Archive

This month I...

• Decided to change the format of the newsletter, I wasn't sending the weekly newsletter as regularly as before, so I'll try sending it monthly, hopefully with more useful information.
• Started working on my own emacs config without doom for fun, it's still not even close to ready, but I'm taking my time and learning it on my way.
• Bought and played a lot of Cyberpunk 2077, it has some flaws, but runs pretty well on my PC.
• Did a retrospective of 2020 using the template from Pat Kua and I enjoyed it, it does take some time, but I think it's useful to reflect and set some goals ahead.
• Set up a Surface Go 2 with Linux with some success (I need to re-install it because it was just a test and because I didn't format the partition by mistake).

Great URLs

• Some tips on how to use the batteries that emacs comes with to their full potential without plugins, and here's more.
• An [elisp cheatsheet]
• The Microsub protocol, a very interesting protocol for building a reader of articles from the web, I am still learning about this protocol, but it looks very interesting to consolidate my Instapaper + RSS reader into one single open source way of handling things to read later.
• The sudo font looks like a really cool font for coding, it has infinite ligatures which is pretty cool, but I don't think I'll be switching to it because I'm not used to the shape of the letters being too tall and I like having some cursive, still, pretty cool, I'm using it for my custom emacs config.
• The book clean architectures in Python has a new edition, it's a book you can read on that site for free, from Leonardo Giordani, who is one of the people I always love seeing in Python conferences, because he's one of the few that talk about this subject in the Python community. A must read for Python devs who care about architecture/big picture code.

These past weeks I…

• Joined a new company and that’s my excuse for not sending out the newsletter, which isn’t really a great excuse because I don’t work on Sundays. Anyway…
• The new company has been great, I’ve been learning a lot and not doing much coding, yet…But so far I’m enjoying it :).

This week I...

• Enjoyed my last week before starting work on my new company, I'm excited! And since I'm sending this newsletter late, I can tell you that the on-boarding is going well :).
• Managed to contribute a bit to the Arch community in the form of editing the fabulous wiki, which was a pleasant experience, takes a bit to get used to how to write in that wierd markup language, but it's fine once you get the hang of it. Being on IRC is helpful.
• Bought a Withings watch (scanwatch) and so far so good, I like it, but I don't like the fact that I have to have location turned on to sync it, I'm trying to do it only every once in a while.
• Bought my old work laptop from my previous company and after paying for it, covered it in sticker (obviously), if you're curious, it's a Thinkpad X280.
• Restarted learning/playing chess, we'll see how long this new hobby lasts, I've focused a bit on it in the past, but it never stuck. After watching the Queen's Gambit on Netflix, I got interested in Chess again.
• Uninstalled Instagram again so I can focus on my new job (and chess), uninstalling Instagram from time to time has been the best to give me back some time.

Cool URLs

• How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner, really interesting article, and everyone should read it, from any skill level. It's about how it's easy to get stuck in a stage of learning where you're not growing your knowledge productively.
• Dreyfus model of skill acquisition (wikipedia), related to the article above.

This week I...

• Continued on my mini sabbatical from last week. I forgot to send out the newsletter, but last week was my last week on my current company (previous :)). This week I was still relaxing and the next week, I will continue to.
• I was thinking about making my own conference for read the docs, but I procrastinated on it, I watched only 4 talks so far.
• I attended Next.js conf, which was lovely, JS Frameworks are not my forte, but it was good to see some new technology that I'm not used to, to broaden my knowledge.
• I've been playing a lot of Hades, and I bought my partner as a Xmas gift, the sims 4 (which I'll also be playing ;)).
• I started reviewing yet another book, more by the end of the year.
• Improved my blog a little bit on SEO.
• Installed SXMO on my pinephone and it's actually the best UI for the pinephone that I've tried yet, mainly because it's faster than others. The keyboard is wonky, but at least it's fast and shows up whenever I want. The phone is not yet ready to be a daily driver tho.

Sound of the week

I haven't really listened to music, but I've been listening to podcasts a lot, mainly:

This week I...

• Worked on my last full week at my current job, it was emotional in many aspects, I'm having some mixed feelings about leaving, I'm going to be missing a lot of people, but at the same time, I'm going to have a mini sabbatical which is something that I've dreamt for a while, next Monday is my last day at work, and then I will start my mini sabbatical. The plan is to do my own private conference and then I'll check my big todo list for more things to do, if you have any advice, reply to this email.
• Played the demo for Pikmin 3, and loved it! Looking forward to having the full game.
• I attended the Arch linux conference, which was lovely, I only missed two talks but I will be soon watching them, they were all very good, and while there wasn't as much community feeling as in previous remote conferences (at least on IRC, I didn't use twitch), it was great and I added to my todo list for this sabbatical, to help out on Arch, I'll play around with adopting and making some AUR packages first and I'll take it from there.

Great URLs

• Datasette, publishing data easily as, for example a web page. I liked this approach of making a static page from a database, I don't have any plans on what to do with this, but it's good to know about this tool.
• A blog post about Roguelike Celebration, the roguelike conference I attended two weeks ago, if you're curious about how it was.

This week I...

• Am attending the roguelike celebration conference, which is great. I haven't made games in a while but I love the topic, and it's interesting to see how different programming is for this different discipline.
• Started reading the pomodoro technique book. The technique is very simple and it's in countless places of the internet, but the book surprised me with some additions to the system. Like keeping track of how many pomorodos you do per task.

Sound of the week

• Heart-Shaped Box by Nirvana (Cover by Kawehi), a wonderfully different cover.

This week I...

• Got and played the game Gloomhaven "Jaws of the lion". If you like boardgames, and have player or wanted to play the best board game according to BoardGameGeek, Gloomhaven, you should try it.
• Finished reading The Cuckoo's egg, great book!
• Have been playing Littlewood and I am enjoying it, it's a fun stardewvalley but chill like animal crossing. In some ways better than either.

Great URLs

• The Grandmaster in the Corner Office, a great article about deliberate practice. I've been thinking about what deliberate practice would look like for programming, if you have any suggestions, let me know.
• The Importance of Deep Work & The 30-Hour Method for Learning a New Skill, another good article about learning new skills using deep work. I liked the idea to block some time (30h) to learn a new skills, I want to try it so I'm not trying to learn 100 things at the same time without having the feeling of progress.
• A twitter thread on sound quality for meetings online, I'll be trying out the tips described next week to see if I can improve my meetings, I found myself sometimes talking too loudly during meetings.

This week I…

• Updated my plan page and . TL;DR: I have quit my job. I realised I like working remotely enough to apply to a company that I’ve been on the lookout for a while which is 100% remote. Otherwise, it was an uneventful week.

This week I…

• Skipped last week’s newsletter. I had nothing to write about.
• Have been following Cal Newsport’s work more closely. I know him and his books but I never really read them or applied anything from him. I subscribed to his podcast and I highly recommend it if you are a knowledge worker.

This week I...

• Have been watching a lot of "Below Deck", you could say I'm addicted. And I was never someone who enjoys reality shows, but the fact that it's a "reality workplace" makes it more interesting. I'm planning on writing a few blog posts with lessons on leadership from each of the leads in the show.
• am sending this newsletter quite late again, but at least I am sending it. I'm thinking about whether to remove this constraint of having to send a newsletter every week, even with not a lot of content, or to just wait and collect some stuff and only send if I have enough. What do you think?

Great sounds

• DOOM Eternal OST - BFG 10000, awesome instrumental metal, good for coding if you can stop your head from headbanging.

This week I…

• Was on holiday, didn’t do anything “productive” this time around and managed to relax properly.
• Took the gaming PC out and played a bit of: Minecraft, LoL, Vampyr (been waiting to get this from Humble Bundle and it came out this month!), and have been continuing to play Dead Cells on the switch.

This week I…

• Set up my old OnePlusOne with LineageOS as an experiment of using a google-free android phone. So far so good, but I know that I can’t have a single phone if I got this route since banking apps don’t support weird Android Roms like lineageOS.
• Found out about , I’m not sure what one could do with them right now, but it looks like a cool tech to explore.

This week I…

• Sent the newsletter late :D.
• Didn’t do as many reps as I have been doing, maybe because I was a bit more tired this week.

This week I...

• Attended Europython online and it was great. I loved the combination of discord + video. It enabled me to check the notes from other talks that I didn't attend and will be a great repository of information when I actually watch the talks, it also enhanced the talks I attended by giving it a specific forum where people could talk about parts of a talk in depth.
• Not really much apart from Europython, my work was very focused so that I could leave to the conference without many things to worry about during my holiday.
• I haven't done much yoga nidra lately, I liked it, but I'm not really finding time to do it.
• I have started reading the book The cuckoo's egg and I'm loving it, great writing and awesome subject, do check it out if you're looking for a non-fiction tech-related story to read.

Sound of the week

• There wasn't a pattern on what I listened to this week, so here are some relaxing Rain sounds

This week I…

• Have been focusing on something I can’t really share, so I didn’t have much time for reading cool articles, so I don’t have much to share this time.
• My gaming pc is still unplugged and will remain like that for at least two more weeks, I miss it a bit, but I love having the extra time to read and write.

This week I...

• forgot to mention on the last newsletter, that I played with Deno at work and enjoyed it, here is the code I produced as I played with it.
• have done an exercise with people in my team as preparation for performance review about writing down what they have achieved in the last year and in what ways have they changed, this has proved to be very useful for them and it was incredibly useful for me when I did it for myself. I wish I did it for every year in my career so I could see my progress. I'll write a blog post about this.
• unplugged my gaming pc and removed it from my work desk, I'm hoping to replace gaming with other healthier habbits, such as writing and reading.
• tried yoga nidra, it's a kind of guided meditation that's supposed to relax you and make you sleep better, it felt good.

Sound of the week

• Zildjian LIVE! - Nikki Glaspie, a great groovy song, #jazz

This week I…

• Wrote 2 blog posts:

This week I...

• Was on holiday for the whole week
• Played Red Dead Redemption 2 (but Gil, I thought you finished it last Sunday! Yeah, but what if I complete the game again, this time, slowly?).
• Prepared for Europython, I'm going to be session chairing (basically introducing speakers and managing their time/questions) for the first day.
• Finished reviewing the last few chapters of the book I'm reviewing (more on this later).
• Moved my personal knowledge base from vimwiki to org-mode, there's still some things I need to do, formatting and links between the files, but I'm now comfortable enough in emacs that I can use org-mode + org-roam for my knowledge base.
• Got a hey.com invite and a trial account (gil.codes@hey.com help me test it out), although I don't think I'm going to be using the service since I already have a protonmail account that I'm happy with and paid for.

Sound of the week

• In This Moment - Call Me, a metal cover of a classic.

This week I...

• Got very tired, maybe it's because next week I'll be on holiday, maybe there's too much work and I'm not feeling like I accomplished much...or maybe it's just normal since it's been a while since I had a holiday, or that at least it doesn't feel like I had one...
• Didn't send the newsletter on time again :(.
• Finished Red Dead Redemption 2 on Sunday and I gotta say that it's the best story in a game ever! I blame this game for not sending the newsletter on time :P.

Sound of the week

• Red dead redemption 2 soundtrack, I know it's a repeat, but this was definitely the sound of the week.

This week I…

• Didn’t use the planck to write this newsletter, so hopefully, there will be a lot less typos, sorry about the previous newsletter.
• Am sending the newsletter very late, on a Wednesday, sorry!

This week I...

• Got the planck ez, which I'm trying to use just now to write this newsletter. I got some very clicky keys, which are awesome to type in, but the ortholinear layout is a bit difficult to use. We'll see how I get om with it, a lot of people seem to prefer ortho to staggered, so I'm really curious to see if this works well for me.
• Am still using emacs, felling better and better, although I used vim a little bit and was reminded of how it feels to use an editor I am really used to (It feels great).
• Uninstalled instagram and it was amazing for my mental health.
• Didn't read much, but instead, played a lot of red dead redemption 2, which made this week feel unproductive.

Sound of the week

• Red dead redemption 2 soundtrack

This week I…

• Didn’t work on Monday, since it was a bank holiday, I took a long walk outside to get out of the house and move my legs.
• The week felt quite packed even thought it was only 4 days, I was as tired as a normal week, I guess I need a holiday…

This week I…

• Kept on using emacs for work, I’m getting more and more used to it. I’m even writing this newsletter on it for the first time.
• I realise that I never talked about how I write this newsletter, so here it goes:

This week I...

• Used doom emacs at work. There's still lots for me to get used to, but I'm slowly getting there. The discord community certainly helps a lot.
• I'm still in my quest to find the perfect way to streamline information, I've been reading about other systems like zettelkasten. But I'm hoping that once I'm happy with emacs, I can switch to org-mode + org-roam and ditch vimwiki.
• As for information input, I was reading yesterday about RSS and it could be a way for me to have a lot of information curated by me so I don't have to mindlessly scroll through Hacker news or Reddit. Another cool tools I could use, are content systems such as: Polar, TagSpaces or Zotero. Which all look good, as long as I can sync the DB with git, I'll be fine. What I also want is a way to have a way where I can generate a PDF with all the news for the day / week that I can read offline, that would be awesome.

Sound of the week

• Carcass - Black Star (8bit)

This week I…

• Published my first npm package

This week I...

• Learned how to use vercel's serverless function to make my own url2markdown service, it works, but it's early days, I'll later write a blog post with my findings and how I integrate it with my knowledge system.
• Been thinking about how to streamline my reading of articles from the web, it's currently a mess, I'm using instapaper + storing urls on vimwiki + storing search terms on my phone and paper notebook + reading pdfs on my remarkable tablet. I want a way to only read things in multiple places, whichever is convenient (right now since I'm only home, I can use the remarkable only) and a way to place urls that can be searched for using tags or their content (paying for instapaper would give me this, and I'll probably do that). It's a work in progress.
• Got better at bread making, today (Sunday) I made the best one yet, it will only get better (I hope).
• Printed some altoids organizer on my 3d printer, I love altoids cases!
• Kept playing Apex Legends, and have won a few games, yay for me!
• Did 10min of exercise every day, it's not much, but at least it's easy and consistent, I may upgrade to longer sessions or more sessions throughout the day.

Sound of the week

• Snarky Puppy - Lingus, a great technical jazz band and song, do listen!

This week I…

• Published a book on Leanpub.
• Found of writing more, will try to use , but I haven’t yet.

This week I…

• Got my first Lego kit in ages, the amazing Pirates of Barracuda Bay set, haven’t finished it, but I already love it, I hope this is not the beginning of another obsession…

This week I…

• Moved my twtxt host from Heroku using ToH, into my . Which feels much more natural, just like the way twtxt was meant to be, and also I don’t have to deal with Heroku’s emails telling me I’m overrunning on the free clocks.

This week I…

• Was still on holiday for two days, until I…
• Got back to work, it was a weird unproductive week, partly due to work, partly because it was hard to get back into a routine. The thing about these holidays spent at home, is that what I really treat myself to was a lack of schedule, I did want to be productive, but I also wanted to chill out, and I managed to do both, but my schedule really suffered. Maybe I should prioritise getting a proper routine after all.

This week I…

• Was on holiday…home
• I had some plans for this week, was going to and was going to learn Rust, write more, be super productive, but the reality is that I just spent a lot of time playing Animal Crossing and Halo (Finished the Reach), baked some bread, and built my new 3d printer (an Ender 3), I’m trying not to beat myself up too much about it because we’re in a pandemic, but part of me, earns for those breaks in the day that helped me make a routine…well, a routine, and doing them artificially, like taking a shower before starting to “work” feels, well, artificial. But I’m happy, I did learn a bit more of rust, built a little for breezometer in actix, so I been “productive”.

This week I...

• Worked from home every day.
• Settled on a kettlebell routine (it's called Simple & Sinister, I haven't finished the book, but I've been doing 5-10 sets of 10 kettlebell swings + 5 sets each side of Turkish get ups).
• Bought and played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Switch. I'm still trying to relax whilst playing it instead of going full in trying to do everything as fast as I can, it's my first Animal Crossing game. I recommend it!
• Started the hobby of making my own sourdough bread. Still making my own starter.
• Planned out next week activities (I'll be on holiday).

Sound of the week

• Went back to listening to Roadrunner United, I wish they recorded more songs/albums together. Roadrunner United - Annihilation by the hands of god

This week I...

• Worked from home from Thursday to avoid being a vector of contagion. Mixed feelings about it, I love staying home, but not because I have to.
• Cancelled my trip to PT since the conference I'm giving a talk in was delayed to November.
• Bought and played a lot of the "Out of Space" game, great co-op game.

Sound of the week

• Cannibal Corpse - Evisceration Plage

Note: This is a late newsletter I should've sent on the 8th

This week I...

• Attended a workshop about communication, the key thing I learned was Active Listening, look into it and practice, I've started doing more of it and had some good success.
• Added the plugin Which Key to my vimrc which is already making my neovim awesome, highly recommend it, it shows you which shortcuts you have configured for the leader key, like spacemacs does.
• Bought the humble bundle Learn to code bundle, there's a few things I'd like to learn.
• Forgot to send out the newsletter on Sunday

Sound of the week

Gil’s Week #202009

This week I…

• Attended a Codebar workshop as a coach.

This week I…

• Learned about the dot language to draw graphs in ascii art, I also learned about graph-easy and dropped it into a shell script (using Docker because it’s a perl script and I don’t like having to install CPAN on my machines) to try it out, but so far I haven’t used any of them for drawing useful graphs, just to play around. Also found this website which lets you draw ascii art in your browser, it’s the coolest of the options.

This week I...

• Was sick on Monday from food poisoning :(
• Didn't drink any caffeine (just didn't feel like it and continued not drinking)
• Worked from home very productively (read mise en place)
• Set up Notational-fzf for my neovim
• Read quite a bit about personal knowledge systems

Sound of the week

• Men eater - Lisboa https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aG_IkCZ4Sqo

What notable things happened this week

• Created this newsletter
• Was invited to give a talk in Oxford
• Went to Software Craftsmanship Roundtable meetup
• Turned my website into a normal blog (instead of a wiki style)

What have I been focusing on

• Learning and setting up git-annex
• Thinking about how to make use of my GPD Micropc
• Minimalism
• High performing teams

This is the first ever newsletter for all the first subscribers (or curious future readers) to get a glimpse of how the newsletter will look like in the future.

What notable things happened this week

If there's anything relevant to highlight this week such as meetups/conferences/things that happened, I'll highlight them here.

• Attended London Python meetup - Learned about some interesting tools for upgrading python applications.