I'm adding an emoji to all youtube links now so I can mix articles and videos into one category. It's a simple heuristic but should work most of the time. CSS, if you're curious:

a[href*="youtube"]::before {
  content: "🎦";
  margin-right: 0.25em;
}

The only thing I'm unsure about is the icon I should use. Some alternatives: 🎦 🎞️ 🍿 📺 🎬 🎥 ▶ 🖥️. If you have any feedback, then let me know :)

Books I'm reading #

• Cloud Native Go: Building Reliable Services in Unreliable Environments by Matthew A. Titmus. I also watch a lot on YouTube about Golang, but I won't link here to keep this shorter.

• Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven C. Hayes, Spencer Smith.

Books I've read #

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. I bought an audiobook long ago and decided to listen to it when I ran out of podcasts. But I don't recommend it. There is only one story/chapter that I like, and many chapters are not worth reading at all. I finished it, but it isn't a good book.

• Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. I'm giving up on this book somewhere in the middle. While I'm still interested in getting a little better at algorithms, I don't get why practicing "puzzles" would be helpful for anyone. At this point, it's not a good use of my time to practice coding puzzles to learn about actual algorithms or to improve my problem-solving skills.

Elsewhere on the Web #

Programming #

• "Stop Writing Dead Programs" by Jack Rusher (Strange Loop 2022). Excellent talk.

• "People Get Microservices Wrong All The Time!" | Dave, Simon Brown & Hannes Lowette On Microservices.

• Don’t Do E2E Testing!

• The Absolute Best Intro to Monads For Software Engineers

• Building Observability for 99% Developers. A good view of how bad microservices work for most developers, teams, and companies.

• 3 tribes of programming. I recommend this one, as I started seeing those everywhere now:

  You are a poet and a mathematician. Programming is your poetry
  You are a hacker. You make hardware dance to your tune
  You are a maker. You build things for people to use

• Great talk in Polish about annotations in Java. JDD 2017: O annotacjach – czas powstrzymać demony (Jarek Ratajski). I'm not a fan of annotations in JavaScript or TypeScript, and this talk is a little bit about why you should avoid them.

Tech #

• Dysfunctional Systems: Digital Products and Addiction - John Voss. Worth watching. Good criticism of habit-forming products and the metrics we use at work.
• Startup, Scale Up, Screw Up - Jurgen Appelo. Not everything is a pipeline.
• TECHNICAL STORIES DON'T WORK
• Do things, tell people.

Parenting #

• Fitness & Productivity for Parents - Why Most YouTube Doesn't Get It!. If you're a parent, then this is a must-watch.
• Are You A Short-Tempered Dad? Here's How To Learn To Stay In Control

Work #

• People don't work as much as you think. Connects well with science about work and articles I linked to in the last couple of months. The deep work limit is 2 hours for most people. You can sit in the office more, but you can do only lower-effort work like attending meetings or answering emails.

• Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs. We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives. This one made me think as well. Especially "What do you like to do?" question.

• Take a Break You Idiot

• Laziness Does Not Exist. But unseen barriers do

• DR PHIL'S QUIET QUITTING DISASTER. This one is mostly for entertainment.

• The Truth about Goals, Habits, and Results in Business and Life.

• I'm not a fan of OKRs and the general goal-setting approach most businesses have and recently got reminded of a good way of explaining it to people:

  "If successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers."

  • James Clear

You may see a shorter version: Winners and Losers have the same goals.
While I can see small value in setting goals, many people and businesses are wasting more time setting and checking them than they are worth.

• What are your Salary Expectations? | Best Answer (from former CEO)

Other #

• 5 steps to SKETCH LIKE A PRO + my breakthrough moment
• Gaming vs. Office Chairs: What I Learned After Selling 1000's. TLDR; Buy an office chair.
• Groundbreaking Research in Artificial Photosynthesis - Doing What Nature Couldn't
• How To Stop Buying Books And Start Reading - Overcoming Tsundoku. I may have become a Tsunduku, but it has come with benefits The value of owning more books than you can read. Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my tsundoku..

Music #

• Polyphia - Ego Death feat. Steve Vai (Official Music Video)
• SLIPKNOT ON ACOUSTIC GUITAR (Before I Forget) - Luca Stricagnoli

Personal Thoughts #

One of my goals for the month was to go through the backlog of articles and videos I accumulated in the Pocket app. At the beginning of the month, I had 313 items. Now I'm down to 43. I've made it my priority to read/watch, or drop things whenever I had some time. What's left is longer or needs more time to digest, but I'm pretty happy with what I did.

My goal of losing weight failed miserably. It is really easier to fast than to limit calories all the time every day for me. I'm probably missing a good system here. So far, I'm more miserable when I'm trying to limit calories or diet than when I fast, so maybe I can fast each month and just accept the fact? I'm not sure if that's a good or bad idea just yet.

I've tried to set a Work in Progress limit for myself to 3, and that was mostly what I did. Even when I exceeded it, it was more of putting one of the books on hold rather than switching between everything all the time. I was feeling a lot less overwhelmed by my work as well.

You can subscribe to my monthly posts at kula.blog/newsletter

Feedback or Comments?

← Home

Want to learn more?

Sign up to get a digest of my articles and interesting links via email every month.