need to face as I grow older.

Speaking of face, here’s my progress so far:

What do you think? Leave me a comment below!

It looks like fall puts me in a spontaneous mood because, a week ago, I also decided on a whim to participate in the Dublin Mo Run this Saturday. In that context, it’s important to know that I stopped running in November last year due to tendonitis in both of my legs and that I haven’t done a round since then. I registered myself for the Mo Run regardless and did two test runs this week to see how I do. Surprisingly, I managed to run the 5k without major problems. It must be the two children that keep me on my feet day and night. ;-) And that I’ve lost 10kg since June probably also helped a bit.

So, the geewiz family will head out to Dublin early morning tomorrow to see a lot of people carrying furry animals on their upper lip across Phoenix Park. My start number will be 26.

May I ask you, my dear reader, for a favor? Support Movember by making a donation. In Ireland, prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in men; each year 1 in 8 men is diagnosed with prostate cancer. Movember is a fun way to lower these numbers. Simply go to my Mo Bro page and help fight a terrible disease!

I believe in working remotely, too.

We've now been living at our new house in Bray for almost two months now and we're happily settling in. The move to Ireland has had almost no impact on my work because I've built freistil IT as a virtual company from the get-go. It really doesn't matter where our team members do their work; it only matters that they do a great job.

Being able to freely move to another place is only one of the advantages we have as a distributed team. In his post on the Stack Exchange blog, David Fullerton lists several more reasons “Why We (Still) Believe in Working Remotely”:

• It lets you hire good people who can’t move. Maybe they've just bought a house or they need to take care of a family member. Not being able to hire people who've made a commitment doesn't make any sense to me.
• You don’t lose people to silly things like their significant other going to medical school. Or like fulfilling their wish of moving to another country…
• When done right, it makes people extremely productive. We've built freistilbox, our platform for Managed Drupal Hosting and Managed WordPress Hosting with a team of three doing everything from IT architecture to payment processing and accounting. The flexibility of our work environment helped us not getting burnt out despite many challenges.
• It makes you focus on more than butts in chairs. Big companies like Yahoo! and HP recently called their remote workers back into offices with the explanation that this will make their teams more effective. I think that's nonsense. “Going into office” doesn't equal good work and “counting butts in chairs” doesn't equal good management.

David goes on with giving some insight into their learnings and how they collaborate. I highly recommend reading the whole post.

Here are a few more reasons why we, too, think that the benefits of working remotely outweigh its disadvantages:

• It makes expenses more effective. Instead of paying for more and more office space, we rather put money into the tools that make us more flexible and productive (powerful laptops, mobile internet access, collaboration software, coffee machines).
• It makes teamwork multi-threaded. It's like parallel processes in an operating system: Once you have the “inter-process communication”, i.e. collaboration tools and processes, in place, each team member can work independently without relying on everyone being readily available at the opposite desk.
• It makes choosing the right things easier. My family is the most important thing in my life. Back when I was working in an office, I could not go home just to babysit for half an hour while my precious had a haircut. Today, a haircut can be an opportunity for both of us to take a break from our usual responsibilities.

I'm the first one to admit that running a distributed team has its challenges. And there are ways to master them. If you'd like to know more, please leave your question in the comments!

Want to make more awesome from whereever you're the most happy? Join our team!