Today is the last day of my writing PACT where I set out to write and publish a blog post every day for 30 days.

I’ve written about various things that were on top of mind: Side projects, sport, personal finance, general life advice that I found useful, replies to blog posts and lately about our new family member.

Funny enough, the most popular post by far (at least according to my Plausible analytics) was a relatively simple (no pun intended) one: The simplest read-later app. It’s essentially just resharing an even shorter article from Marcel, with a few additional comments by me. His repost on Mastodon was probably the reason why it gained some traction.

If I’m honest, this is one of these posts that I probably wouldn’t have published, if it weren’t for this challenge. But having to write about something every day forces you to just write about whatever you can think of.

In retrospect, I’m glad that I pushed through and managed to write for a whole month. Writing per se isn’t even the hardest part most of the time. It’s arguing with your inner critic to actually publish the piece.

But you never know if a piece resonates with someone else and maybe makes their day a bit better too. I got some great replies on some posts that definitely made my day. One thoughtful message always makes a published post more than worth it, no matter how many people read it.

Still, I’m also glad that I can now go back to a more natural posting schedule. Write just whenever I want to, not because I have to.

That’s the cool thing about PACTs: They’re not habits, they have an end. But they still help you to try out things that you wouldn’t have done otherwise. I can only recommend coming up with one yourself.

I’m probably going to do the same again.

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It’s now been five days since Naida moved in with us.

While not everything has been sunshine and rainbows, I was still surprised about how well everything went and how well she adapted to the new environment within a few days.

Some personal highlights:

In the beginning, she was afraid of entering our house and especially the elevator. We often just had to pick her up and hold her until we reached our floor. But now, she happily enters the elevator when the doors open, even before we go in.

She loves our couch and her dog bed in our bedroom (see evidence above). It fascinates me quite a bit how after so little time she already knows her way around the apartment and what spots are for just hanging around and relaxing.

Her big stretches are so cute, now I know why that yoga pose is called downward dog.

Whenever I’m at my laptop for a prolonged period and she is in another room, she usually checks in every now and then and requests to be petted. This always makes me happy.

She listens to her name very well and the “come” command also starts to work, at least in a low-distraction environment.

Still lots to do and my girlfriend and I both are always so tired in the evening, but having Naida around us makes up for it :)

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Since then, I also got more and more into the ATproto community and I get very similar vibes from there.

I’ve been building things for the web for over 10 years now and the only other time where it felt like I was a part of a bigger community of builders was when I discovered the indie hacking scene in 2018.

ATproto feels similar, with one difference: It feels like there is this bigger and overarching goal of making the web more open and personal again. This sense of purpose makes me even more excited.

While the community is growing by the day, the connection paths within are relatively short. That’s really cool for getting in touch with the right people.

For example:

I’m building Morgenblau, an ATproto-based RSS reader. I first wrote about the concept a couple of weeks back, and back then, already multiple people expressed interest and some even reached out in private.

This week, Patrick somehow discovered the post again and shared it. This led to even more eyes on the post and ultimately ended in getting very valuable feedback and DMs from folks (thanks again!) and also in me discovering projects that are building in a similar area (most notably Octothorpes Protocol and Murmel).

It’s this serendipity of discovering cool things, getting to know great people and creating something new with others that makes building online such a joy!

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Brittany reposted a custom feed made by Marisa called “Nature in the News”.

The feed surfaces positive news about nature in general, wildlife recovery, advancements in renewable energy, and more.

I scrolled the feed for a couple of minutes and saw news like:

The coal-hungry economy straddling Europe and Asia is among several developing countries witnessing a rapid boom in clean technology as prices fall and fossil fuels face further crises

If there is to be a solution to insecurity in energy supply and price volatility, it's staring us in the face - Europe's spend on clean energy rose sharply after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It needs to rise sharply again.

The federal government is doling out funds to help youth get green jobs training in natural resource sectors such as energy, forestry, mining, earth sciences and clean technology.

Just skimming the posts and seeing these positive headlines made me happy. Seeing that despite all the horrible stuff going on in the world there are huge advancements being made in very important areas and towards a better future.

When going about our daily lives and hearing all the things that are currently going wrong, we often forget that there are also millions of awesome people out there who work tirelessly for good causes. And they have great impact.

Hope is a very powerful feeling. And by sharing and spreading good and uplifting news, we also help move the needle a teeny tiny bit as well.

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Now it’s a little after 7 in the morning. I haven’t yet been on my phone but instead have been out in nature for 30 minutes, have already walked 2.5k steps, got to experience the sunrise and watch Naida explore the forest around our neighborhood.

All things that every self-help book preaches as must-dos for physical and mental health, but now, I actually have to do them. There is no other choice. And sometimes, this is a very liberating feeling. No need to negotiate with my inner “Schweinehund¹”, as we say in German.

I’m sure I won’t always be as excited for morning walks as right now, but currently, I’m really looking forward to them.

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Today was a big day! Our little family welcomed Naida into our home.

After roughly two months of regularly visiting her in the shelter, we finally felt ready to take her with us.

So far, the day has been great with only a few little oopsies. Let’s hope the night will be fine as well. She’s already loving our couch, which we’re counting as a good sign.

We’re looking forward to getting to know her even better, and you can look forward to more dog content on this blog ;)

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It’s called the “daily shutdown ritual” and has been brought onto my radar by Cal Newport. You might know him from his books “Deep Work” and “Digital Minimalism”.

The idea is simple: Introducing a barrier between your work and leisure time in the form of a simple ritual.

Cal’s version is a bit more systematic than mine: He updates his main task list, reviews his calendar and his plan for the next couple of days and then says his magic phrase: “schedule shutdown, complete.”

For me, it works in an even simpler way: At the beginning of the day, I draw a little box somewhere. This can be on a post-it, on a loose sheet of paper or in my bullet journal. Then, when I’m done with what I set out to do for the day, I simply make a tick inside this box.

This point in the day also serves as a point of reflection: Did I forget something that I should probably write down for tomorrow?

No matter how your shutdown ritual looks, the effects are always the same.

It serves as a signal to the brain to shift into “leisure” mode where one can forget about daily obligations and can just do whatever the heart, mind or body desires. No need to worry about the other stuff for the rest of the day. What a great feeling.

Sometimes, the best productivity hacks just mean ticking a single box.

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Stretching was always an afterthought, and I suppose for most amateur soccer players it’s the same. Now, a couple of years later, I wish I had paid more attention to it earlier on.

The good news is that since taking running more seriously, I’ve come to appreciate a good stretch more.

Before I started running, I always thought it was just an endurance sport. But to become a good runner, you actually need to become well-rounded in three areas: Endurance (duh), strength, and flexibility. The latter two are especially important for long-term injury-free training. I’m speaking from experience here since I’m still recovering from a knee injury that was caused by a lack of strength in my left leg.

The thing is, you can actually combine them. There is this great video by one of my favorite fitness YouTubers that goes in-depth about it:

The core info of the video is that in order to get more flexible (and stay flexible), the goal is to become stronger in the end of your range of motion.

For the classic toe touch position, this means folding over until the hamstrings and calves contract and then purposely contract them even more. Doing this regularly for a couple of reps improves the flexibility and strength of the legs simultaneously. And the feeling after getting out of such a stretch is always a relief.

Apart from the hamstring stretch, my other current favorites are:

• Calf stretch on stairs
• Pigeon stretch
• Dead hang from a pull-up bar
• Butterfly stretch

Another approach I’ve learned from a different YouTuber is to simply try to integrate the same movements you’d do during a flexibility session in everyday life.

My favorite here is sitting cross-legged when watching TV to open up the hips. Or getting into a deep squat when I have to grab something from the floor.

Additionally, stretching can even be part of a meditation or a breathing exercise. This makes it even easier to integrate it into daily life.

In short, flexibility is way more than a necessary evil. And even if I still enjoy my runs more, my daily stretches have grown on me recently as well. Now you know why.

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I’m a couple of days late to Apple’s 50-year anniversary. But I find it still a great occasion to share this video snippet that I rewatch from time to time. It’s from a 1994 interview with the late and great Steve Jobs.

It’s short, I recommend you watch it in full (full transcript at the end of the post):

This section is the most powerful in my opinion:

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

I think this idea is one of the main drivers behind what got me into coding and designing things for the web as a teen. Although I hadn’t seen this interview back then – the possibility that I can just build something out of nothing with a laptop and an internet connection still feels magical to me to this day.

The beautiful thing is that this notion of being a creator is obviously not limited to the medium of code.

For you it might be writing, drawing, audio-visual content, woodworking, community-building, or hundreds of other things.

The important thing is just to recognize the fact that we as humans are all creators by nature. And that we have the capability to shape our personal lives but also influence the world around us on a far greater scale than we sometimes realize.

Full transcript of the video:

The thing I would say is when you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money.

But life — that's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.

And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will — you know, if you push in, something will pop out the other side — that you can change it, you can mold it. That's maybe the most important thing is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you're just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that's very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you'll want to change life and make it better because it's kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.

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But there is one particular thing about this whole back and forth that makes it really complicated but also quite predictable to be happening.

Matt summarized this very well in his post:

Its unsurprising AI is so divisive on Bluesky. We're at an intersection of devs – for whom Claude is a useful tool used by most – creatives and artists where AI is bad and damaging, and blue wave who just see it as sama and grok. We're arguing about different things from very different perspectives.

That’s exactly it! If you read a discussion with this thought in the back of your mind, two arguing people can be right (from their perspective) at the same time. Or at least their standpoint is understandable.

I’m a dev myself. So I consider myself lucky to get to experience what I’d say is the first truly helpful use case for LLMs in the broader economy. I think anyone who has tried the recent models, particularly Opus 4.6 in Claude Code, can’t deny the value it provides. Even if you’re still writing all your code by hand, Claude can still help you by surfacing bugs you probably wouldn’t have caught or serving as a brainstorming partner that is always available.

Sometimes I wonder if the discussions were similar back when compilers were first introduced and people weren’t forced to write in Assembly anymore. Of course this example is a bit flawed since it doesn’t touch on the ethical concerns. But from a dev only perspective, I find it interesting to think about.

But I also want to mention that, while being a fan of using Claude Code for development, I can still find the trend of just vibe coding something without understanding anything and then hosting (and probably exposing) sensitive user data highly problematic.

Current AI tools become more powerful by the day but in the end, they are still tools that should be used responsibly by someone who is experienced enough to use them. You also wouldn’t recommend using a chainsaw to everyone.

Another thing I want to add for nuance is that I’m still very glad that I was able to learn programming back when LLMs weren’t a thing. Again, if you’re a responsible smart person and start learning to code today, you’ll probably be a better programmer faster. On the other hand (I see this myself in some university lectures), many people who are just getting started are simply handing over their whole thinking to the machine and I’m not sure how it’s gonna work out for them when they enter the industry.

This whole discussion is, as always, more a symptom of online discussion culture than anything else.

We have to be able to tolerate ambiguity around such polarizing topics as AI.

Peter worded it well:

i think ai is a dangerous technology that has ethically problematic origins, can amplify our worst traits, & will be exploited by greedy people, but nonetheless is here to stay, holds great potential for good, & needs people of wisdom & creativity to mold it toward human thriving

I have a hunch that most people have a balanced opinion like this. It’s just that the most vocal people are often the people at either end of the spectrum that skew the public perception.

The right thing to do right now is, in my opinion, the following:

Not wasting your time in online discussions, it’s not worth it. Maybe one (thoughtful and non-aggressive!) reply is ok but a back and forth over hours will not help anyone and only solidify existing beliefs.

Lead by positive example. As a dev, that could mean building truly well-crafted products that your users love, with or without AI. As an artist, that could mean showing how beautiful and unique human-made art is. So many possibilities.

Much of this situation reminds me of what it's like being a vegetarian. I've been one for a couple of years and I haven't even once argued with someone who eats meat. Of course I would prefer if they didn’t, but I also know that arguing won’t help the cause. A way more powerful thing to do instead is inviting people over to dinner, cooking vegetarian and showing them that not eating meat is very tasty too¹.

Show, don’t tell, should be the mantra.

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If you begin to grasp what this protocol enables, you’ll inevitably become a fan (at least you should in my opinion).

Posts like “A Social Filesystem” by Dan Abramov that capture this notion of “formats over apps” give a glimpse into what will become possible, once more apps are being built on the protocol. It’s gonna be awesome!

But here’s the other thing: Most non-techies probably don’t care that much about “owning their data”, “migrating a PDS” or “decentralized architecture”. That’s also the reason why, at least from my perspective, Mastodon never really took off apart from small, often tech-related, communities. For normal people, these kinds of phrases are just buzzwords that don’t mean much.

Making the benefits of the Atmosphere clear is mainly a UX problem. And I think that talking about it as having an “Everything Account” like Anuj Ahooja does is a step in the right direction.

People know how “Sign in with Google” works. “Sign in with ATproto” will, to them, just be another option for signing in to apps.

But then they discover the added benefits:

“Wow, all my friends from app A are already here on app B? How cool is that!”

“My photos I uploaded on this platform that got really bad recently are on here as well? Nice, I don’t have to re-upload everything!”

You don’t have to know what a PDS is and how the data is shared between apps to get its benefits.

The “Everything Account” and by extension the “Internet Handle” (although that maybe gets too technical again) are the most convincing arguments for betting on ATproto right now.

Because people care more about the fact that they can use their beloved handle anywhere instead of which server their data is exactly hosted on.

No more dominik03 accounts, just dominik.social everywhere.

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In life, there are different virtues you can attain over time.

According to columnist David Brooks, we can sort them into two buckets:

Things like our salary, job title, net worth and the (fancy) material goods we own belong to the resume virtues.

The other ones belong to the eulogy virtues – things we’d want to be mentioned in our eulogy: How much people truly respect and admire us. No one would wish their eulogy to mention the huge house they live in or the sports car they own.

I like this quote from Morgan because it’s equally funny and true:

When we struggle to earn respect and admiration through intelligence, humor, empathy, or the ability to love, we may resort to the only remaining — and least effective — tool: material goods. Admire my car, beep beep, vroom vroom.

But whose attention do these material goods really attract and how lasting is the impact?

The problem gets even worse when you hear that psychologist Tim Kasser found out that “those who craved extrinsic pride the most had less mental capacity left to nourish their intrinsic pride.”

So by valuing material over immaterial things during your lifetime, you actually leave yourself less room to cultivate the latter.

Morgan shares a good rule of thumb of how this tug-of-war between the two poles works:

I tend to view my desire for material things as inversely proportional to what I have to offer the world.

That’s why your reputation is actually the most valuable thing you own. When “your name speaks louder than anything that you could buy – that’s your worth”.

There’s also this quote by Warren Buffett, who put it like this:

At my age, you measure success in life by how many of the people you want to love you actually do.

So, in short, the thing to do is pretty simple. Morgan again:

Invest in the interior of your house, not the exterior.

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In the town where I live, we have this great sports facility with multiple soccer fields, a skate park, a basketball court, a sports hall and a tartan track.

As a runner, I obviously mostly use the last one. But the thing I enjoy most about it is the environment it’s in.

Since this facility is open to the public, there is a diverse group of people exercising there almost every time.

Young and old, teams that have a training session, kids who are just playing and individuals who are stretching or running laps around the track.

It’s just a very contagious feeling seeing all of them when you enter the facility and start running your laps as well.

For the longest time, I was convinced that running could only be fun if you’re fully out in nature and try to cover as many different streets and paths as possible.

That’s not the case anymore: Turns out, running in circles can also be very enjoyable, provided the atmosphere fits.

And let me tell you, being on the track with maybe one or two other runners during sunset while you hear a soccer team train on the field next to it and someone trying out new tricks in the skate park is a very cool and motivating atmosphere.

The sense of belonging to a bigger group of people that you don’t even know but that match your energy.

It’s the place where athletes meet.

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The biggest consequence of this is usually one hour less of sleep. Not great.

But there’s another thing that’s happening today, and it’s a positive one: All of a sudden, the evenings are longer again.

More time to catch a few rays of sunlight on an afterwork run.

And the possibility of seeing the sun set behind the Jura while I’m writing my daily blog posts.

Well, at least if the weather lets it happen. Not today, but maybe tomorrow.

I’m looking forward to these longer evenings.

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Most of the things on the list are pretty obvious when you read them, but I still find it helpful to have a menu to choose from.

So here we go:

Breathwork

Our breath is one of the only automatic functions of our body that we can actively control. That’s what makes it so powerful to change our state of mind.

I like these three practices the most:

For focus, Box Breathing. Here, you breathe in for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. Repeat.

For calming down, longer exhalation. In for 4, out for 6, repeat. This helps the nervous system to realise that everything is ok.

For winding down in the evening or getting back to sleep, 4-7-8 breathing. In for 4, hold for 7, out for 8, repeat.

For all of these exercises, you can also find guided videos on YouTube like this one.

Meditation

Closely related to breathwork and really similar effects. Depending on the type of person you are, one or the other might work better.

The simplest version here is to just set a timer, sit down, close your eyes and watch your breathing happening. If your mind wanders away, try to notice it without judgement and move your attention back to the breath. That’s the only thing to do.

Another form of meditation that will make you feel better is practicing gratitude. Just think of or list things that you are thankful for right now.

Exercise

Anything that moves your body will help you get in a better headspace. Here, it’s probably best to just try out various types of exercises and see what fits you most.

For me, when I just have a short stretch of time, my favorite exercise is just a set of push ups. No equipment needed, you won’t have to change clothes afterwards because it didn’t get sweaty, but you still feel like you’ve done something good for yourself.

If I have a longer block of time, nothing beats going for a run outside. Sometimes I feel like running is more of a mental than a physical health exercise.

Stretching

Stretching is the bridge between exercise and meditation.

My favorite way of doing it is to put on a calming playlist and do static stretches (meaning you hold them for a specific amount of time instead of moving) for the areas I feel tight in.

If you’re someone who works at a desk a lot, I can’t recommend back, hip and hamstring stretches enough.

Music

I don’t have to tell you this, but music is so powerful in helping you change your mood, no matter the direction.

Depending what you want to do – focusing, calming down, stretching – choose an appropriate playlist, hit play, and enjoy.

Reading

Another good way to calm down is to read. Obviously something long-form, preferably as a physical book or on my e-reader.

Writing

The best way to get unstuck with a problem is to simply write about it. Make a braindump, just write whatever comes to mind (stream of consciousness), list things, create a mindmap.

There’s no right or wrong here. The only task is to get the messy thoughts onto paper which automatically makes them feel more manageable and less overwhelming.

Talking

Sometimes, talking works even better than writing, especially if you have someone you trust around. They won’t even have to give you a solution but just talking things through and having somebody listen helps to feel more relaxed.

If you don’t have anyone around in the moment, making a voice memo is also a great option. And it serves as a little journal if you do it regularly.

As you can see, it’s often the simplest practices that have the greatest effects.

What are your practices for shifting your state of mind?

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If you’re watching only one video today, make it this one.

Not only is it exceptionally beautifully written, shot, color graded and edited, but it also has a very important message.

All you need right now is a win.

Sometimes, whether or not we feel like we’re in a slump, the most important thing we can do is think about the next step to take.

And this step doesn’t even have to be big. Preferably, it should be a small one.

Because small wins are quick to achieve. Then you can go and find the next one. And stack them over time.

And before you know, you have built momentum.

I’ve experienced this countless times myself. This momentum that’s being built is usually the greatest predictor of whether or not I’m going to have a great day or not.

So, just remember, the only thing you have to do is simple:

You gotta ask yourself, what small win can I go and achieve, right now?

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Project Hail Mary is the movie adaptation of the similarly named sci-fi book by Andy Weir. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because it’s the same author that wrote The Martian, which was a huge hit (both as a book and later a movie starring Matt Damon) a decade or so ago.

I won’t go into too much detail about the story of Project Hail Mary here to avoid any spoilers, but it’s the same type of movie that The Martian also was. A guy in space who has to solve problems with science (and a couple more twists and turns). But this time, the guy is Ryan Gosling.

I started reading the book roughly a year ago but never finished it. And I’m also not the biggest sci-fi reader¹. So I was only half-prepared for what would await me.

Nonetheless, to cut things short: The movie adaptation of this book really is as good as the reviewers say.

The story is solid, sure. If you’ve read the book and know the technical details a bit better, it’s likely even more immersive.

But what stood out to me most were the artistic choices the film makes and that can only be brought to life in this audiovisual format:

The imagery and the music selection. Everything else is great too, but these two elements really were top-notch and definitely in my top 3 of all the movies I have ever watched.

Almost every frame (especially the wide-angle shots from outside the spaceship) could be printed and be hung on a wall. And the music makes these images and also the relationship and experiences of the characters even better. Not too obtrusive, yet, despite the different genres, always the right acoustic accompaniment for each scene.

So all in all, if you have even the tiniest interest in anything science/technology related and love beautiful pictures and good music, definitely go watch Project Hail Mary! And do it on the biggest screen possible, the IMAX experience is truly incredible.

And I’m probably gonna give the book another shot after the watch.

5/5

Watched: 25.03.2026

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The Pudding is one of those sites I love to browse regularly and always leave with a feeling of delight (and new insights).

If you haven’t heard of them, they are a digital publication that creates data-driven stories. So they often have an interesting dataset or pose a curious question (often both) and turn it into a visual essay for readers to explore.

One piece I found yesterday and wanted to share is called “Happy Map” by Alvin Chang.

The idea is pretty simple:

The whole project is based on a 2017 research project where 10’000 people across the globe were tasked with tracking their happy moments. This resulted in a dataset of more than 100’000 of them.

Alvin then turned this data into a fictitious archipelago where each island is a cluster of similarly themed happy moments: Hobbies and creation, love, personal growth, children and so on.

On each of these islands then live dozens of cutely drawn cartoon characters that represent the individual happy moments.

Just clicking on these tiny cartoon characters and seeing their happy moments is a very rewarding experience. They are often really small ones, but seeing them make other people happy might make you look out for similar moments during your day as well.

A couple of examples:

I have been doing well at a new video game.

My dog was super happy to see me when I got home from lunch.

An annoying meeting got cancelled.

I was listening to my kids laugh in the car on the way home from school.

I found out that I had a little bit more money than I thought I had.

I ate at a new restaurant that opened up near me and loved the food.

You’ll definitely find a few gems when you click around this map for a couple of minutes. Try it!

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For me personally, when it comes to personal finance, one of the hardest things is to find a good ratio between the money I spend vs. the money I save.

As I wrote about in the last post from this series, saving is what gives us independence.

On the other hand, spending money on the things we truly value is a great way to boost happiness.

So what to do now?

Good advice never simply says 'Live for today' or 'Save for the future.' The only good tip is: 'Reduce future regret.'

This is the recipe for success that Morgan proposes. And the famous psychologist Daniel Kahneman adds that “a smart approach towards money requires a well-calibrated sense of how we’ll experience regret about our current decisions at various points in the future.”

In the end, our task is to strike the right balance between two of the most powerful forces in our world:

• Exponential growth
• The fact that today we are one day closer to death than yesterday.

One great way to kill two birds with one stone is to try to have experiences that you can later look back on with nostalgia.

Trying to do this is a good way of having a great time in the present while also saving (a memory in this case) for the future.

And when it comes to saving, there is also a case to be made for doing it slowly, step by step, over many years. Not trying to rush the accumulation of wealth by taking shortcuts.

The fastest way to get (and stay) rich is to do it slowly, silently in the background.

Because “the faster wealth was created, the more likely luck played a decisive role. That can reverse just as quickly.”

A quote from Laozi that sums this sentiment up perfectly:

Nature is never in a hurry, yet accomplishes everything.

And if you’re patient, you will too.

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Switching away from tools you depended on for years can be hard though. And while I think it would theoretically be possible to completely ditch all US tech, I don’t think it’s a pragmatic solution. Case in point, I’m writing these words on my MacBook Air which I would re-buy in a heartbeat – it’s fantastic.

But perfect is the enemy of good and achieving more digital sovereignty is possible through little steps too.

Since my Dropbox subscription is about to renew, I started to look for a new solution for my cloud needs. I briefly considered buying a NAS and hosting everything myself, but at least for now, I postponed that project.

One reason is that I found a very feasible Dropbox replacement: It’s called kDrive by a Swiss company called “Infomaniak”.

I already use one product from them, namely their email service, for my personal domain and am very happy so far.

I don’t know how well-known Infomaniak is abroad. In my view, Proton usually comes top of mind when people think of a Swiss company that provides alternatives to US big tech products. But since this topic of digital sovereignty has entered the mainstream discourse here in Switzerland, ads for Infomaniak are everywhere.

They brand themselves as “the ethical cloud”, and from what I can tell, they deliver well on that.

For example, they offset 200% of their CO₂, try to extend the lifespan of their servers for as long as possible, encourage the use of public transport for their employees with bonuses and so on.

Another cool fact about their data centers is that they use the thermal energy generated by their servers to heat up to 6,000 households in the proximity of the facility.

So from an ethical standpoint, Infomaniak seems like a vastly superior company compared to many other cloud providers.

I’m sure a Dropbox pro user will find features that Infomaniak’s kSuite doesn’t support, but based on my needs, I don’t know what more I could wish for. They even offer a one click migration from Dropbox to their cloud which makes switching over a breeze.

Another nice benefit of this switch is that the pricing is way better: Dropbox costs roughly 110 Swiss Francs per year and offers 2 TB of storage. kSuite costs way less (CHF 60/year) and even provides 3 TB of storage.

All in all a no-brainer in my book: Supporting a local company that offers a better service at a lower price point and seems to have the right moral standards.

This sounds like an ad but really isn’t: If you’re on the lookout for a new personal cloud, email server or web hosting, check out Infomaniak – they might help you gain a little digital sovereignty back!

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One of the main theses of the book is the following:

There are two ways to use money. You can use it as a tool to improve your life. Or you can make it the measure of your status, to compare yourself with others.

It’s pretty obvious which of the two ways is the better one when you want to live a happy life¹.

The main way to do it is to look at money as a tool that can buy you independence.

This reframing has one big advantage: All the money you don’t spend on something (that you probably don’t need) today is a voucher to have control over your time in the future. On the other hand, debt “is a piece of future that someone else controls”.

Obviously, you shouldn’t save every dollar and sacrifice today for tomorrow. There is always a balance to be found, which can be very individual.

But “buying” independence should always be amongst the top items on the list of things to acquire.

As Morgan puts it:

The simplest formula for a pretty good life is independence plus purpose. The independence to do what we want, plus the wisdom to want to do something meaningful. That's not everything, but it gets you a long way.

And, related:

Wealth without independence is a special form of poverty.

That’s also the reason why money ≠ wealth and status ≠ independence. Many people optimize for the first part of both equations, when the happier path is achieved through the second one.

And as a general recipe for when to spend money without guilt, Morgan adds:

I spend my money freely on my independence. I spend a lot of money on maintaining control over my time.

Because:

Independence delivers the best return of all.

In the end, it’s always important to remember that money should be a tool that serves you, not the other way around. Today, and in the future.

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A social media post, a forum entry, an essay, a poem – you name it.

But my favorite format remains the short blogpost.

A couple of paragraphs, talking about one experience, one idea, one epiphany, but always something to take away or something leaving the reader inspired.

As a creator, I find them the most pleasant to write. More space to expand my thoughts compared to an ephemeral post on social media that will disappear within hours. But not as daunting to write as a thousand-word essay.

As a consumer, I find them to be the most enjoyable type of post to read. They offer a glimpse into someone else’s life and the world inside their head. They feel ordinary to read, but not in a boring way at all. The “ordinary-ness” of these posts is what makes them worth reading in the first place. Not a polished piece, but words on a page someone thought were worth being jotted down.

That’s why I love reading short blogposts. And writing them for others to read.

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Some days feel like I have all the time in the world. I manage what I set out to do, I move, create, read, learn. These are fulfilling days. Then, in the evening, I have this feeling of “being done”. I can properly wind down.

But then there are days where I feel like the exact opposite. Not enough time for anything. A todo list that won’t shrink, no matter what I do.

Much of this comes down to perception and intentionality. I don’t do more on the days that feel good. I just do the right things in an intentional way.

No day is perfect and it’s a constant up and down, but for the next couple of days, I want to start paying attention again to these particular things.

These activities correlate with me feeling like I don’t have enough time:

• Social media usage.
• Checking news apps multiple times a day.
• Consuming audiovisual content (mainly YouTube).
• Putting too much on my todo list and then procrastinating.

On the other hand, these behaviors increase my chance of having a good, fulfilling day enormously:

• Planning an intentional activity in the morning before taking my phone out of airplane mode: Walking, meditating, stretching, …
• Taking a break to read.
• Writing a blog post.
• Focusing on the next step I have to take for one of my side projects.
• Listening to long-form content (audiobook or podcast).
• Exercising.
• Spending uninterrupted time with family and friends.
• Having a shutdown ritual in the evening.

When I re-read this list, one pattern is clear: Using my phone less is the biggest leverage I have.

The only thing I have to do is replace it with better, simple activities: Moving my body, creating something, socializing or consuming long-form content.

This post’s purpose is to serve as a reminder to myself.

But I hope it’s also a small check-in for you to make sure that, today in the evening, you’ll feel like you’ve had a good day.

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One random fact from the book that stuck with me is this: Between the 10 richest men in the world, there are 13 divorces.

Even if one has all the money in the world, more than they could spend in 1’000 lifetimes, a good and happy life is not guaranteed.

On the other hand, it shows us normalos that the calendar quotes are actually correct: You can’t buy the most important things in life.

When we envy these rich people, we often only see the monetary aspects of their lives. What we don’t see is, to quote the book, “that even people with home cinemas fight with their partners”. Their life isn’t perfect either.

But the thing is, nothing in life is as important as it feels in the moment when you think about it. If all you do is think about how much more money you would need to be “happy”, you vastly overestimate the effect money has on your life.

Health, a good social life and independence are way more important. Things you can’t buy with money. Except the last one, more on that in other parts of this series.

But there's a related blind spot that goes beyond wealth.

With enough information, every behavior is understandable.

I think this is a pretty good way of thinking about the life choices of other people.

Most humans strive for their best life, the best possible reality for them and the people around. Or at least they believe they've made reasonable choices. The only issue is that we all have different information about ourselves and the world around us.

This applies to politics (won’t dive much deeper into that here), but it also applies to the realm of personal finances.

We should put more emphasis on the personal, not the finances.

There is no right or wrong when it comes to how people handle their money. There is no need to debate about whether a purchase was necessary or not. To some people it might be, to others, it might not.

To follow Morgan’s advice, we should ask the following question more:

Because of which experiences that I might not have had, do you believe what you believe?

The answers might be surprising.

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And you wouldn’t be reading it.

But you still do.

Because I just set a timer for 5 minutes, sat down and started writing.

We often hear that consistency is key when it comes to habits or getting better at something.

Even if you’re not in the mood to do the thing you set out to do, simply set a timer for 5 minutes and see what happens.

When that timer goes off, you’ll have taken another step forward. Not a huge one. But take another one tomorrow and one the day after and you’ll be farther than if you decided not to do the thing today.

5 minutes are almost over.

And today, I wrote a post. I even published it.

For consistency. And for you.

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This weekend, I finished reading “The Art of Spending Money” by Morgan Housel.

If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because of his mega-bestseller “The Psychology of Money” from a few years back. He also writes a blog well worth reading.

I never read “The Psychology of Money” because, from skimming the table of contents and reading a couple of summaries, I felt it was more geared towards people who are starting their personal finance journey¹.

But his new book sounded intriguing to me.

I’m at a place where I’d say that I follow most of the common knowledge from the personal finance community: Saving a reasonable percentage of my monthly income, investing into a distributed ETF with a savings plan, not trying to “outsmart the market” – things like that.

If you’re in the same place as me, “The Art of Spending Money” is a phenomenal book. Maybe if you're not, too. I would not even classify it as a finance book but more as a philosophical one. A huge portion of the book revolves around the pursuit of a simple life and how that looks different for everyone.

Most insights from the book didn’t feel completely new to me, but they were put together in such a nice way that made me eager to continue reading. The anecdotes that the author tells are also well chosen and integrated.

I won't go into too much depth about the content of the book in this post, as I plan to write further posts about topics the book touches upon.

I just wanted to tell you that I really enjoyed this book. It's the best finance book I've ever read – and it isn’t even one.

5/5, a book that came at the right time for me.

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Until I found out from Marcel that there is a superior way to manage articles you want to read. I’m even a bit ashamed to admit that it took me reading a post from another person to come up with this system. Because it’s so stupidly simple, you can summarize it in one sentence. In Marcel’s words:

Here it goes: I put links to articles I want to read into my to-do list and then I read them.

Yeah, that’s precisely what I do now. Here’s my Today view in Things 3 as of writing this:

Three side-effects of this system that are a feature, not a bug:

• If I save many articles on a day, they clog up my todo list. This makes me more conscious of what I want to save in the first place.
• If I don’t manage to read an article on any given day, I have to move it to the next day. This creates friction. If I do this a couple of days in a row, it starts to annoy me. A good sign that I can delete the article from my list altogether.
• If I really do want to read an article, I make time for it because it’s now on my todo list. With the same priority as, let’s say, doing laundry. Not something to do “sometime”.

But what about saving articles for later so I can revisit them?

I don't think there is a point in doing that anymore. If an article truly resonates with me, I should probably take the time and write a post about it. Like I did yesterday. This makes me reflect on the article and I won’t forget it so easily.

For other articles that I find shareable, I post them over on Bluesky and they get backfilled onto my personal website, so I have my little archive there.

You see, you don’t need much for a good read-later system. Not even a new app.

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The current zeitgeist (at least according to my YouTube feed) seems to be to create apps in the shortest amount of time possible while maximizing revenue at the same time.

But statements like “I built this app in 48 hours and made $20k from it” aren’t the flex people think they are. Sure, I’d love to have that hourly rate, but how fulfilling and sustainable can this be?

Andy’s post touches on that and I agree with his thesis. The far superior way to build software and by extension a business is to do it slow and in a compounding way. Even in today’s fast-paced landscape. Hyper Growth (and crash) vs. Slow Growth.

Now I admire slow builders like Panic, 37signals, and James Thompson who's maintained and shaped an app for 30+ year (new life goal).

Same. Because I’m building Morgenblau, an RSS reader, I would add Brent Simmons to the list. He’s the creator of NetNewsWire, probably the longest running RSS reader on Apple platforms. Or companies like Information Architects, the folks behind iA Writer². These people and companies are much more interesting to me than the ones who obviously only follow the hype train.

Slow success means you get to stick with an idea long enough for it to get interesting.
If you want to do your life’s work, do it slow.

Not saying that everything you do has to be “your life’s work”, but it helps with finding direction. And you can always tell when the creator of some tool has thought things through, has worked through the idea hundreds of times, sat with it for long enough. No matter how good the tools get, you can’t do that in 48 hours.

The tools don’t even matter. Honestly, I don’t care about whether every line of an app I use has been written by hand or Claude Code. What I care about is the craft, the thought that went into how the app should “feel”, what the experience is like for the person using it.

An app built with the slow growth mindset almost always checks these boxes.

Even when they don't hit some flashy revenue number on day one, I believe in the long term, you can only succeed when you work like this.

Apps attract the audience they deserve. Apps built with care attract users who care.

And I also believe that once you’re known as someone who “cares” as a creator, you have won. A reputation like this is enormously hard to earn and invaluable.

On the other hand, if people know you as someone who’s only selling them something to make a quick buck and reach another revenue milestone, you’re in trouble. Recovering from this kind of reputation is even harder.

So choose wisely.

It’ll be way more fulfilling as well:

Most of the founders I know were happiest in their early days when it was just them and a buddy building cool shit around a kitchen table.

That’s exactly the vibe I’m optimizing for when building my own software.

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In hindsight, one of his videos had a huge impact on me. Despite it being a simple video with a simple message:

But the great thing about our world today, with the internet and all the tools available to you, is that we can build stuff and just see what happens. You can trade in the time that you would spend watching Netflix or playing video games and launch that tool, or launch that blog, or create that YouTube channel. The most amazing thing about it is that most of the time, you don't have to invest anything other than your time.

I remember my 15 year old self being fascinated by this idea. This person who I look up to tells me that the one thing that changed his life is simply using his time in a more intentional way and, like, just create stuff? I don’t need anything fancy to get started? I can just do it?

Now, I didn’t stop watching Netflix after this video, but I started to work on projects more consciously. Nothing spectacular – most of the artifacts from that early time only exist on my hard drive. But I still did the work, simply because I wanted to and found it interesting. Not because I felt I had to.

Even if the obvious results of this mindset shift weren’t immediate, when looking back, it definitely changed my life as well.

Two concrete examples.

During the pandemic, I started to get interested in Webflow, because working in Wordpress at my day job didn’t bring me any joy anymore. So I started to tinker around with Webflow in the evenings and built small websites. A couple of months later, I applied as a Webflow Developer at another agency with a custom built site. On the same evening, I heard back from them and long story short, I got the job!

Sharing my work online played a huge role in this journey as well. From about 2018 on, back when “Design Twitter” was the coolest community on the internet I could imagine, I enjoyed sharing short snippets of my work on there. Sometimes design related, sometimes little coding projects. It’s how I met Cédric, another Swiss designer. After some time, he hired me for coding related freelance work and fast forward to today, I now work with him at the agency he co-founded last year.

I could continue with listing examples, but most of them, and that’s the truth as well, didn’t have this huge apparent impact on my life. Things like the #100DaysofSwiftUI challenge or when I made minimalist visualizations for each chapter of a book I really enjoyed.

Honestly, I think these projects were just as if not even more important than the obvious outcomes. They gave me much joy, allowed me to explore what I like doing and shaped my taste as a designer, coder, creator in general.

If you think about it, even writing posts for this blog counts as a side project. I never knew that I liked to blog but still, here I am. It doesn’t tie to my other design/code related creations in an obvious way. On the other hand, I think becoming a better writer, a better communicator, also makes you a better designer and programmer. So even seemingly unrelated side projects allow you to grow as a person.

One huge trap you can fall into though (which I probably fell into at times) is taking your side projects too seriously and trying to monetize your hobby in some way, shape, or form.

I think things like this shouldn’t be planned or expected. If they happen, they happen, if they don’t, they don’t. Both outcomes are ok.

At its core, side projects should always be driven by curiosity, because you want to create something that didn’t exist before. Not the desire to reach a specific (especially monetary) goal.

To summarize Mackenzie’s video and my own experience in one sentence:

Follow your curiosity, create things and you’ll be surprised where all of this takes you.

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But since then, that habit of writing daily has faded quite a bit. And especially lately, my brain felt very scattered across different things that are very important to me when it comes to creating and learning: Building Billow at my day job, being a good student at University and working on my own projects like Morgenblau or Kai.

But I also noticed that these three things have a particular “seriousness” to them that often makes it harder for me to start working on them day to day.

I need something right now that I can do regularly that still feels fun and fulfilling, while not being so cognitively demanding. I love programming and especially in this day and age with all the possibilities we have, it is more fun than ever. But despite what all the Vibe Coding gurus say, real engineering and programming can’t be done on autopilot. I notice this every day: Crafting something truly great is still hard.

Writing on the other hand, when done right and under the right circumstances, never really feels hard to me. It’s more like structured thinking and I always feel better after having written something. Not tired but happy.

That’s why I’m borrowing Anne-Laure’s concept of a PACT². Doing something purposeful, that’s actionable, can be done continuously and is trackable.

Worded in the suggested format, my PACT is:

I will publish a post daily on this blog for the next 30 days

No other real rules besides that. Posts can be long or short, sometimes structured, sometimes not. But always something that’s on my mind when I sit down to write. And I’ll try to make the posts atomic: Just one core idea to explore, not trying to do too much.

One inspiration for this challenge that I want to name here is Robert with his personal blog. He publishes a post (almost) daily and it’s probably the only blog with such a high post frequency that I practically read every day. My guess is that it’s because his posts a) always have a consistently manageable length, b) feel very personal and c) most of the time tie back to a topic I’m passionate about like blogging or living a simpler life.

So yeah, my timer for 15 minutes just went off so I guess it’s time to not overthink it and just get this post out now.

See you tomorrow :)

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Although the occasion is very devastating, I still found the quote below worth sharing.

For context, the whole interview revolves around uncertainty in life and how to cope with it from a philosophical angle.

Philosopher Wilhelm Schmid (translated):

[…] There is also the other side of life, where something completely unexpected can always happen. There are people who put enormous energy into fantasizing about the evil things they could do. The good thing is that there are many people who put enormous energy into thinking about the great things they could do. The modern world was built on this basis. It didn't just fall from the sky, but is the product of a great many people who invented and realized wonderful things. We shouldn't forget that in all of this.

Something worth keeping in mind despite all the uncertainty and cruelness that today’s world can expose us to.

Source

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If you don’t know, Claude Code is currently widely considered the gold standard when it comes to agentic engineering. So his words carry a lot of weight.

What you’ll immediately notice when you hear Boris talk is how calm and clear he speaks. He sounds very considerate and doesn’t have to use hollow phrases to get the audience to keep listening to him.

(I think the intro sequence at the beginning of the podcast does him a disservice since it takes many of his statements vastly out of context.)

I also like that he, despite him working for Anthropic, clearly states that he doesn’t think that truly hands-off agentic use (or anything close to that) is possible yet. He primarily uses Claude for the stuff that it’s really good at right now. Namely the writing of code itself. Steering, giving context, deciding and reviewing is still something he largely does himself.

Now, for a contrast, type “Claude Code” into your YouTube search bar.

You’ll see a lot of videos that are titled like this:

“Claude Code is INSANE and I’m gonna teach you everything about it in just 20 minutes!!!”
– Channel that made SEO content 6 months ago

I know it’s simply the attention economy at play but it always saddens me to see this.

No matter the topic, in general, the voices you shouldn’t be listening to are amplified while the valuable insights by people who know their craft are way harder to find.

It’s always important to remember that almost nothing in this world is as black and white as some people want you to believe. Most things have a nuance to them you only discover when you don’t fall for the extreme takes.

We should all make sure we give our attention to people who truly deserve it. Not the ones screaming the loudest. But the calm builder whose actions speak louder than words.

Because, remember:

Your attention is expensive

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Ok, hear me out here.

Two days ago, I posted this note:

With the exams finished and my new personal website out in the world, it's time to dive into the world of iOS development again 🥳
I will talk more about the app in the next couple of days, but as a little teaser, here's the icon :)

Well… maybe not anymore.

Yesterday, I worked a little on the app again, but I felt almost no enthusiasm, no joy anymore. It’ll probably come back in the future, but right now, it just didn’t feel right. So this particular project is on hold for the foreseeable future.

What I am enthusiastic about right now is the social web and more particular the AT Protocol¹. It really feels like 2026 is gonna be a big year for this part of the internet. And I want to be a part of that.

The web is where my programming journey began over 10 years ago, it’s what I feel most passionate about.

A couple of days ago, Tim launched an RSS-reader on the AT Protocol. This is pretty great timing, as I was writing about something similar just last month. And since in the protocol, everything is public, I can just build my own take at an RSS reader² but still leverage Tim’s Lexicon, so both are compatible with each other – Tim even encourages this.

So… my next project will be my own shot at the “ideal” (at least for me) RSS reader for the Atmosphere. It’ll be a mix and match of true and tried concepts from products like Reeder, but also new and innovative ones like Alcove or this phenomenal post. Plus obviously some ideas of my own.

Hopefully, something that will be as useful to you as it’ll be to me. With a heavy focus on clean and minimal design and a great reading experience.

I’m gonna call it “Morgenblau”. Quite similar to the German word “Morgenrot”³, but blue is a way better fit for an Atmosphere product.

Exciting times ahead! I set up a simple waitlist form over at morgen.blue if you don’t want to miss anything related to the development of the app. But I’ll also post the occasional update here on my site.

Let me leave you with one question if you’re already using RSS:

What is one thing that you would change in your favorite reader to make it even better?

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Last Sunday, approximately 1.5 years after its launch, my old website got retired¹, and this new one got published. Maybe you’ve seen it already these past couple of days – if not, then welcome!

In this post, I want to give you a glimpse behind the scenes, some decisions I made and why, and where we’re heading.

Enjoy :)

The reason

I wasn’t really “unhappy” with my old website per se, there were just a few gripes I had with it. I still like the design and could’ve definitely used it on this new site as well, but I also wanted to go in another direction, ever since posting a logo concept a couple of months ago.

The main “problems” with the old site were:

• It felt too “static” to me and the blog posts weren’t really first class citizens.
• The content was managed via Git which is a simple method on one hand, on the other one, it meant that I could only really publish from my laptop and not really from e.g. my phone.

One place where you can see this pretty well is /photos. Uploading a new one was just too much of a hassle: I had to manually resize and rename the image, drag it into Darkmatter, find a unique slug and only then could I publish it. Just too many steps, which resulted in me not posting new photos for almost the entirety of the lifetime of the old site.

Things had to change.

The concept

The main goal was to make the dynamic content (a.k.a. posts, notes, photos & races) front and center. Which led me to design kind of my own personal social media profile on the internet. The main inspiration for that came from John, the Founder of Ghost (more on that later). If you visit his website, you will definitely see that.

The best decision I made regarding this dynamic content is the separation between posts and notes. Notes are my format to “just post” stuff without a high barrier. For example, notes don’t have a title, they just get an automatic slug. And also, notes can come from external places. Currently, it also includes all my Bluesky posts with the #buildinpublic or ones, that have a link in them (#link, this also includes reposts and quotes).

I also was able to backfill all my tweets from my now deleted X account, all the way back from 2018. Go visit #tweet for a trip down memory lane, it’s pretty interesting to see, what I’ve posted in the past².

As with other social media profiles, you can also follow my site by hitting the big orange button on the top right. But instead of needing to have some sort of account, you can do it with two of the most open protocols the internet has to offer: Email³ and RSS.

The RSS feeds are now split up by content type as well, so you can just follow whatever interests you. The old feed at /rss is mapped to the “Everything”-Feed – sorry if I spammed your reader on Sunday.

One other part I want to highlight more on this new site are slash pages. But that’s still a work in progress at the moment…

The tech

The MVP of my new site is, undoubtedly, Kirby. If you’re a web dev and want to tinker a bit with your site, I can’t imagine a better CMS to use. It is so flexible, has great plugins, is a one-time purchase and doesn’t even need a database! Everything is just flat files and PHP, nothing more. Pretty cool.

Having it be a server-side application built with PHP proves to be a great advantage for me. For one, I work with Laravel at my day job, so I’m very familiar with the language. Plus, the caching system is fantastic, the site feels really fast. And I also don’t have to resize my images anymore, the site does it by itself! Once when I upload them, another time when they get served. This is such a quality of life improvement for me when it comes to publishing more!

The only reason I didn’t commit to Kirby earlier was, that I was a bit afraid to tinker too much and never finish launching the site. But luckily, Claude Code is so good by now, that I managed to build this whole site in roughly 2 weeks without any prior knowledge of the CMS (while being in exam season).

So yeah, sorry Kirby for not committing to you earlier…

…but the other options were all so tempting as well:

• Astro + a new Backend: This would have allowed me to essentially reuse 90% of the code and probably would’ve been a very efficient solution. On the other hand, I didn’t really feel like managing two moving parts and I also wanted to try something new.
• Ghost:⁴ Ghost is the most beautiful CMS out there and if I’m honest, this would’ve been the main reason for me to choose it. It’s a great CMS for classic blogs or publications, but I think for my setup with these different content types, I would’ve fought the system too many times. Their social integrations are pretty cool though, and having a built-in newsletter is also very nice.
• Micro.Blog: Speaking of social integrations, Micro.Blog is the undisputed king of that and one of the indie web’s favorites. This platform gets you up to speed quickly, POSSE is built in, and you don’t need to have much technical knowledge to use it. That’s why this platform would probably be my recommendation if you’re a non-techie. But exactly this approach was just too restricting for me, as I found out. The developer experience wasn’t really great when I tried to build my own theme, so I discarded the idea again.
• Leaflet: This is an atproto-based blogging platform, which means, it’s powered by the same protocol underlying Bluesky. I’m very interested into this protocol these days, so using Leaflet in conjunction with Astro was also an interesting choice to consider. But again, this felt like managing too many moving parts and when it comes to social publishing on the at protocol, I think I have a better idea (more on that below).

The future

Talking about the future of this newly launched website, I plan to mainly evolve it into two directions:

First, I want to add more slash pages. I like the idea of just being able to say “Visit my /uses⁵ page to see all the products and tools I use in my life” and to hopefully help others discover cool stuff or learn more about me. The /slash page will be the hub of all these pages. Except for /now and /about, which remain in the nav, as they are the most important ones in my opinion.

The other direction is the social layer of my web presence. I truly believe that the before mentioned at protocol has a huge potential to be that layer and helps us connect the indie web (and also the broader web in general). For example, there is this new lexicon (essentially just a schema to save data in atproto) called standard.site, which aims to provide one unified interface for long-form content on the web. If I publish my posts not only as web pages but also as documents using this lexicon, the whole atmosphere (the collection of apps built on top of atproto) can be notified of and consume them. There are already tools that allow you to see all, yes really all, the posts that are published this way⁶. This is essentially the first step towards a more social indie web that I outlined in my last post.

But all these things are plans for the future. Right now, I’m happy that I was able to launch this new website in a relatively short amount of time and how it turned out. The next small steps are to add more basic slash pages and photos from the last 1.5 years. There’s a big catalog to go through :)

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Sure, there are standards like Webmentions, which lets one website notify another when it for example links to it in a comment. But this particular one is just too niche and challenging to implement. Heck, I’m a dev, and I’m not even sure if I have implemented them correctly.

A standard that has stood its test of time is RSS. I would argue that it is, in absolute numbers, more widespread than during its glory days 10 or 20 years ago – mainly because of podcasts. But it’s still a one-way street. Someone publishes content, and you get to consume it in a central place – that’s it.

What if RSS or an RSS-like format got more social? Some sort of RSS 2.0¹. I’m mainly talking about two things:

• Social interactions
• Discovery

Having a way to quickly reply and provide feedback without having to use another platform would be a game changer. Sure, email feels more personal, and I love it, when someone writes me in response to a post. But let’s be real; people just don’t do that very often. Having likes would also be great. Not as a vanity metric, but more as a signal that you are not posting into the void and people actually took the time to read what you had to say.

Discovery would also help with the problem of people not knowing where to start when adopting RSS. They could just subscribe to one feed and similar ones would be recommended. The key difference to a social media algorithm here would be that you still have full control of your RSS reader. Nothing gets pushed on you, and only posts from subscribed websites show up – still in reverse chronological order.

I’m not sure yet how this would be implemented exactly on a technical level, and especially how to still make it privacy-preserving. But what I do know is that some interesting developments are being made.

Primarily within the Open Social Web. Protocols like ActivityPub and AT Protocol are the future. Maybe the latter even more so than the former for what I’m describing.

If you don’t know what AT is, I can only recommend you to read this phenomenal post by Dan Abramov: Open Social

But in short, in this protocol, each user controls their data in a thing called “PDS”, short for “Personal Data Server”. No matter what data type, a Bluesky Post, a book logged on Bookhive a repo hosted over on Tangled or even a simple static website – everything is in there². And you can pretty easily host it yourself, especially compared to let’s say a full-fledged ActivityPub server.

Back to the topic of a more social IndieWeb. The good news is: There is some progress being made in this space. I especially wanted to highlight three projects here:

Micro.blog is the OG of making personal websites more social. If you post your content on there, it is automatically distributed to Mastodon, Bluesky et al. But it still feels more like a social media profile than a personal website.

Ghost made some considerable improvements as well with their v6 release. Now, all websites running with this CMS are essentially connected to each other and part of the wider Fediverse. Sadly, the ATproto feature only works via a bridge for now. But I still think this is the best tool right now if you want to make your personal website more social³.

The project I’m most excited about though is called Leaflet. It’s a blogging platform that lives on the AT Protocol. And you can already see the advantages of that regarding social interactions: When you comment on a Leaflet link over on Bluesky, the comment automatically shows up in the Leaflet comment section. You can also easily share quotes on Bluesky, and they again show up in Leaflet. Their creators are actively exploring on how to make a more social RSS, and I am very much rooting for them!

Still, a long way to go, though. But maybe, until 2030, some of these imaginations will turn into reality. The Open Social Web will have succeeded over the walled gardens, and the IndieWeb is thriving like never before. I certainly hope this will be the case!

What can you do right now?

Join the IndieWeb! Start your own personal website, start sharing what you’re working on over on Mastodon or Bluesky, blog on Micro.blog, Ghost or Leaflet. We can all help to make the IndieWeb feel more social :)

This is my entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of December 2025 about the IndieWeb in 2030 (hosted by V.H. Belvadi). If you have a blog, consider writing an entry yourself.

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It’s the beginning of December again, which means Spotify Wrapped has just dropped. Like last year, I want to share mine here and encourage you to do the same, so we can all discover some great music :)

This year, Spotify used a TikTok-style vertical scroll for Wrapped instead of the old Instagram Story format. I didn’t quite like it as much because you had to actively swipe pretty often to get to the next bit of information. In previous years, you could just let it play through and watch your Wrapped like a movie. Since leaving Instagram and TikTok, I’m just not used to that format anymore, so maybe that’s on me.

But anyway, let’s take a look at the list now. Every song is linked, so you can directly listen to it on Spotify. Enjoy, and let me know if you also like one of these!

Top Songs

1. Lost My Mind – BUNT., Elley Duhé

106 listens

Third time in my Wrapped, second time in a row on the top spot: What can I say? This song is just great! Together with Broken (Lost Frequencies Cut) and Clouds (also by BUNT.), it’s the only song that has been in my heavy rotation since 2023. All songs still remind me of my Seoul trip, so they always make me nostalgic. And again, it’s just a remarkable song – also for running.

2. Promised Land (Patrick Lite Remix) – Saco, Sparkle, Patrick Lite

83 listens

Especially the first couple of notes, this “guitar sound” (for the lack of a better word) always calms me down. It’s generally a pretty chill song, and quite the opposite to #1. Definitely not something for a running playlist but still a great one.

3. Clouds – BUNT., Nate Traveller

72 listens

Well, who’s that again? Take a guess who was my favorite artist this year ;)
This song was also in my top 5 last year, but it even climbed one place higher this time. Pretty similar style to #1 but that’s why I listen to BUNT. so often. It’s this mix of dreamy sounds and samples with techno elements that is just awesome. It was also the artist’s break-out single in 2023 and still holds up to this day.

4. The Unknown – PALASTIC, Sam Welch

66 listens

PALASTIC has a couple of great songs, but this one has stuck with me the most this year. It’s a pretty warm and calming sound, the sort of music you would listen to on a late night car drive or commute. If you like this one, also check out their other songs, they have similar vibes.

5. Dreamer – Tom Bailey

63 listens

An ode to childhood and also a dreamy¹ song again. I haven’t listened much to Tom’s other songs, but I probably should. What’s also cool about this song are the visuals, which show VHS-style clips of the artist’s childhood. For the extra nostalgic feels.

Honorable Mentions

Songs that didn’t make it into the top 5 but that I still liked very much:

• Different Time – Swimming Paul
• One Day At A Time – Thierry Von Der Warth, Jay Mason
• Bara Bada Bastu – KAJ
• Best Day of My Life (BUNT. Version) – BUNT. Tom Odell
• Other Side – AVAION, BUNT.
• All The Stars – Lonely in the Rain, Saavan
• Happy Enough – Tors
• Only Friends – BUNT.
• Spaces – BUNT., The Chainsmokers, Izzy Bizu
• Blaze – Booka Shade, Jan Blomqvist
• VHS RAVE – Tiësto, Swimming Paul
• Safety Net – Bea and her Business
• WACUKA – AVAION, Sofiya Nzau
• Unbound – Anderholm, Alexandra Pride
• Lose My Mind – Don Toliver, Doja Cat
• Messy – ROSÉ

Top Artists

Just for completeness’ sake, here are my most listened to artists:

1. BUNT.
2. Lost Frequencies
3. Swimming Paul
4. Ben Böhmer
5. Myles Smith

What was your song discovery this year? I’d love to know!

If you want to travel back in time, you can also read my Spotify Wrapped 2024.

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The calculator is incredible. […] To perform its function it only requires light (thanks to its tiny solar panel on the front) […].

If you traveled back in time with this little thing that you can hold in the palm of your hand and gave it to people living thousands of years ago, it would just… work. It would feel completely, wildly, insanely miraculous.

This post reads like a love letter to one of the few pieces of tech that just works: No account, no other dependencies, not even electricity is needed. How beautiful!

I love computers, the internet, modern technology. But this hits different. Especially coming from someone who was part of the early team at OpenAI.

Read the full article here: https://karpathy.bearblog.dev/i-love-calculator/. His blog¹ is great in general. There aren't that many posts on there, but the ones that are, are so interesting to read.

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Yesterday, I participated at the Lausanne Marathon – my first-ever race at that distance. Now, on the day after the big event, I want to recap a bit and write about my experience. For future me and maybe for you as well, if you’re interested and perhaps even want to run a marathon yourself.

The result

First things first, I actually finished the marathon! This was my primary goal and I achieved it, which feels great.

My secondary goal was to finish with a sub 4h time. As you can see, I didn’t manage to do that (the official chip time was 4:18:01). But after having completed the whole distance and knowing the pain I went through, this almost feels like an afterthought. At least it wasn’t close, and I didn’t have to stress myself out on the last couple of kilometers.

As I crossed the finish line, I was just happy that I pushed through and that now, all the pain, all the doubts, all the struggles were over, and I was finally able to rest. My family was there to support me, and seeing them again meant so much to me. This is a moment that nobody can take away from me, and that I will remember and cherish forever.

The prep

As the saying goes, the true marathon is all the training you do to be able to compete in the race. The marathon in the end is just the reward for all the hours spent on the tracks the months before.

To give you a glimpse into my training, here are some details:

I ran the whole year and raced at various events. But the true marathon training started on June 24th, so 18 weeks ago. Since then, I have…

• …completed 59 runs, 2 of which were 10k races…
• …which took me almost 65 hours…
• …and made me cover 634 km.

Apart from the summer vacation in Scandinavia, I followed the plan almost without fail. The longest long run at 30k took place roughly a month before the race. It’s kinda fascinating how I grew to enjoy these long runs, and how a 16k one suddenly felt like it wasn’t that long.

I also trained most of my time in zones 1 and 2, which was a bit of a weird feeling in the beginning. When I prepared for 10k races in the past, I usually had way more speed sessions in the plan, so I had to adjust a bit to the lower paces.

The week of the race, I unfortunately didn’t feel that great and was afraid that I would get sick. My HRV decreased quite a bit, but maybe that was also due to the nervousness. Luckily, though, I stayed healthy and felt confident that I could run the race.

The race

At the start line, I felt awesome. And on the first few kilometers, that feeling proved true: Everything felt easy, and I was able to settle into a good rhythm. The weather was great, a bit cloudy but not rainy, and the temperature was very comfortable. The whole course ran along the shore of Lake Geneva and made for a very picturesque view.

Around the half-marathon mark, though, I felt some fatigue creeping in, and I had to slow down my pace a bit. But since I had run the first half quite a bit faster than anticipated (I was roughly 1 km ahead of my planned pace), I just ran the next couple of kilometers almost exactly at the pace my Garmin was suggesting. At this point, I was still ahead of the 4h pacer. But I already felt that the way until the finish line would be a very long one.

Right before the 30k mark, though, I slowed down quite dramatically and a couple of hundred meters later, I had to walk a few steps for the first time. At that point, I was seriously doubting how I would be able to ever run another 12 kilometers until this whole thing was over. It wasn’t a problem with my cardiovascular system (no problem there whatsoever, my HR stayed quite even during the entire race), but my legs just completely shut down. This was also roughly the spot where the 4h pacer caught up and overtook me. So I knew that the goalposts had now shifted, and the goal was just to finish the race.

I felt that there wasn’t a possibility that I could ever run all the way to the finish line. So I switched to another strategy: Whenever my Garmin alerted me that another kilometer had passed, I was allowed to walk 100 meters. And then run another 900 meters until the next kilometer mark. It was just me against my head who told me to just stop and my legs who felt like they would just quit by themselves if I didn’t do it. Only the next step mattered. Step by step toward the finish line – nothing more, nothing less.

So the saying that the marathon race really starts after 30 kilometers is definitely true. If I had to tell you what defined this race for me, these were the exact moments that do it justice. I was overwhelmed by all the feelings and thoughts I had but also by the sheer kindness of the strangers who supported us all by cheering, shouting our names, holding up motivational posters, high-fiving, handing out snacks, and one man even helping me refill my water bottle.

This whole time, apart from wanting to finish the race, I only had one goal in mind: I wanted to be able to run the last kilometer in full without any walking breaks. And let me tell you, this was certainly the longest kilometer of my life. But as the finish line came in sight, I was even able to pick up the pace a tiny bit and cross it without any regrets. Realizing at that moment that I had just completed my first marathon was one of the best and most overwhelming feelings I ever felt.

Lessons learned

In hindsight, there are obviously a few things that I could have done better. Here is what I would do different the next time:

Really prioritize a negative split

I now know that feeling great on the first half of the race is not at all an indicator of how the race will unfold. So even if the starting pace of the pacer feels “too slow”, there is a reason why you should run a marathon in a negative split (i.e., running the second half faster than the first).

Focus more on nutrition

I already took nutrition way more seriously than in my other races, but there is still some room for improvement. For example, I couldn’t take my last gel because I felt like I was going to puke afterward. So having some sort of carbohydrate-drink on me would have been a good idea. Also, I didn’t explicitly carb-load the week before, which might also have contributed to my muscular fatigue.

Completing a marathon by itself is a big achievement

My longest race before this one was a half-marathon, the longest run ever was that 30k from the training plan. I really underestimated what these last 10 – 12 kilometers demand from your body. So for a next marathon, I would allow myself to just enjoy the race more without focusing so much on my pace.

What’s next

Yesterday evening, I was glad that I experienced finishing a marathon but was also quite sure, that I wouldn’t ever do this to myself again voluntarily. Why would I?

But today, despite having the heaviest legs ever, the world already looks a bit different. I’m not committing to anything concrete yet, but I will say this much: This probably wasn’t my last marathon.

A big thank you to everyone who supported me on this journey \<3

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As a future reference for me and hopefully as inspiration for you, I wanted to share some of the gems I found:

Host Grotesk

A beautiful sans-serif font that works very well for headings. I like that it has a very geometric feel while still featuring some interesting and “sharp” details like the descenders for j and y. The lowercase a looks beautiful as well, kinda like a loop.

It is based on Poppins (which explains why I like it so much) but not nearly as overused – let’s hope it stays that way.

Specimen: https://elementtype.co/host-grotesk/

Alternatives to Host Grotesk that I also consider great sans-serif options for headings are:

Onest

Specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Onest

Rethink Sans

Specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Rethink+Sans

Geist

Geist is made by Vercel and thus already very popular. It’s a great all-rounder font that I like to substitute for Inter, since it’s still not as widely used as the latter. There is also a Mono version, which is a plus.

Specimen: https://vercel.com/font

Aeonik Fono

This is a font I immediately fell in love with. It is based on the Aeonik font made by the same type foundry and, as the name hints at, is a hybrid between the sans-serif and the mono version. I like beautiful sans-serif fonts, I like mono fonts – this feels like a match made in heaven.

Only “downside” for me right now is that it’s paid, so it’s not gonna be used on my personal website. But I’ll bookmark it for future budgets with bigger budgets :)

Specimen: https://cotypefoundry.com/our-fonts/aeonik-fono

Departure Mono

A font straight out of a flight ticket. I’m really digging this aesthetic right now, possibly because of my usage of FocusFlights¹. It obviously doesn’t fit every design, but when it does, it gives it that special ✨extra✨.

Specimen: https://departuremono.com/

An alternative with a similar vibe would be:

Pixelify Sans

Specimen: https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Pixelify+Sans

If you happen to know other great fonts that are not that widely used, please let me know!

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Success is being excited to go to work and being excited to come home.

Sounds like the recipe for a good and fulfilling life.

Discovered via Aaron Francis’ Newsletter.

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Number Go Up by Zeke Faux is a unique blend of investigative journalism, social commentary and a true crime recount of some of the biggest frauds in recent years. And it was an interesting read because I experienced most of the stories told in the book in real time.

Zeke’s book documents the 2020–2022 hype-cycle and subsequent fall of the crypto industry. Think Dogecoin, NFTs, news about Bitcoin hitting a new all-time high and the like. It was the pandemic and also the time when I first dabbled with crypto. Luckily, I only scratched the surface back then, so most of the stories from this book I only knew from hearsay. Looking back at this time by reading this book, it’s pretty crazy and somewhat hilarious what was going on during that time. And in hindsight, I’m also glad that I was lucky enough to not have gotten pulled in too deep.

What’s also hilarious is the fact, that this book is technically a failure. All the stories are hold together by Zeke’s effort to prove that Tether, a stablecoin that is supposed to always mirror the value of the US-Dollar, is a fraud. The only problem: Tether is one of the few companies that actually managed to survive the big crypto crash of 2022.

But that doesn’t make the book any less interesting, quite the opposite, actually. Together with Zeke, we set off on a journey through the weird world of crypto. There we meet child-actors and ex-plastic surgeons turned billionaires, crypto bros who try to make Bitcoin a national currency and also Sam Bankman-Fried. In just a couple of weeks, he went from being the poster boy of the “serious” crypto people to one of the biggest fraudsters in recent history.

Practically every chapter tells a new unbelievable and odd story from the crypto-mania, so the book never gets boring. The story about Tether is just the frame that holds everything together and is the driving force behind everything that Zeke investigates. Combine this structure with Faux’s funny writing, and you get a book that is almost impossible to put down. At least if you are (or were) somewhat interested in cryptocurrencies yourself.

Two well-written and funny bits I don’t want to keep from you:

“Anybody around the world can play and make money playing,” Cuban said in a quasi-documentary on Axie posted on YouTube. “And it makes perfect sense once you dig into the numbers.”
The numbers actually made no sense.

The mysterious text message arrived one night in August 2022, while I was out at a bar with a friend. It read: “Hi David, I’m Vicky Ho don't you remember me?”
This was strange, because my name is not David, and I couldn’t remember anyone named Vicky.

A book well worth your time: 4.75/5

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Currently, I am in between the two exam seasons after my second semester at uni. I still work part-time during the summer and obviously have to start preparing a bit for my upcoming math exam in September, but I still enjoy doing a bit more stuff just for fun.

Right now, that “fun” mainly consists of getting back into iOS app development with Swift and SwiftUI. I already started learning it 3 years ago when I completed the well-known 100 Days of Hacking with Swift challenge. But after finishing it, I never really pursued that path, and, apart from one or two demo apps, never published anything.

A lot has changed since then, and picking up developing with Swift again is an even better experience right now. For two reasons:

For one, SwiftUI received some pretty substantial upgrades since I last touched it. Most notably, SwiftData for data storage and @Observable, which makes creating ViewModels way easier than it was back in 2022.

And secondly, LLMs like Claude or Gemini are now a way bigger thing than during my last adventure into Swift territory. Since there isn’t as much content on the internet about writing apps with Swift (at least compared to writing web apps with Next.js, for example), I remember getting stuck pretty often on some weird Swift peculiarities when I last tried to build an app. Things you don’t remember or can’t know as a beginner.

This has changed pretty substantially since then. With (currently) Gemini as my learning partner, I move much faster now and also don’t get stuck as frequently. On the other hand, because of the smaller training data on Swift that Gemini has, it’s not really able to write my code for me like it would when writing a web app. It has a solid knowledge of the foundations, but can’t always connect the dots just right.

I’d argue that this is actually a great thing for me right now: I can quickly ask questions and get answers about the main APIs that Swift and SwiftUI provide but am still forced to try to understand them to the point that I can combine them into a fully functional app. A classic win-win situation, I’d say.

Still, having the foundation from completing that 100 day SwiftUI challenge (and my general programming knowledge as well) proves quite helpful, no matter how much weight Gemini can lift off my shoulders.

After roughly one week of getting back into the tools, following some tutorials and diving into the new APIs, I am now in the process of building my first proper iOS app! One that I actually plan to release. I don’t want to reveal too much yet, but once I have a somewhat functioning MVP, I’ll talk about more details.

And if you’re interested, I’ll also provide a TestFlight link, so you can try it out yourself and let me know what you think about it.

I’ll keep you in the loop :)

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Both have this highly polished but still raw and imperfect aesthetic that I really like. Kinda like if Beef was an ad.

The first one is from Strava:

The second one from Nike¹:

The latter was particularly relatable, as it actually rained during today’s run. I quite enjoy these kinds of workouts in the drizzle – fewer people around and everything seems calmer. Pure bliss.

Except when a car next to you drives through a ginormous puddle.

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Long time, no see – hi again!

If you’re a regular visitor of this blog, you might have noticed that my post frequency on here dropped quite a bit since starting uni. And even more so since the start of the new year.

But a lot has happened and changed meanwhile, so that’s what I want to talk about in this post. Let’s get you up to speed, shall we?

Uni: Exam season

The whole month of January and the initial part of February was mostly dominated by my first uni exam season. I had a total of four exams, two of them took place in January and were comparatively easy to prepare for (one in social sciences and one in computer science). The other two were in maths – namely linear algebra 1 and analysis 1. And they weren’t easy at all.

I was always someone who did pretty well in exam situations without needing too much preparation thus far in my career. Oh boy was it different this time…

Since we had to hand in exercises every week throughout the semester, I was already pretty deep into the material by the time January rolled around. Still, I have never invested more time in an exam than I did for the two math ones. So the entire month essentially consisted of trying to understand the syllabus more deeply with the help of many YouTube videos, lots of googling around and trying to use Claude as my personal tutor¹. I also used RemNote for memorizing all the theorems and proofs we had to know by heart, and set out to solve as many mock exams as I could.

In the end, I wasn’t able to achieve that pre-exam confidence that I was used to, which was unfamiliar (but since it was a uni exam, also to be expected). I also knew that I had done everything in my power to prepare myself, though.

The results proved that all of this effort was time and energy spent well: I passed all four of my exams with a grade between 4.5 and 5.5 (4 means passed, 6 is the best grade). And because I invested so much, the feeling afterward was even more rewarding :)

The only downside was that just one week after the final exam, uni started again. Kind of a bummer, but it makes me look forward to the 3-month summer break even more.

Work: A big project

Work was also quite busy these past few weeks. Our agency took on the biggest project we ever had to handle: A complete redesign of the website of one of the biggest baby food manufacturers here in Switzerland. In the past, we mostly worked with tech startups or small to medium-sized companies that weren’t that widely known. But this brand was immediately recognized by everyone in my social circle who had ever had a baby, which was cool to see.

Luckily, the client was very pleasant to work with, and the project went as smooth as we could expect. The only source of stress in the end was our tight timeline. And the fact that we, alongside the development of the new website, also launched a community forum as well. Fully built with Webflow and Wized (and a surprisingly small amount of custom code).

All in all, a very cool project and I learned a ton of new stuff!

Personal: Moving out

Now onto what was probably the most significant change so far this year.

About two weeks ago, I finally moved out of my parent's house and in together with my girlfriend in our own first apartment!

I never moved houses in my conscious life so far, so all of this moving stuff was very new to me. But we had the support of both our families and lots of helping hands, which made the actual moving day a lot less stressful than I expected².

We have since become accustomed to the new living conditions and things work out well so far. Not everything is finished yet (right now, there are still boxes full of my books next to me, for example, that I still have to store somewhere), but we’re getting there.

Despite the usual challenges that such a change provides, we are both delighted with this new space that we get to call home now.

Creativity & Sport: What’s going on

Because of all the things above, I have unfortunately slacked a bit on the creative front. But I hope that, with things getting back to normal now, I’ll have more time again to dedicate to this website and other projects I want to tackle. So if all goes along as planned, you can expect to hear from me a bit more frequently in the coming weeks and months on this blog.

I still aim to build v2 of this website with Kirby CMS and a slight redesign³ soon. And I also plan to finally commit and build one of these Laravel project ideas that are still floating around my head. Keep a look at my /now page to stay up to date on that front!

I’m pretty proud to say that I was able to follow my running training plan quite well during all this time. I’m still training for the Grand Prix Bern, a 10-Mile race that takes place in a couple of weeks. My goal is to beat my time from last year (which was around 01:20:00) and maybe even break the 01:17:00 mark. Fingers crossed, that all this training will pay off like it did for the exams.

As for long-term running goals, I still aim to run my first marathon this year (the one in Lausanne in October). It’s still a long way to go with plenty of kilometers to get in, but I hope to be able to publish a “Life Update: I ran my first marathon” this year.

Now, back to studying, working, settling in, creating and running – there are still loads of things to do!

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Luckily, there is an app out there that fixes many of these annoyances. I first heard about it in a video from Matt Birchler, where he talked very enthusiastically about it. But I wasn’t sure if I really needed to purchase another utility app.

This morning, I noticed that it’s now available on Setapp and, since I have a subscription there, free for me to use. So I thought, why not give it a shot?

The app is called Supercharge and is made by renowned indie dev Sindre Sorhus¹.

The quick conclusion after a couple of hours: Matt was right when he praised this app. It fixes so many of these tiny little pet peeves I have with macOS. Granted, all of them are just small improvements to my workflow, but in sum, these little things add up.

Here are the first few features that I already discovered and set up:

• Make ⌘ + X (cut a file/folder) behave like it should in Finder
• Create a .txt file directly in Finder via a shortcut and opening it directly after giving it a name
• Go back a folder level with ⌫ in Finder
• Open files with ↵ instead of renaming them in Finder – renaming now uses ⇧ + ↵
• Prevent accidentally quitting apps by changing the ⌘ + Q shortcut to making me press Q twice
• Automatically un-minimize windows when an app becomes active again
• Automatically install apps from DMG files and trash the file afterward

I've not gone through all the available settings, so I'm sure there'll be many more features to discover.

In short, if you are a Mac power user and especially if you already have a Setapp subscription, go give Supercharge a try!

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For context, the interview is with a man named Mr. Wagner, who turned 105 years old a couple of weeks back. It’s titled “high birthday of a curious mind” and well, it did not disappoint!

Here are the most compelling bits, with some commentary from me.

On historic events

Mr. Wagner was born in the time between the first and second world war. It was a time when the first world war wasn’t even called that – “there had been only one so far”. As a kid, he thought that he would only experience peaceful times during his life. Even before he turned 20, as we all know, he was proven wrong.

I don’t know about you, but this feels scarily accurate to what is going on right now in the world. I also never thought that I would experience a war in Europe, a global pandemic or the renewed rise of extremism and fascism all around the world. Well, I’m not even 25 years old, and it already happened.

On strokes of fate

During his time in the military, Mr. Wagner had an accident that permanently damaged his hearing. For that reason, he couldn’t continue studying ornithology and switched to botany. Later, he received his doctorate in zoology, became an assistant professor in Zurich and was even awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern at the age of 76 for his achievements in the field.

Although the incident in the army and its consequences were horrible for him, Mr. Wagner still managed to have a very successful and fulfilling career. Who knows if it would’ve all played out this way, if he hadn’t been forced to switch to another field of study?

On living 100+ years

Mr. Wagner understandably wasn’t expecting to get this old when he was still a young man. He always thought how great it would be to experience the turn of the millennium. Nowadays, he says, 80-year-olds “seem like young people” to him.

But he also thinks that trying to optimize every aspect of your life to reach such a high age is pointless. He attributes the fact that he was lucky enough to live 100+ years just to a sheer amount of luck.

And I agree to a certain extent – while trying to live a healthy lifestyle is definitely something worth pursuing, I also get that in the end, no day is guaranteed and the unexpected can happen in every moment. I guess it all comes down to finding the balance between doing hard things now to make life better for future you, while also not forgetting to enjoy the present.

There’s one answer from Mr. Wagner that I find equally morbid, funny but also understandable. Because he had such a “good and long life” already, he sometimes tries to overwhelm his heart while climbing the stairs. But he also acknowledges that it wouldn’t be a pretty sight for the person who’d find him afterward.

I think it’s kind of beautiful to be able to say for yourself that you had such a fulfilling life, that you’re ok with it coming to an end.

On insignificance

As a scientist, Mr. Wagner highlights the fact that even if one reaches the same age as him, from a geological standpoint, that timespan is no longer than the blink of an eye.

But during this time, as a thinking being, “you can’t stop being amazed”. The one fact that he can grasp the least is that it was possible for life to begin developing from dead matter. Therefore, he is convinced that there is something out there that exists independently of time and eternity – “whether you call it a god or something else”.

His thirst for knowledge is still there up to this day – for example, he’d like to know how this whole AI thing develops. And if human existence will end because of natural or self-inflicted causes. Let’s hope, the answers to both questions don’t have the connection that I think of right now…

All of this shows how important it is to never stop exploring and learning new things, and to never ever lose your sense of wonder and appreciation for the beautiful world around us.

Some closing thoughts from me

Interviews with old people like this one always help me put my current life, my worries, my plans for the future and everything else into perspective. It’s like zooming out and seeing the bigger picture. People like Mr. Wagner experience so much stuff during their lifetime that is nearly impossible to grasp for me. And these experiences also contain tons of negative ones, a lot of hardship and failure as well.

Sure, this exam that is coming up¹ might seem like such a big hurdle right now and feels like the biggest problem in the world to me. But if I were in Mr. Wagners shoes, at 105 years old, this one moment would feel so insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I would probably smile that I worried so much. One such moment rarely has the impact on my life I might think it has when I live through it.

I am healthy, my loved ones are healthy as well, I have something to eat every day, a roof over my head, I get to study a subject I’m passionate about, I get to create things every day and share it with the world. What more is there to ask for?

We should probably all zoom out a bit more from time to time.

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As I’m currently preparing for my last two (but unfortunately hardest) exams of the semester, I got up early to be at the university library as soon as it opened.

Apart from the “getting out of bed” part of said plan, this always turns out to be an excellent choice.

From where I live, I have to walk around 10 minutes to the train station and then commute for another 20 minutes until I arrive in Bern. This whole 30-minute long journey is always beautiful in the early morning. The village is mostly asleep, only a few cars drive through the streets, it’s chilly, and you can sometimes still see the stars.

There are also significantly fewer commuters on this particular train I usually take than on the subsequent ones. No searching for an empty seat, just sitting down where I want. People are still tired, so no one is talking loudly either, perfect for some reading or just listening to music.

In the library, the headlights aren’t even all turned on at this time, only the ones that are necessary to guide your way to a desk. This means that you get to use the desk lamps, which adds an extra bit of study atmosphere.

After about an hour of studying, I take my first break and head outside to catch some fresh air. This is the absolute best part of the plan:

I get to watch the city slowly waking up.

This view always feels like a reward for waking up early. And having moved one step closer to a goal of mine already.

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Ok, that sounds a bit dramatic. But I am now a part of omg.lol, the proud owner of the “best internet address that I’ve ever had” and a new member of a pretty cool and wholesome Mastodon instance, social.lol.

This means that I also had to leave my old instance, mastodon.design. The switch was pretty easy, thanks to this great video by Matt. But I got asked a couple of times for the reasons behind the switch. So I thought I’d quickly share, why I chose to move to social.lol. Or rather, why I think it’s a cool project and community worth supporting.

First of all, omg.lol is pretty difficult to describe. You essentially get an omg.lol subdomain that comes with a bunch of little tools and additional perks. Things like a kind of “link-in-bio” page, email forwarding, a status log, and so on. But honestly, I just like the vibes of it. It feels equally nerdy, friendly and has big IndieWeb energy.

The main reason I wanted to join though was their Mastodon instance. Plenty of people whose personal blogs I follow are on there, so it felt like a great community to be a part of. And having to pay a small fee of $20 per year to be on there has two big advantages in my opinion:

Everyone in the community contributes financially towards the operating costs of the server, which feels like a very sustainable model compared to other servers. And the quality of posts on the instance itself is notably higher compared to more general instances because people on social.lol explicitly want to be on there.

Granted, my former server mastodon.design also had some great people on there and is generally well run. But one thing that bugged me recently was their choice to completely block (or “defederate”) threads.net on a server level. Adam (the creator of omg.lol) wrote a great article about why that might not be the best idea.

And I agree, this goes against my idea of an open social web as well. Just because the Meta executives have made horrible decisions lately doesn’t mean that I want someone else to block all the people on Threads for me¹. Let the users be in charge!

Apart from the Mastodon server, as already mentioned, omg.lol offers a lot more than just that. For example, you can also prove your ownership of a domain and get a timestamped certificate like this:

Is this a legal document? No.

Is it still a cool way to verify stuff? Hell yeah!

Everything on omg.lol has this kind of energy to it. And everything is open and can be controlled by an API, which is also nice. I’m currently rebuilding this website and might integrate one or two omg.lol features, stay tuned.

If you’ve read this far, I highly encourage you to check out omg.lol yourself.

And to Adam, thanks for creating such a wonderful nerdy place on the internet :)

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It sounds far too simple, but listening to the soundtracks of iconic movies (mainly ones by Christopher Nolan) just does something to my brain.

Whenever I’m on my way to an exam, the last two songs I always listen to are:

Time by Hans Zimmer (from Inception)

Can You Hear The Music by Ludwig Göransson (from Oppenheimer)

Just a couple of minutes to let my mind wander to another world, and I’m ready for whatever real life has to offer.

Webnotes

• Luke shared some of his favorite epic music for epic focus as well.

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Over the past few years, there has been a development towards tools that do more for you – automagically. Note-taking apps are now summarizing articles for you and tagging and connecting them as they see fit. Calendar apps automatically time-block your day, so you always know what to do next. And these to-dos get split by your task manager into manageable chunks without you even having to think about it.

Occasionally, I still think about what the seemingly “perfect” productivity tool might be. A dashboard, that gives you all the data you need at any given moment. That always tells you, what you need to have on top of your mind. And that adapts to events like traffic jams in real-time and adjusts your departure date accordingly.

A tool, that essentially does all the organizational thinking for you, so you can be more creative and focus on what truly matters.

But…

…would you actually be able to know what truly matters, if this shiny new tool always decided what you should do next? If you never paused and pondered about what is truly necessary, and what might not even need to be on your to-do list? Because being efficient does not mean that you are being effective. It’s way more important to work on the right things, not to just do more.

Because of that, over the past few years as well, I’ve seen myself being drawn to simpler productivity systems. Systems, that not only try to make you more efficient, but that also introduce a tiny bit of friction just in the right places.

The best example that comes to mind for this philosophy is the Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll. If you hear about BuJos, you might think about those fancy illustrated spreads that artists post online. But the original implementation is actually quite simple.

Ryder calls his invention a “mindfulness practice, disguised as a productivity system”. Because it’s a very manual system, it relies heavily on recurring rituals, such as migrations: Every month (or even every week), you sit down, flip through the previous days and migrate all the tasks over to the next period, that still seem relevant.

I also follow this practice regularly, and it’s fascinating, how many things we deem urgent and important are actually neither. The simple act of having to copy and paste over something you have already written down before, makes you pause: “Do I really need to carry this task with me?”. If you copy over the same task week after week, month after month while never finishing it, it might not be significant at all. And if you can’t even bother to migrate the task the first time around, why should it be worth your time for completing it anyway?

A tiny bit of friction and a system that forces you to engage with your to-do list and reevaluate it occasionally makes your life better than any automated system ever could. Friction is used as a tool for mindfulness. As a force to keep you in the driver’s seat of your life.

I think it’s worth it.

This is my entry for the IndieWeb Carnival of January 2025 about the importance of friction (hosted by V.H. Belvadi). If you have a blog, consider writing an entry yourself.

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Murder in the Family by Cara Hunter is probably the most unique fiction book I’ve read this year.

The setting is a Netflix-esque true-crime show. And the whole book reads like a transcript of it. It was a bit weird to get used to at first, but once you get to know the characters, the format really grows on you. There are also stage directions included, which at times made me feel, like I really was watching a tv show.

At the center of the book is a twenty-year-old case, where one rainy October night, a young man named Luke Ryder, the step-father of three kids from an upper-class London family, is brutally murdered. But there is one problem: The police never arrested anyone for it.

Now, in 2023, six experts gather in this tv show to try to solve the case by looking at new evidence, doing their own research and discussing their findings in front of everyone. The director of the show is Guy Howard, the youngest of Luke Ryder’s three step-kids. He wants to solve the case, no matter what. Which makes for a fascinating dynamic.

One of the coolest things about the book is the use of mixed-media elements. For example, whenever they discuss some newspaper article, a picture of the torn-out piece is inside the book. There are also maps, other paper documents, voice notes, emails and more. At the end of each episode, there were also some online comments from a Reddit-style forum, where internet sleuths discuss their theories.

The goal of the book is for you to become one of these armchair detectives yourself. On the cover, it even says: “Can you solve the case, before they do?”

To be honest, I couldn’t solve the case fully. There were just so many twists and turns, shocking reveals and more up to the very last page. But that only added to the reading experience.

The beginning felt a bit slow to me, since you need to get up to speed with everything that happened in 2003. Who was involved and what the police already know. But once you’re past that stage, the pace picks up fast. The experts do their own field-research around the globe or via the internet and present their findings. Some are not that interesting, some do change the dynamic of the whole case. The studio-scenes are broken up by interviews with other people and even some recreated/acted scenes from the night of the murder.

I won’t spoil anything here, just know, that almost nothing in this book is actually as it seems. There were so many plot-twists that I stopped to count. Which probably makes this book also a candidate for a re-read, since in hindsight, there was quite a bit of foreshadowing on certain reveals.

Granted, some plot-points were a bit far-fetched in my opinion and not that plausible. But that didn’t diminish the reading experience at all.

What’s interesting is, that this book to me also felt a bit of a stab against this new genre of “true crime reality tv”, where real crimes are solved live in the most dramatic way, just for better tv ratings. With no respect to the emotions of the involved people. You’ll know what I mean when you read it.

All in all, definitely a recommended read for anyone, who likes (true) crime – and maybe grew up with the internet. That “Reddit”-forum really added to the whodunnit mystery for me ;)

One of the best books I read this year: 4.5/5

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Every now and then, a piece of writing resonates with someone and that person even decides to share it. Either by posting a reply or a link to the piece on their website, or by reaching out directly via email.

I’m using Plausible Analytics on this website. Not so much for the numbers, but more so for the referrers. Whenever I see an unknown personal website in this list, a sense of wonder arises: “Who is this person and why have they decided to share or write about my posts?” This usually leads to discovering more great personal websites.

And then, there’s email. It doesn’t happen that often, but when I see one from someone in my inbox who reaches out in response to a post¹, it’s always a pleasure to read. For example, I’ve had someone reach out and recommend me more similar books when I published “Inconveniences of everyday life”. What a pleasant surprise!

The internet is smaller and more personal than you think. Even a bigger blogger (namely Rahul from Hulry) has reached out a couple of weeks ago, which felt almost surreal.

It’s just interesting to see, how many great and likeminded people you get to know, once you start putting yourself out there.

To spread the word, I decided to put together this small list of people with awesome personal blogs, who have personally reached out to me over the last year or linked to mine from their site². Just click on their name and pay them a visit!

• Amadeus
• Chris Glass
• Chris (uncountable thoughts)
• Jedda
• Marisabel
• Patrick
• Robert
• Toni
• Yordi

Thanks y’all for making the web a better place 🫶

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Inspired by Jedda and in the spirit of sharing and discovering great music, I also wanted to write a bit about my Spotify Wrapped this year.

Every song is linked, so you can directly listen to it on Spotify. Enjoy, and let me know if you also like one of these!

Top Songs

1. Lost My Mind – BUNT., Elley Duhé

This song was already in my 2023 Wrapped and climbed even higher this year. I simply like BUNT.’s style (as you will also see later), but this one is my absolute favorite track of his. It also reminds me a lot of my Seoul trip last year, as I’ve listened to it a lot there while I was strolling through the bustling streets. Maybe that’s the reason I had this one on repeat for over a year now.

2. 9 bis 9 – SIRA, Bausa, badchieff

I don’t listen to German music particularly often, but 9 bis 9 is a track that just gives me good vibes every time I hear it. It sounds like the feeling you get when you spend a warm summer evening with good friends to me.

3. Solo – Myles Smith

Myles is my artist discovery of the year. My favorite track of his is actually Stargazing, but it came out after Solo, which was already in my heavy rotation by then. So I can only recommend that you check out both songs ;)
I’m actually going to a concert of his next spring and am really looking forward to it! His shows seem great, from what I’ve seen so far.

4. Clouds – BUNT., Nate Traveller

Another great song by BUNT., although not as special to me as the first one in my opinion. Still, a very great choice for picking up the pace when going for a run.

5. Somewhere Only We Know – Keane

This one is quite the outlier in the list, since it’s already over 20 years old. I rediscovered it because of this one great montage in Beef (one of my favorite series this year) and it has been in my heavy-rotation ever since. You probably know it as well, but it never hurts to re-listen to great songs.

Honorable Mentions

Songs that didn’t make it into the top 5 but that I still liked very much:

• Broken (Lost Frequencies Cut) – Lost Frequencies, Isak Danielson
• Stargazing – Myles Smith
• DELILAH – MIKOLAS, Mark Neve
• Stockholmsvy – Hannes, waterbaby
• Chihiro – Gravagerz
• Roots – Calum Scott
• All My Life – Tiësto, FAST BOY
• Past Lives (Ian Asher Remix) – sapientdream, Slushii, Ian Asher
• VHS Rave – Tiësto, Swimming Paul
• Dive (Deluxe Mix) – Lost Frequencies, Tom Gregory
• Delilah (pull me out of this)¹ – Fred again..
• Fisch² – LCone
• I Had This Thing – Röyksopp

Top Artists

Just for completeness’ sake, here are my most listened to artists:

1. BUNT.
2. Lost Frequencies
3. Fred again..
4. Myles Smith
5. Tiësto

What was your song discovery this year? I’d love to know!

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These past few days, Bluesky really seemed to start getting traction and starting to hit mainstream appeal – adding over 1 Million people per day. With people I know joining left and right, I also gave it a shot. Here are my initial impressions about the network and the AT protocol behind it.

The cool stuff

Identity is the most important thing

On the web, the domain of your personal website is kinda like your identity. It’s unique, it’s recognizable, it’s not tied to any social network. On the AT protocol (and therefore on Bluesky), you can set your domain to be your handle. What a great idea! No more hoping that your username is available, you are now just @yourdomain.tld¹.

This already sounded promising, but then, I also read about how you can host your data yourself and essentially own your social graph. This means that, in theory, you could just leave Bluesky altogether but still take your data with you to another service. Granted, there don’t really exist such services yet², but I’m fairly positive, that they will eventually. Or at least multiple instances of Bluesky.

User-centric

Bluesky really gives you control over your experience, unlike any other social network I’ve used in the past. The two most notable examples are:

• Custom feeds/algorithms³, just pick and choose the ones that fit your needs
• Custom moderation services and blocklists to make Bluesky a more friendly place

Global discovery

This one is huge, especially when coming from Mastodon. If you’re looking for someone, you’ll actually find them (if they are on the network). And likes, replies etc. are also always available, not just the ones that your server knows about.

Simple to get started, many possibilities for advanced users

The sign-up process feels like (almost) any other social network and is fairly straightforward. This is certainly a good thing, as it helps Bluesky with onboarding a non-tech audience. The starter packs are also a great idea for getting up to speed quickly and finding your people⁴.

But for devs, Bluesky also provides plenty of opportunities to build things on top of their API and the AT protocol. And, you won’t believe it, the API is actually free (looking at you, X 🙄).

Comparison to the Fediverse

I am by no means a technical expert when it comes to ActivityPub (the protocol powering the Fediverse/Mastodon) and the AT Protocol. But upon an initial inspection, I feel the AT Protocol is more suited for social networks.

The Fediverse is really server-centric: You have to choose one when you sign up, it becomes part of your identity/username, it influences what you can see on the network (because of which other servers federate with yours and/or are blocked by your admin). Sure, you can technically switch servers, but this changes your username and requires your old server to permanently redirect your old account, which doesn’t seem like the most ideal solution.

On a protocol level, I also heard this comparison, which made quite a lot of sense: On ActivityPub, everything is social media. Your blogposts, videos, microblogs, images, whatever format you can think of. Everything is interconnected, can be viewed across networks and in different clients.

Whereas, the AT Protocol provides an ecosystem for a new Social Web that is more open than Web 2.0 and exists alongside the regular web. I like this approach more, to be honest. If I want to consume long form content, I open my RSS reader (web), if I want to consume short updates and talk to others, I open Bluesky (social media).

In short, Mastodon feels more like a niche forum. I still love it, especially for web related topics and the IndieWeb scene on there. But Bluesky is way more diverse, has more people with different interests and this is, ultimately, what makes such networks truly feel “social”.

Both approaches are interesting and frankly, if either of them succeeded and became the new standard for communication on the web, I’d be pleased. But if I had to choose, I would go with the AT protocol.

Where to go from here

Bluesky and the AT Protocol are by no means perfect yet and maybe, we are all a bit in our honeymoon phase right now. However, after reading about it the past few days, taking a look at the docs, listening to a lot of podcasts, I truly feel like AT has a shot at becoming the standard for future generations of social networks.

On a more personal level, seeing the Bluesky team communicating just gives me a good hunch about this whole thing. I encourage you to especially listen to what Jay Graber, the CEO, has to say about the project and her vision for the future of the Social Web. I’ll link a few podcasts below.

All of that said, I still believe that the best thing you can do on the web is having your own personal website. Social media should be an extension to your online presence, not be your online presence. At least that’s my opinion.

That’s why you’ll still mainly find my content here on this website. But you can now also find me on Bluesky as well as on Mastodon⁵. Or write me an email, that’s still the best and most personal medium for getting in touch online :)

Further reading

If you’re interested, here are some links that I found helpful in wrapping my head around the AT protocol and Bluesky:

• The AT protocol documentation
• The best comparison of the two protocols, AT and ActivityPub
• The AT protocol explained in detail: As a video and as a thread
• Common misunderstandings about Bluesky: Thread 1 and thread 2
• A research paper that helped inspire Bluesky
• How to self host parts of Bluesky
• Podcast episodes with Jay Graber: Techdirt, Decoder and Dot Social

And here is an earlier post of mine where I talked more in-depth about the Fediverse.

Tools

• The firehose in realtime
• Discover the data behind your profile
• Create custom Bluesky feeds
• A directory of Bluesky starter packs and tools
• Find new people to follow

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I’m currently reading “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman.

It’s essentially an “anti-productivity” book, which argues that we as humans should not only acknowledge our very limited time on earth – but actually embrace that finitude. Because it frees us from the idea that we have to “get everything done”.

One passage that especially resonated with me this afternoon was the following:

Geoff Lye, an environmental consultant, once told me that after the sudden and premature death of his friend and colleague David Watson, he would find himself stuck in traffic, not clenching his fists in agitation, as per usual, but wondering: ‘What would David have given to be caught in this traffic jam?’ It was the same for queues in supermarkets and customer service lines that kept him on hold too long. Lye’s focus was no longer exclusively on what he was doing in such moments or what he’d rather be doing instead; now, he noticed also that he was doing it, with an upwelling of gratitude that took him by surprise.

What a powerful reframing!

So the next time I’m bothered by something seemingly unpleasant, I try to remember exactly this.

In the grand scheme of our lives, all those annoying inconveniences of everyday life shouldn’t bother us at all. We should instead be thankful, that we can feel this emotion right now. To have this irritating experience in the first place.

A very philosophical take. But one worth remembering when you miss your next train.

Webnotes

• Chris shared this post on his website.
• Marisabel did the same, here is her website.

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Yesterday was the day I had worked toward for almost half a year.

This past spring, I decided to sign up for the Lausanne Marathon 10k race. The goal was clear: This would be my main race of the year, where I wanted to set a new 10k personal best. And, as an even more ambitious goal, run my first sub 44’ 10k race.

From that day on, this was the main objective I had in all my training. I started a custom running plan in Runna, I put the goal on my /now page as my top priority, I told people in my personal environment about it. The game was on.

So, for the past 22 weeks, I have run 4 times a week, alternating between easy runs, tempo runs, interval runs, and long runs. I enjoyed most of them. One that was particularly great was a beautiful 18k long run on a sunny Saturday towards the end of the plan, where I truly savored each of the full 90+ minutes.

But there were also the days when things didn’t feel so great. Either because I just wasn’t enjoying the run, or also because the “obligation” of having to spend up to 2 hours running on an already packed day stressed me out. Especially when uni started.

But yesterday, as I was heading back home from Lausanne, I thought to myself: “This feeling of accomplishment right now makes it all worth it.” It’s an emotion that can’t be brought about consciously. A sensation that one earns by putting in the work. No matter how rainy it might be outside (insert other reasons to not go for a run here).

For those wondering, I reached my goal of setting a new personal best. And I even managed to run the race just 1.3 seconds short of 44 minutes¹. That’s what I call a precision landing. And a sign that not one second spent running in preparation for this event was wasted.

With this final race² of the year in the books, I’m now looking forward to a couple of winter months, where I can dial back my weekly milage. But I’m equally looking forward to planning my next running year, setting new goals, working towards them. And hopefully reach them.

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Exactly one year ago, I was in the midst of my biggest adventure so far. For the first time ever in my life, I was living on my own for a month, in a foreign place, in a foreign country: Seoul, in South Korea.

These past few days, I’ve looked through photos from this time with a warming feeling of nostalgia. And It got me thinking about cities I once visited, that I want to visit again someday.

In no particular order, here are my current top 3:

Seoul, KR

Let’s start with the obvious contender, Seoul. I’ve never stayed longer in one place abroad, so naturally, you develop some feelings for that place.

In the first few days, arriving (both physically and mentally) proved to be quite a challenge for me – I’ve never been outside of Europe before, let alone, in a country where I could neither speak nor read the language. But as you probably know if you’ve also travelled to such a place before, somehow, you can still find your way around.

Apart from the challenging moments, there were also a ton of beautiful ones. I mostly like to think about those ordinary daily moments. Like my (almost) daily walk in the late afternoon, where I would head in the direction of Yeouido (an island on the Han river) to find a restaurant to eat. I loved the anonymity of just walking along a familiar route in an unknown but exciting place while listening to a podcast or songs I still connect with that walk. There was nothing special about that walk from the outside, but to me, this route is one of my Seoul core memories.

On two or three occasions, I would also take the metro to a different part of the city and walk along the Cheonggyecheon stream. In a bustling metropole like Seoul, this little this park, which meandered through the city with the stream, was a great place to wind down.

I still miss some of my favorite comfort foods I would eat multiple times a week, like Gimbap or the cookies from that small little pastry shop in my neighborhood.

Seoul was far too big for me to explore in this one month, so I would love to head over there again in the future and continue my journey where I left off. But this time, preferably with someone else to share the experience with.

Stockholm, SE

I’ve always loved the calm and laidback vibe of Scandinavian cities. I might be influenced by the portrayal of them in pop culture, but to me, they seem like a gorgeous place to live in (well, maybe except when I read some Nordic noir thriller). Not too dissimilar from Swiss cities, but somehow more exciting (perhaps because they don’t feel as familiar to me).

Stockholm was the first of these cities I visited and also the first proper vacation with my girlfriend, so it holds a special place in my heart.

We stayed in the beautiful Liljeholmen area in a great apartment, sandwiched between water and a park. It was the perfect place for a relaxing vacation.

Two places that come to mind when I think about this holiday in Stockholm are the Vasa museum (one of the best and most impressive museums I’ve ever been to) and the public library with its beautiful architecture.

If I ever decide to study abroad for a semester, Stockholm is definitely a top contender!

Brighton, GB

Brighton is the only city on this list that I’ve actually already visited twice.

The first time was in 2019 as part of a voluntary language stay during my apprenticeship. Since we were quite a big group of Swiss people in that language school, we didn’t really improve our language skills. But the experience was still great!

I lived in Hove with my host mom and a Turkish roommate. Both were very nice people, but I especially enjoyed the talks with my host mother, who would regularly talk to me about the history of Brighton or what was currently going on in the country (while watching the morning news on TV). This connection with a local absolutely enriched the stay.

Two other memories that immediately come to mind are the student parties on Wednesday at the Pryzm club and the walks along the promenade.

In 2023, I visited Brighton again with two friends who were also part of the original 2019 trip, and we visited some of these places once more. It felt like a trip down memory lane.

I’ve been to more cities that I would love to visit again, but these are definitely my favorites. What about yours?

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After 4 weeks of taking the calculus 1 class in university, I’ve had my first true [insert mindblown-emoji here] moment. And I want to share it with you.

Even if you are not a math-person, I think it’s still great to see that something like the thing I’m about to show you is possible. It feels like a magic trick, but with numbers and this (turns out very important) concept called infinity.
It not only has the very cool symbol $\infty$, it also comes with some very cool properties, as you will see!

And, as a disclaimer, I won’t get too technical in this post and I will simplify some things. I just want to share the general idea, hopefully awe you a bit as well, and leave you with some further resources for learning more about it (if you’re interested).

To infinity (and beyond)

In our very first lecture, our professor mentioned that mathematics in general and calculus in particular essentially “tries to understand infinity”. This already sounded intriguing to me, so I wrote it down. As you will see, working with infinity makes some interesting stuff possible.

Back to basics

Even if you haven’t heard the term in a long time, you know about the commutative property of addition. It’s this thing here:

$$2+3=5=3+2$$

Or in words: No matter how you arrange the summands ($2$ and $3$), you’ll always get the same result ($5$).

Infinite sums

As our professor already hinted at, though, in calculus, we’re not dealing with finite sums all the time. We’re also working with infinite sums. As the name suggests, in these sums, there is an infinite number of terms we have to add to each other.

These things are called “series”. They usually look something like this:

$$\sum_{i=1}^{\infty} a_i$$

Or in words: Let $i$ go from $1$ to $\infty$ and add all elements $a_i$ together.

So the sum in the end looks like this:

$$a_1 + a_2 + ... + a_i$$

Essentially, we’re adding together an infinite number of elements (since $i$ goes up to $\infty$).

Nothing is as it seems

There is a subgroup of series called “conditionally convergent series”. Don’t worry about what that means, just trust me that the following series is one of them (the “alternating harmonic series”):

$$\sum_{n=1}^{\infty} \frac{(-1)^{n+1}}{n}$$

Or written differently:

$$1 - \frac{1}{2} + \frac{1}{3} - \frac{1}{4} + \frac{1}{5} - \frac{1}{6} + \cdots$$

This goes on infinitely, the sum has no end. But you’ll notice a pattern: Every odd summand is added ($+$), while every even summand is subtracted ($-$).

This leads us to the star of the show: The “Riemann series theorem”.

It states (I’m simplifying it a bit here) that we can rearrange the terms in the series in a way, such that it converges to (“reaches”/gets arbitrarily close to¹) any arbitrary real number².

A few examples of what that might mean:

• We can rearrange all the terms in a way, such that the sum converges to $\pi$.
• We can rearrange all the terms in a way, such that the sum converges to the current year (e.g. 2024).
• We can rearrange all the terms in a way, such that the sum converges to your age.
• We can rearrange all the terms in a way, such that the sum converges to [insert random number here].

Wait, what?

🤯

The difference

So while commutativity is a crucial property of finite sums, it isn’t the case for all sums.

For finite sums, we are assured that $2+3$ and $3+2$ always equal the same thing: $5$.

But for infinite series of the before-mentioned subgroup, this is not true. The arrangement of terms matters very much and produces different results. Isn’t that crazy to think about?

Further reading/watching

As promised, if you are keen to learn more about that phenomenon, here are two helpful links to dive deeper:

Wikipedia article (including the proof): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riemann_series_theorem

A video that explains the theorem in-depth:

Tell me about your wow moments!

Has this post reminded you of your own mind-blowing mathematical discovery? Or perhaps you've encountered a fascinating mathematical concept that left you in awe? I'd love to hear about it!

Don't be shy – whether it's a simple insight or a complex theorem, all math wows are welcome! Who knows, your story might inspire the next post in this series.

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Robert struck a nerve with one of his latest meta blog posts about blogging. Not only with me, but also a few other people within my Mastodon bubble (namely Jedda and Yordi).

In his post, he essentially talks about how it’s ok to work on your blog on your own terms. Don’t set arbitrary deadlines or goals, don’t join a blogging challenge just because you feel like you have to. And do not not publish a post, just because you think it’s not perfect.

Robert’s post came at the right time and really resonated with me. The past few weeks have been way more hectic and packed with all the uni stuff going on than the preceding weeks and months. Which also had the side effect of me deprioritizing this blog compared to before. It already feels so far away when I think back to the time when I started this blog. Even though it has hardly been half a year.

Back then, I planned to go “all in” with this blog, to write elaborate essays about fancy stuff I learn about regularly. Posts with explainer graphics and all that stuff. If you head over to the essays section of my blog, you see that I published, well, one “essay” since then. And it doesn’t even have a single graphic in it.

Have I failed, because of that? Actually, no. Because this is my personal blog. And working on it, tweaking the design, writing a new post (just like now) should bring me joy. Not be another item on my to-do list that I push from day to day and don’t finish because I feel it’s too daunting.

Just like a painter, I want to create on my website in a more organic way. Raw, imperfect stuff that still projects that I care about it.

Sometimes, it is a longer post, just because I feel like it. Other times, just a short thought. And right now, it’s just a simple response to a great blog post I felt like writing on a Wednesday evening. Just because.

Webnotes

• Robert linked back to this post in his own
• Jedda quoted this post in her own response

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If you are a regular visitor of my website, you might have noticed that my posting frequency has gone down quite a bit these past few weeks. The reason is pretty simply a lack of time. As I’ve already talked about in my last newsletter, I am now also a part-time student at university and juggling all my responsibilities has become quite a bit harder lately.

Now, the good news is, that I am slowly but surely adjusting to it. Another thing that this change brought with it, is, that I started evaluating my priorities in day to day life. Unfortunately, writing (at least publicly) is not in one of the higher spots anymore.

This doesn’t mean that I’ll shut down this newsletter or stop writing on the blog. I still want to write, as I very much enjoy it! But I wish to write whenever I feel like it and find some time. And not have to force myself to it.

What I intend to say with this, is, that this newsletter, Tiny Sparks, might not be published quite as regularly in the upcoming months (at least until the first semester is over). I’ll still put it out whenever I can, but that might only be once a month. Just so you know.

But I hope you stick around anyway!

Enough admin stuff, here is today’s issue:

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

Honestly, not much apart from me getting used to uni and getting more immersed into higher mathematics. But one thing that finally was published is a new website I built at work: WYDE, a clean and simple one-pager with some GSAP-powered animations for a real-estate project. I am quite proud of it and happy that it’s live now!

As for blog posts, I just published my submission for the SeptemBest blogging challenge by Robert. You can read here, which post made the cut: dominikhofer.me/septembest-2024

🔮 Tool Recommendation

Although it looks and sounds pretty dystopian, I wanted to share SocialAI with you. It is a “social” app, that looks and feels similar to Twitter/X or Threads, but with one caveat: You are the only human on there, the rest are all AI bots.

At first, I thought: “WTF, that is so weird!”

But then, I listened to a Vergecast episode, where the app’s creator mentioned that this app is essentially a new approach to UIs for LLMs. So, instead of chatting with just one “person” (like in ChatGPT), on SocialAI, you put something out and get a response from various personas (supporters, skeptics, realists – you get the idea). You can then interact with the most interesting responses, which triggers a new set of responses, and so on.

Probably not an app for everyone, but if you’d like to explore human-AI interactions from a new perspective, definitely give SocialAI a go!

📚 Content Piece

James Jani is one of my all-time favorite YouTubers and one of those creators, that publishes only about one or two videos a year. But when he does, the videos are absolute bangers.

James’ videos live somewhere at the intersection of internet culture, scams, investigative journalism and social commentary. His newest video (which actually is a two-part series, but I found the first video more intriguing) talks about the whole GameStop saga, that happened a few years back. And what happened since then.

And let me tell you, a lot has happened since then. See it for yourself, the video is a masterpiece:

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

You can now also subscribe to this newsletter via RSS!

See you in two weeks (or maybe later)!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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Since I committed to the SeptemBest blogging challenge by Robert, I still have one more blogpost to write for this month: The one where I show you the post I am most proud of this month, the one that was the best in my humble opinion.

Luckily, apart from all the things going on, I still managed to publish a few candidates. But I chose one that not only managed to capture my enthusiasm for a hobby of mine, but also seemed to resonate with quite a bunch of people over on Mastodon:

The After-Run High

Especially during these first days of uni, where everything is new, exciting but also stressful, running serves as one of the best activities to keep my physical (but also mental) health in check.

As I’ve written in that post:

Every run improves your day, no matter how long it was and how you felt before or during the run.

So I keep running.

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Phew, what a week this has been. Uni has officially started for me, which ultimately meant one thing: My schedule is way more packed now than a couple of weeks ago. It’s not really stressing me out, but the fact that I could easily fall asleep every day at 8pm shows pretty well, how much energy this switch takes.

So, I’m saying it already now, apologies if the content on this website or in the Tiny Sparks issues seems a little thin – it’s because my priorities have shifted a bit.

But I anticipate that this phase will fade out over the next couple of weeks, as I get more accommodated to the new lifestyle. Luckily, we humans can get used to almost anything.

Now, it’s time to dive into this latest edition of Tiny Sparks – enjoy!

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

Obviously, Uni started, and I am now a student, once again. Things are going great so far (apart from the amount of new information I have to process). I’ve met a few nice people and have already learnt a ton. Mostly math stuff, as that is my main focus of this semester.

I also started learning and playing chess again (because of a podcast, lol). So these days, watching videos by Gotham Chess or Anna Cramling has become some sort of wind-down routine for me. Wouldn’t have thought that I would say one day that watching chess videos helps to calm me down. Aaaaanyways – I also play on Lichess from time to time, so if you’re active on there, hit me up and we can play a game!

As I’ve mentioned in the last issue, Zeitlos, my forever Diary, is already in personal use. I’m quite happy with it so far, so my motivation for developing it further has kinda plummeted. But I started with a new little project, that helps me organize my new study life. It’s called Tsugido, a simple daily todo list app with a few twists that will hopefully help you stay focused one day as well. Will let you guys know, when I have something to show :)

Last but not least, here are the blog posts I’ve published since the last newsletter – in case you missed any:

• The After-Run High: An ode to the fantastic feeling you get as a reward for going on a run.
• Life Update: Uni Start: Last week, I also wrote about the start of Uni. So if you want further details on what exactly I study and why I do it, there’s your post.
• My favorite live performances: Three great musicians – three great live performances. Sit back, relax and enjoy.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

If you have looked into the most effective studying techniques, you have most certainly come across the concepts of “active recall” and “spaced repetition”. And if you have looked up the best tools to practice these techniques, you have almost guaranteed seen Anki.

What if I told you, there is a new, even better app than Anki? An app that also lets you practice flashcards in a spaced repetition interval. But these flashcards write themselves because they are just made from your lecture notes.

Sounds great, right? Well, you should check out Remnote, which feels like Notion and Anki had a baby, that allows you to study even more effectively. I’ve kinda used it during my previous studies but with a few improvements over the last couple of months, I have decided to go all in on it and use it heavily for uni.

📚 Content Piece

Math might be a hard subject, but it’s also a fascinating one. Especially if it’s presented in an engaging way.

The channel “Numberphile” never disappoints on that front. And especially Hannah Fry always explains mathematical concepts in a very captivating way.

While not necessarily a mathematical concept per se, in this video, Hannah explains how one graph changed the whole timetable-creation game for railways. And how this invention, that is over one century old, has led to a significant reduction in accidents and casualties.

Definitely worth a watch, even if you’re not interested in maths (you won’t see any numbers, if that helps).

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

You can now also subscribe to this newsletter via RSS!

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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When I really like an artist, I usually look up their live performances on YouTube. And occasionally, I stumble upon some real gems. The kind of videos I can watch as many times as I want, and I still get goosebumps.

Today, I want to share three of my favorite live performances by great artists.

Pure creativity

I already mentioned Fred again.. in a previous post, but I’ll say it again: Although I’m not a musician myself, Fred is one of the most inspiring and talented creatives I know.

Especially his Actual Life series is worth mentioning here. During the pandemic, Fred sampled sounds from various sources (like social media videos or voice notes) and turned them into original tracks. All of them have that distinct Fred again.. sound, this rawness where you can feel all the creativity and emotions that were poured into the song.

No wonder his tracks are quite heavily featured in my playlists nowadays, they are particularly great for pumping you up during a run.

This performance of the Track “Delilah (pull me out of this)” (from “Actual Life 3”) at Glastonbury 2023 is a testament to the creativity and skill Fred has. Everything is done life, he mixes bits from the sample with the live piano and pre-recorded parts. It’s just great to watch him build up the song live (my favorite part starts at around the 03:20 mark):

The ending is also wonderful, hearing the audience keep singing your song while you’re already leaving the stage must be the greatest feeling ever.

Pure emotions

I originally found Isak Danielson, a Swedish singer-songwriter, via the Lost Frequencies Cut of “Broken”.

Although the original track is a rather heavy song (text-wise), the acoustic version of it, an edition of Isak’s “Sunday Sessions”, is just beautiful to hear and watch.

I can’t exactly put it into words why. The video just gives me a very calm, winter-y, Scandi vibe and always makes me feel melancholic and emotional (in a good way).

Pure vibes

Myles Smith is probably my top artist discovery this year. He has quite blown up since spring, so you might have also heard one or two songs from him. The first song I put in my heavy rotation playlist was “Solo”, but my absolute favorite one of him is called “Stargazing”.

This live recording of a Manchester concert of his is just pure vibes: A rather small location, but the crowd totally electrified, Myles and his band seem to have the time of their lives and everything just sounds perfect.

As a cherry on top, the cinematography of this one is also 10/10:

These are my current top 3 live performances. What is your favorite one?

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Today is Friday, September 13th, and it’s Orientation Day for new bachelor students at Uni Bern. Which also means that my lectures (and my university career as a whole) start in just three days, on Monday.

I wanted to quickly write about this life update, what I’m studying and what’s changing in my life these next couple of weeks.

As some of you may already know, I’m going to study Computer Science as my major with Social Sciences as my minor. I like this combination of subjects in my study because they are not too similar, and I hope it will provide some variety in my day-to-day life as a student. Plus, acquiring some multidisciplinary knowledge won’t hurt.

Studying CS at the University of Bern also means that I have to earn at least 30 ECTS points with Math lectures. This will actually be the focus of my first semester, and is honestly probably the part that I have the most respect for. But I’m equally excited as well to get a more profound understanding of Mathematics.

I plan to complete my bachelor's in 4 instead of 3 years but work 50% in my current job as a web developer. I’m really looking forward to that mix of very theoretical lectures to building things practically. Furthermore, I will, of course, also continue with working on my own projects and writing on this blog. This is the kind of variety I had in my life two years ago when I completed the “Passerelle¹” – I enjoyed that lifestyle very much and hope to have a similar one over the coming years.

Speaking of my blog, you can expect to see more study related content on here in the near future. Meta-posts about learning, but also explanations of concepts I learn in my subjects. I’m planning to use the Feynman Technique to my advantage as much as possible: Explaining ideas and concepts in my own words to others, to understand them better myself. I hope this will benefit both you, the reader, as well as me. I hope you stick around and learn something new from time to time!

Regarding the future, I don’t yet have the one goal I want to accomplish academically. I’m doing this 100% for myself, because I hope that studying CS in a university environment will provide me with a solid understanding of theoretical concepts, that I can then apply in my side projects and future jobs. I’ll probably also try to complete a master's diploma someday (maybe at ETH Zurich or something, they have great CS master’s courses), but that’s way too far in the future. For now, I just want to complete the bachelor, learn a ton of stuff and apply as much of it in my work as possible.

That’s it for this short life update, wish me luck for Monday and take care!

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I just came back from a 15k run, and I feel great.

I didn’t feel great before the run, though. Having to run 15 kilometers on a Saturday morning doesn’t sound like a lot of fun.

But luckily, this feeling only lasts for the first few 1’000 meters. After around ¼ of the run, everything feels lighter and smoother. I’ve found my natural stride and am steadily increasing my pace.

Usually, these long runs tend to be progressive. Which translates to a slow-ish start, but you pick your pace up every x kilometer, depending on the length of the run. Today’s run, for example, looked like this:

• 5 km warm-up pace
• 5 km 5:05 min/km pace
• 4 km 4:55 min/km pace
• 1 km cool-down

In such a run, typically during the hardest effort, something wonderful happens: You experience a Runner’s High. It sounds kinda spiritual, but in this state, your body, and mind work together perfectly, despite the hard effort. The body taps into its last reserves, while the mind releases endorphins. It’s the first reward of a long run.

The second one happens after the run is finished. Immediately when you stop running, you might not feel particularly great but rather exhausted (at least I do). But after some stretches, taking a shower and slipping into clean clothes, I have that feeling of an “After-Run High”. That’s not a real term, but it sounds cool and fits the sensation.

No matter how my day will go from that point on, I have already done something good for myself – for my body but also for my mind. I’m in a relaxed state and way more motivated to do the things I’m supposed to do.

Ultimately, it all boils down to two things:

Every run improves your day, no matter how long it was and how you felt before or during the run.

And, the harder the effort, the better you feel afterward. That doesn’t only apply to running, but everything worth doing in life. Putting time, energy and will-power at something will always pay off eventually.

So, take out your running shoes and go for a run. You won’t regret it!

Webnotes

• This post was my pick for the SeptemBest blogging challenge by Robert.
• Jason wrote a few nice words about this post on his blog: Thoughts on SeptemBest

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Every so often, you do something and then immediately afterward know that it was the wrong decision. Robert recently wrote about this feeling as well. And that’s how I felt about my newsletter-move to WordPress, that I so proudly announced in the last issue.

As you can see, this newsletter is now entirely hosted on my website. And if you’re subscribed to it via e-mail, you just got the link to it. But don’t worry, this newsletter isn’t going anywhere. It’s just transforming into a sort of weeknote, that you can still get reminders for via e-mail.

The benefits of this whole switcheroo are:

1. The issues now exactly fit into the whole vibe of the website
2. All my content is in one place and
3. You can now also read this newsletter in your RSS reader as well (which you definitely should, RSS is great¹!)

Enough about the technical side of this newsletter (it’s hopefully the last time for a while) – let’s dive into this week's issue:

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

I ran the “Stadtlauf” in Thun. Another 10k race in the books, that serves as preparation for my main 10k in autumn. The race took place on a warm summer evening, and it was just such a great feeling, being surrounded by other runners and dashing through the beautiful city of Thun. You can see the result on my /races page.

Laracon US took place, which means my YouTube feed was full of great talks and videos being uploaded left and right. Taylor announced the new changes for the Framework, which make me very confident that it was the right choice to learn it! I also took advantage of the discount happening over at Laracasts and bought the annual membership. I’m currently checking out various courses, especially the one by Joe Tannenbaum on building TUIs has been great so far!

Speaking of Laravel, I finally made some progress on Zeitlos, yay. Here is how the app looks right now:

It is fully functional and has all the main features like authentication, the ability to add and edit entries, saving them (encrypted, obviously) and even streaks.

I’ve been using it for the past few days myself, and it does its job so far. I’m gonna add the remaining MVP features soon (like the “on this day” feature), so v1 is feature complete.

The app is already live at zeitlos.linea.studio. Signing up is not possible for everyone yet, but if you’re reading this, reach out to me and I’ll whitelist your email address!

I’m also building a small Laravel application at work, I hope I can share more about it soon!

Last but not least, here are the blog posts I’ve published since the last newsletter – in case you missed any:

• Implement a WebFinger endpoint in Astro: A technical post about how I made my Website more discoverable on the Fediverse.
• Why I write: Just some reasons why I started to write regularly. And why you might want to do the same.
• But, how do I actually set up and secure a new VPS (on Hetzner)?: Again, a very technical post. Simply a guide for me that might also be helpful for you.
• What you and your smartphone have in common: A quick and dirty post (with not the best title in hindsight), but it features two interesting quotes worth thinking about.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

Do you sometimes ask yourself if your blue is the same as someone else’s blue? Well, I have great news: There is now a website to check exactly that! It’s called Is My Blue Your Blue? (surprise, surprise, but the domain is actually really cool!).

Not 100% scientific obviously, but still a fun little tool to figure out, if your color perception is the same as the one from other people.

📚 Content Piece

Speaking of internet games, there was this viral website a couple of weeks back called One Million Checkboxes. It was just a website with one million checkboxes (again, duh!), with the twist, that they were global. Meaning, if you check one box, it is checked for everyone else on the website as well. This sounds really trivial and mind-numbing, but it got really competitive with two groups forming: The “Checkers” and the “Uncheckers”.

The website is not really working anymore, but its creator published a great post that I wanted to recommend here: The secret inside One Million Checkboxes.

The internet can be a really gruesome place, and we often just can’t have nice things anymore because someone always ruins the fun. But this article highlights the very best of internet culture and was actually pretty wholesome to read! It’s an unexpected story about some brilliant teenagers, hidden urls and even a Jake Gyllenhaal GIF. You should read it 😉

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

You can now also subscribe to this newsletter via RSS!

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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YouTube recommended me this video by Dan Go:

An interesting piece in general, but two things really stuck with me:

Your brain is a piece of software. Consistently upgrade it.

Your body is a piece of hardware. Consistently upgrade it.

What a great metaphor!

You also regularly update the OS of your smartphone (hopefully) and also upgrade the hardware (aka buy a new one) from time to time. Why wouldn’t you want to do the same with yourself?

Especially the software, your brain, can be updated an unlimited number of times.

Take advantage of that. Learn new things, create something, challenge yourself!

The human brain is the most fascinating and powerful thing we know of. Neuroplasticity allows it to evolve and change its structure throughout your entire life.

Use it or lose it.

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In the “But, how do I actually…” series, I try to explain how to do computer things in a way that previous me would have appreciated (and future me can reference).

This is a written checklist for me, borrowed and slightly adapted for my personal needs from an awesome video by CJ on the Syntax YouTube Channel. The video is included at the end of this post.

Keep in mind that I’m still learning, so if you have more tips for me when it comes to setting up a VPS as efficient and securely as possible, please reach out!

Setup and secure a new VPS provisioned on Hetzner

1. Go to the Hetzner Cloud Dashboard and provision a new Ubuntu server (don’t overthink this too much, you can easily rescale these servers later – the only thing you can’t downsize is the disk storage)
2. Add your public SSH Key during setup
3. Connect to the server via your terminal ssh root@<serverip>
4. Accept the fingerprint (if this ever comes up again, be aware that you might be the target of a man-in-the-middle attack)
5. Update package lists: apt update
6. Upgrade packages: apt upgrade
7. Check, if a reboot is required: ls /var/run/reboot-required. If no such file or directory exists, you’re good. If it exists, reboot the server via the Hetzner dashboard. Alternatively, type reboot into the terminal.
8. Run apt upgrade again. If a package has been kept back, try upgrading it manually with apt upgrade <package-name>.
9. Optionally add a secondary user (see below)
10. Disable password login: vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config, search for PasswordAuthentication and set it to no
11. Restart ssh service: service ssh restart
12. Add a firewall in Hetzner, a good default is to just open the ports 22, 80 and 443
13. Enable auto-updates: apt install unattended-upgrades, then dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades
14. Open the config file: vim /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades
15. Uncomment this line to enable regular updates as well (not just security ones): // "$${distro\_codename}-updates";
16. Verify with systemctl status unattended-upgrades (you should see a green dot)
17. Done, your server is ready to be used now!

Create a separate user (optional)

1. While logged in as root, run adduser <username>
2. Set a secure password
3. Add your data like full name etc. (optional)
4. Give the new user the possibility to run sudo commands: usermod -aG sudo <username>
5. Verify with groups <username>
6. Create the .ssh directory in your home/<username> folder (you can get your current directory by running pwd): mkdir .ssh
7. Add your public key to the server: vim .ssh/authorized_keys

Video

Here’s the video by CJ, that goes over many more details if you’re interested:

Just a fun little command

Run tail -n 10 -f /var/log/auth.log on your server to see all login attempts that happened on your server. The better secured your server is, the less login attempts not coming from you, you should see.

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Recently, I wrote about how I write daily. In this post, I want to take a step back: Why write in the first place?

If you’re not a writer (yet), it might inspire you to start the practice as well. And if you are one already, ask yourself, what are your reasons for writing?

Here are mine:

Writing to think

Writing slows down my thinking process. And that’s a brilliant thing, especially because my mind tends to race at 100 km/h occasionally.

Forcing myself to articulate my thoughts physically in front of me is a great way to “stress-test” my ideas and expand on them. Oftentimes, when I just write, I come up with even more ideas, arguments, whatever to support my initial thesis. Something, that is pretty challenging to do just in memory.

Putting something (really, it doesn’t matter what) on that blank page, and I have already done the hardest part: I started. It gets easier from there. Because the cogs have started turning.

Writing to understand

One of the best evidence-based studying methods is the so-called “Feynman Technique”. The goal is to learn and understand things by explaining it to others. This always exposes pretty inevitably, where you lack understanding of the subject.

You can practice this by explaining the topic to another person. But you can of course also do it by writing. It doesn’t even have to be published to my blog, just the act of writing down how something works always helps me understand it better.

Writing to process

When I do my daily writing practice without a clear idea in mind about what to write about, I usually resort to something autobiographic. Like how the last day went or what’s currently going through my head¹.

Again, just starting somewhere and keeping on writing is the key here. It takes me to thoughts, conclusions, and clarity I haven’t found before. It’s a pretty easy but effective way to process my emotions. Kinda like therapy, but it’s just me and a sheet of paper.

Writing to document

When I originally launched this website, I elaborated on the hope, that 40-year-old Dominik will look back one day and be genuinely thankful for young me to have started documenting my life and thoughts.

Through writing regularly, my writing becomes a record of the person I was at that specific point in time. Maybe my thoughts and views on the world have changed meanwhile, but this way, I can track, how and why that happened.

Sure, I could also do this in other mediums (like voice notes). But the great thing about writing is, that I don’t really need any specific equipment. Even when I write digitally, .txt files can be read by every computer without specific software. No matter what year it is. It’s just text.

Writing to improve

This reason is twofold for me.

Of course, writing regularly makes me a better writer (duh!). But it makes me a better communicator as well. And being good at that skill is beneficial in every aspect of life, be it in your personal life or your career.

On the other hand, since I speak German natively but write in English, I also improve on that front. I discover tons of new words but also learn to articulate myself better. Because I don’t live in an English-speaking country, this is the main way I train my productive skills (instead of just working on my receptive ones by watching Netflix).

Writing to create (serendipity)

Lastly, writing is also just a creative outlet. It allows me to create something new that hasn’t been out there. I put my perspective out in the world. And maybe it resonates with someone.

This also creates serendipity (what a wonderful word). It enhances the chance that someone might find me and my writing by accident². Just because they looked something up that I’ve explored before or someone shared a post of mine with them. This probability increases with every single post I put out there³.

I will never be able to influence, if and whom my work resonates with. But even if just one person reads a post of mine, and it gives them a new insight, some inspiration or the motivation to create something themselves, it has all been worth it.

These are my reasons for writing. What are yours?

Webnotes

• Robert included me on his “Why we write”-page.

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For example, my Mastodon account is dominik@mastodon.design. But when you search for toots@dominikhofer.me, you’ll also find my profile¹.

Here’s how you can add this functionality relatively easy to your own Astro site. The approach also works for other frameworks, the specific code just might look a bit different. You can always reach out to me, and I’ll see, how I can support you!

Preparation

Your Mastodon instance gives you the exact JSON, you need for this to work. Just go to https://[your_instance]/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:[your_username]@[your_instance] and you should be greeted with a JSON object. Mine is for example under https://mastodon.design/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:dominik@mastodon.design.

Save both the link and the JSON response somewhere, we’ll need it later.

Static method

This method uses a static Astro endpoint. This means that it will ignore anything that comes after the ? in the url and always serve the same JSON. So toots@dominikhofer.me will work, just as posts@dominikhofer.me or justarandomuser@dominikhofer.me will.

We will have to follow the same directory structure as Mastodon, though.

So in your src/pages folder, create the .well-known directory (with the dot!) and add a webfinger.ts file within.

This file then contains the JSON you copied earlier and a GET function, that just serves that JSON when someone (or something, like Mastodon) looks for your WebFinger.

Here’s a template for you to copy:

// Endpoint for WebFinger
const WEBFINGER_JSON = {} // replace {} with your full JSON object

export async function GET() {
  return new Response(JSON.stringify(WEBFINGER_JSON), {
    headers: {
      "Content-Type": "application/activity+json",
    },
  });
}

You can now open https://localhost:4321/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:youruser@yourdomain.com and should see your JSON object on screen.

Dynamic method

The dynamic version is just a bit more complicated to implement, but has the added benefit of allowing you to specify multiple users on your domain. So you could create a toots@youdomain.com as well as a photos@yourdomain.com user for your Pixelfed account. This is possible because the endpoint now respects the resource parameter after the ? in the url.

It only works though, if you deploy your project in server or hybrid mode. You can find more infos about this in the Astro docs.

Just like with the other method, we need to create the webfinger.ts file within the src/pages/.well-known directory.

The file then looks something like this:

// Endpoint for WebFinger requests
export const prerender = false;

// Edit this array
const ACCOUNTS = [
  {
    username: "toots",
    redirect:
      "https://mastodon.design/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:dominik@mastodon.design",
  },
  // ... more users here
];

const hostname = "yourdomain.com";

export async function GET({ request, redirect }) {
  const url = new URL(request.url);
  const resource = url.searchParams.get("resource");

  if (!resource) {
    return new Response("Bad request", { status: 400 });
  }

  for (const account of ACCOUNTS) {
    if (resource === `acct:${account.username}@${hostname}`) {
      console.log(account.redirect);
      return redirect(account.redirect, 301);
    }
  }

  return new Response("Not found", { status: 404 });
}

One thing that is crucial is that you put export const prerender = false; at the top of the file if you have set your output in your astro.config.mjs file to hybrid.

You can then add as many users in your ACCOUNTS array as you please. Just remember that the redirect has to be the .well-known link from Mastodon (or another Fediverse platform) you copied earlier.

When Mastodon now reaches out to your server to look for toots@yourdomain.com, this function will resolve this user to the appropriate redirect and thus return the correct JSON.

If someone is looking for nonexistenuser@yourdomain.com a 404 error will be returned.

That’s already it, now you have Mastodon on your own domain without hosting a server! If you need some further help, take a look at the source code of this website or reach out to me. I’m happy to assist you in setting this up.

Further reading

Here are some other articles that helped me along the way that might serve you as well:

• https://www.seanmcp.com/articles/use-your-domain-on-mastodon-with-astro/
• https://tonysull.co/articles/introducing-astro-webfinger/²
• https://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2022/11/05/mastodon-own-donain-without-hosting-server.html

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You might have already recognized that something looks different this time. Tiny Sparks doesn’t run on Substack anymore and is now self-hosted on WordPress!

There are a couple of reasons for this switch, but in short: Substack has a Nazi problem and I want to own my content.

This means that I now have full control over this newsletter and its content. It runs on my own domain and is even federated to platforms like Mastodon¹

I know that this doesn’t really affect you as a reader, but it was quite a lot of work, and I’m proud of how it turned out. So please excuse my excited ramblings about it ;)

With that said, let’s dive into this week’s issue:

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

Apart from my newsletter, my personal website got a few nice updates as well:

• It now features a /blogroll page, where you can discover the blogs I regularly read. Maybe, you’ll find something interesting on there as well (There are tons of personal blogs like mine).
• I also made my website more compatible with the IndieWeb. For example, you can now react to posts on Mastodon and these webmentions will show up under the original post after some time. I also added webfinger support, so when you, for example, search for toots@dominikhofer.me on your Mastodon instance, you should find my account.
• The RSS feed also got an overhaul. Mostly under the hood stuff that improves the experience of reading my posts in an RSS reader. But I also added a small stylesheet, so the feed is human-readable in the browser: dominikhofer.me/rss

Because my newsletter is self-hosted (aka it runs on my own server), I also got to play around with Coolify once again. My personal analytics have been hosted with it for quite some time now. But I feel like with the process of setting up the newsletter, I only now begin to understand, how all of this really works. My current conclusion: Self-hosting is hard af, but at least equally cool.

Another minor change: I migrated my personal email addresses (those with @dominikhofer.me and @linea.studio) from Apple to Infomaniak, a Swiss-based cloud company. It’s a bit pricier, but now, I have way more control over them (at least it feels like it).

As for Zeitlos, the Forever Diary I am building, there haven’t been many updates in the meantime. I hope to work more on it again next week, now that all this personal site stuff is out the way.

Last but not least, here are the blog posts I’ve published since the last newsletter – in case you missed any:

• Diving into the Fediverse (once again…): Some resources I found while trying to understand the Fediverse better.
• How I write every day: A simple principle that allows me to write more regularly. This post resonated with quite many people, so you might find it particularly interesting as well.
• On: Civil War: My thoughts on the movie from A24.
• A song memory: A note about rediscovering a song I haven’t heard in a long time and feeling nostalgic about the memories.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

A couple of weeks ago, I migrated all my Podcast subs off Spotify and now use Pocket Casts as my podcast player. It feels nice having the music and the podcasts I listened to separated again. And Pocket Casts is also a really nicely designed app that is a joy to use.

What Pocket Casts does way better than Spotify when it comes to podcasts in my opinion is queue management, general organization of your subscriptions and automatic playlist.

Many dedicated podcast players have these features, Pocket Casts just happened to be my choice because I once used it in the past. Other options for you might be Apple Podcasts (who recently launched its web version) or the beautiful Neuecast.

📚 Content Piece

Speaking of podcasts, one episode I listened to and thoroughly enjoyed this week was “What’s the best phone to do crimes on” by Search Engine. It starts out like an episode that could get you on the FBI watchlist but turns into a thrilling true crime like story. PJ Vogt and Joseph Cox talk about the secure phone company Anom, how it was operated and the surprising true story behind it.

You might enjoy this one, even if you’re not a really technical person, so definitely give it a listen!

Additionally, I want to also recommend an older blog post I read this week called “The Part Time Creator Manifesto” by Swyx. He talks about why it’s actually a great idea to be a creator in addition to your day job, and why you should not go full time with it.

Two great quotes from the piece:

It’s about having a job while not being your job.

We are all fed up with over-SEO-ed content and generic lowest-common-denominator products. Part Time Creators can offer far more diversity, creativity, and unique expertise to fulfill every niche need of humanity. And they can make money, share valuable knowledge, and have more dignity doing so.

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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Usually, when I go for a run and don’t want to listen to my own running playlist, I throw on one of these running mixes. They’re great. There are even different versions for different tempos, so I can always choose one that fits my run.

Occasionally, it so happens that I rediscover a song I haven’t listened to in a long time. And with that, sometimes also a nostalgic memory.

Yesterday, I went for my run fairly late for my standards. The sun was already setting when I took off. Which also means that I ran the second part pretty much in the dark.

But these are the perfect moments to rediscover an old song memory. I love the solitude when running through nearly empty streets, just the streetlight guiding my way. Focusing on my strides, my breath, just thinking about the next step.

I was already on the last 500m, when “Animals” by Martin Garrix came on. You probably know the song, it’s quite energizing. And I felt that energy and immediately picked up my pace one final time. It felt amazing.

As I was almost sprinting towards my home, I remembered again, how I first heard this track. The song came out in 2013, which means I wasn’t even a teenager back then. But there are two things I quite distinctively remember about it:

1. The music video. It felt so iconic to me, with that clock in the beginning that then becomes an element of the beat. I’ve watched it countless times at the time because back then, I didn’t have Spotify, and we only bought songs very occasionally through my dad’s iTunes account.
2. Martin Garrix himself. One fact I always remember about him is that he was only 16 when he made it.

This was one of the first times when I heard that some random teenager created something so groundbreaking essentially from his bedroom.

I don’t listen to this track particularly often anymore. But with every encounter, it reaffirms my belief, that anyone can create great things. The only things that matter are the willingness to learn, to make mistakes and, most importantly, to just keep creating.

So, thanks for the memory, Spotify.

The music video

Further reading

You might also like my post about inspiring artists. It also talks about my fascination with these types of creators.

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To be frank, I initially felt the premise of the movie was intriguing because it seemed like a work of speculative fiction that explores an interesting scenario. A story that is set just a couple of years into the future of our present. At that time, the world is even more divided than now. And the USA is in a full scale civil war. Sounds scarily realistic but also intriguing, right? So I wondered how the film would execute on that controversial plot idea, what would it look like, who fights against whom, why do they fight in the first place, and who wins in the end? You get the gist.

Additionally, it's an A24 production. Always a great stamp of quality.

Anyways, as I headed into the film, I was immediately drawn in. Not because of the story, though. But because of the visuals. Civil War is one of those movies, where you can essentially pause it in an arbitrary place and the frame on screen is just a piece of art.

It also helps that the main protagonists are war photographers from three different generations. As they always have their cameras on them during combat scenes, the movie makes use of the pictures taken in a visually interesting way. Immediately after a photo is taken, it’s shown for a few seconds – sometimes even in Black and White, depending on who took it. Sure, all the shots are very brutal, but there is some artistic “beauty” (if you can call it that) of capturing these moments, frozen in time.

The youngest reporter used an analog camera, which once more reinforced my desire to shoot analog as well. I've written about it briefly in the past, but this movie was one further nudge to push me into that direction. We'll see where this journey goes.

The music stood out as well, although more because it almost felt ironic in the context of what was going on. You'd see citizens in military uniforms killing each other while some happy tunes were playing in the background. Nevertheless, it was a perfect choice, highlighting the futility of the conflict. It's just brutal, and no one really wins.

This sentiment was further enforced when I looked up some analyses (as I always tend to do after watching an interesting movie). Many commenters expected a classic (anti-)war movie, where the “good guys” fight against the “bad ones”, where you get to learn about the background of the war and why it happened. Kinda like I did in the beginning. But the story isn't really the point of this film.

All the events are presented in a very neutral way, through the lenses of the war reporters. The only obvious bad guy is the president. But apart from that, the story actually doesn't matter that much. It's just people killing each other in different places at different times along the journey. People who knew each other before, and, in one instance, even went to high school together. It's all so sad and pointless.

However, that's precisely the point, Civil War tries to make.

4.5/5

Watched: 09.08.2024

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I don't think writing every day will change your life...
...I know it will.

— Peter Suhm

Occasionally, you stumble upon a piece of content, that flips a switch in your brain. It may not be life-changing per se, but right at that moment, it certainly feels like it.

That’s how I felt when I first discovered writinghabit.com, a simple one-pager on how to build a writing habit (who would have thought?) by Peter Suhm.

Previously, I’ve consumed a ton of content that revolves around writing regularly. And the fact that it might actually be the one habit that could change your life. It’s a simple habit, but keeping consistent at it is not easy. Yet over time, you create a ton of serendipity and a plethora of content, that speaks way more than any CV ever could. Additionally, writing is also just a cool skill to have.

Sure, writing has a ton of upsides. But when it actually comes to taking the time every day and write, even when you don’t feel like it, is hard. That’s precisely how Peter felt as well when he wrote a blog post titled “How I’m going to build a writing habit in 2024”. This post is the basis of the principles he outlines in the one-pager.

These principles are not all ground-breaking, but there are two that made all the difference for me. Or really only one because the first plays into the second rule.

The first important principle to start writing more is to lower your standards. Peter makes this illustrious example where the quality of your writing sits on a scale, somewhere between the best prose ever written and literally writing the word “fuck” 500 times, just to keep the streak going. Both technically qualify as writing.

Obviously, you should not just write the same word over and over again. But simply knowing that you could theoretically start your writing session this way takes the burden of coming up with something unique. Because, when you’ve jumped the biggest hurdle, starting out, the motivation usually kicks in and so does inspiration and ideas.

This principle of lower standards translates into the main principle that resonated with me and made all the difference in my relation to writing. It’s titled write, don’t publish. From the website:

The main reason you have writer's block is because you're writing with publishing in mind. Forget about publishing and write for the sake of writing. Most of your words should be going into the bin. Otherwise, you're spending too much energy editing while you write.

That’s essentially already it. Separate your writing from editing/publishing. These are two separate skills. You want to get better at writing, so just write. About whatever you want. Something that you just discovered, what you ate yesterday, what you are going to do today or what you see when you look out the window. Literally anything.

Establishing the new habit

All this brings me to today. I’ve now written daily for almost two weeks, a thing I’ve never accomplished before. And I attribute most of that to following the tips from Peter.

To not neglect this blog totally, two things count as “writing” for the day:

1. Writing 500 words. This can be fully freeform or with a concrete blog post idea in mind. Not all writing has to make it onto the blog, though. As already stated, the main goal is just to get that writing muscle activated.
2. Or alternatively, editing and publishing a previously written post. This way, I force myself to separate the writing from the publishing process. And although it looks easier – proofreading, rewriting and actually publishing a post is often times more time-consuming than just jamming 500 words onto the page.

Finally, as with all the habits I try to establish, I follow the Two-Day Rule by Matt D’Avella: It’s ok to miss one day if life happens. The streak only breaks if I miss two days in a row.

I hope this piece inspired you to start writing regularly as well! Check out writinghabit.com to get you up and running and alternatively listen to Ali Abdaal’s podcast episode with Nathan Barry for inspiration.

If you happen to start a blog as well, please send it to me. I’ll be your first reader!

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Every once in a while, I get this sudden urge to try to understand the Fediverse better. Like on a technical level. I already know quite a bit about it since I first joined Mastodon, but still feel like there are quite a few pieces of the puzzle missing.

That’s why I dived down another rabbit hole earlier this week – inspired by the similarly named podcast by the New York Times. At its core, it’s a story about how big tech algorithms have shaped society over the past decade. You should definitely listen to it, whether or not you’re interested in the Fediverse per se, it’s very well-made.

Anyway, hearing all of this prompted me to do some more research about ActivityPub, the protocol that powers the Fediverse. And I thought, I’d share some interesting links I found along the way with you. They are not exclusively about ActivityPub, but also about the IndieWeb/OpenWeb in general¹. Enjoy!

Link list

• ActivityPub is the next big thing in social (Podcast)
  An episode of The Vergecast, where the two hosts talk to the CEO of Flipboard about a more open Social Web.
• Rewind: Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? (Podcast)
  A conversation between Nilay Patel and David Pierce from The Verge and the CEO of Mastodon, Eugen Rochko, about the Fediverse and Mastodon in particular after the whole “Twitter/X is now run by Elon”-saga.
• Mastodon user with 2 files (YouTube)
  An interesting technical tutorial on how you can essentially create a “fake” Mastodon user with just two files.
• ActivityPub vs AT Protocol (YouTube)
  A video by the same guy where he explains the difference between ActivityPub and the AT Protocol used by Bluesky.
• The Fediverse Files (YouTube)
  A playlist on the wordpress.com YouTube channel where they talk about all things Fediverse with various guests like the co-creator of the ActivityPub protocol.
• Building an ActivityPub Server
  I haven’t fully read and understood it yet, but this seems like a great introduction to building your own ActivityPub server. I plan to do that to understand the protocol even better.
• Introducing astro-webfinger
  A short tutorial on how to set up a webfinger endpoint in Astro for better discovery on the Fediverse. Bookmarked for later, will implement that on my own site.
• Elk
  Just a great web client for Mastodon that I’ve been using over the past couple of months.
• StreetPass
  A really cool Chrome extension that helps you find the Mastodon profiles of the people whose websites you’ve visited in the past. It does this by looking for rel="me" links on the sites.
• Followgraph for Mastodon
  This handy tool finds people for you to follow on Mastodon, based on what people the people you follow follow. Sounds way more confusing than it actually is.
• diagram.website
  A very, very cool link map (or whatever you call it) of different topics surrounding the best parts of the internet.
• Get Started with RSS Feeds
  This is the ideal site to send someone to who hasn’t heard of RSS Feeds before.
• RSS Feeder Best Practices
  A more technical post about RSS Feeds and how to improve them on your site. I’ll use this as a guide to improve mine.

& an idea from me

While reading through all this stuff, I had an idea for a small little tool that I could build myself: An ActivityPub server that takes your existing RSS feed and makes it readable on the Fediverse (for example Mastodon). There are some existing projects that aim to do similar things on GitHub, but none of them seem to work or do what I envision.

Would that be something you’d use as well, or does it sound like a pointless idea? If you’ve read this far, please tell me your opinion (regardless of what you think 😉)! You can find my Mastodon account or my email over at /hello.

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How time flies… We’re already one third into August. Which also means that my first day of uni is getting closer and closer (if you don’t know already, I’m going to study Computer Science as my major and Social Sciences as my minor at the University of Bern). I still have roughly a month left until I’m back in study mode, but I’m already in full-on preparation mode. It feels like a sort of “transition month” between only working and going back to working & studying simultaneously.

For starters, I’ve now reduced my working hours at the web agency I work at to around 20 per week. For this month, it means that I have a sort of “decompression/preparation” phase where I can take things a little slower. But it also gives me some headspace to figure all this uni stuff out. Like how I have to sign up to lectures (do I even have to sign up to all of them or does it depend?) and making sure, I have a broad overview and plan of how my four years at university will play out. Apart from that, I’m also brushing up on my math skills to make sure, I’m not completely lost in my first lecture. Because this semester will be math-heavy, and I’m equally nervous and excited about it.

Enough about the future, let’s dive into edition number four of Tiny Sparks:

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

After my vacation in Belgium, I’m back in the running game: I’ve started training again and am currently logging around 40 kms per week. Unfortunately, the temperatures outside are pretty high, so I often have to do my runs either early in the morning (which I don’t really like) or at dawn (which is actually quite enjoyable). Apart from that, I’ve also signed up for a 10k race that takes place in 2 weeks. I’m gonna mostly treat it as a training for my race in Lausanne in October.

I also got a Remarkable 2 tablet! If you don’t know what that is, it’s essentially a “digital notebook”, kind of like an iPad but with no apps (just a folder system & notebooks) and an e-ink screen (like an e-reader). I bought it as a distraction-free studying device for uni because my iPad a) has not the best battery live anymore and b) is just too distracting for long periods of studying. The Remarkable has the advantage of truly feeling like writing on paper, but without all the logistical mess of having to carry physical notebooks. I like it so far, will report back when uni has actually started.

On the coding side, I have finally started to properly work on my Forever Diary. I’m calling it “zeitlos”, which means “timeless” in German. I like the sound of it, and it really fits the idea of the product. After all, the diary should be a timeless tool for documenting your life. If you’re interested in the technical shenanigans, the code is Open Source on GitHub.

Last but not least, here are the blog posts I’ve published since the last newsletter – in case you missed any:

• Re: To Read or Not to Read: A reply to Alexandra about reading (or not reading) books and my final entry for #JulyReply2024
• Learning all the Countries in the World (Part II): Asia: My second chapter in my quest to learn all the countries in the world. You should definitely read it if you are keen to learn some interesting facts about many of the Asian countries!
• Re: Finding my Blogging Voice: A reply to an unknown blogger, whose first blog post really resonated with me.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

One app I’ve used on and off over the past year but always really helps me calm down when I’m stressed or want to wind down in the evening is Oak. It’s a simple mindfulness app that features a handful of meditations, breathing exercises and wind down practices. It’s the best free meditation app I’ve encountered so far and certainly worth a try!

These days, I mostly use the “Guided Breath” exercise for falling asleep (I never listened to the full exercise, which is a testament to how great it works I guess).

You can download Oak for free on the App Store.

📚 Content Piece

Although the Trump assassination attempt has already disappeared from our collective memory (at least partially), I wanted to share this interesting Video by HowTown: How the Trump shooting was twisted on X:

It’s essentially a comparison of the covering of the event between Legacy and Social Media (particularly X). In the video, the two hosts show a timeline of how the events were reported online, how X fills the void when newspapers are still trying to verify the information to ensure that no fake news spreads (posters on X fail miserably at that as you’ll see) and what the commercially available blue checkmarks have to do with it.

Even if you’re not into US politics at all, the video highlights the issue with our current attention economy and unregulated tech giants in a particularly interesting way. Plus, the two hosts are pretty charming – I instantly subscribed to the channel when I found it.

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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I discovered your blogpost via a reply by Robert. It popped up in my RSS feed and sounded interesting. I read through his post and thought, “let’s check out this new blog, and who the person behind it is.”

You write about plenty of things that I also doubt myself on regularly when it comes to writing. Is my writing good enough? Am I making silly grammar mistakes? Is it too complicated or too mundane? Will anyone bother to even read this?

This is my first post and I don't expect it to make a splash, but rather just a drop in the sea of writers online. My real goal with this post and others are to find my "blogging voice", a version of myself who can write freely without worrying so much about the particulars.

Two things here: First, while a simple blog post might probably not make a splash in 99.9% of cases, you got at least two people reacting to it with their own blogpost. Inspiring only one person is already way more than the average writer achieves with his/her first post, let alone two. So kudos on that.

Secondly, in my opinion, this is undoubtedly the beauty of online writing. I’m still working on it as well, but I find that with every blog post I publish, no matter how big or small, it gets easier. I find my flow. My inner critic gets quieter. I just write¹. And that’s just a wonderful feeling. I hope you’ll feel the same overtime.

Even though I don’t really know anything about you and your site currently has two posts, I immediately added it to my RSS reader. When reading just that one paragraph on your homepage, it just resonated with me. Because, from what I can tell, we’re in a pretty similar place in life: We’re both 23, we’re both interested in Computer Science (I’m going to uni this fall to study it as well, after having worked in the web industry for the past four years) and we’re both trying to express ourselves online, through the words we publish on our own page.

It feels great discovering someone like you. It’s rare to find someone in our generation who shares the same passion for creating and sharing things online just for the sake of it. Views, likes, or replies don’t matter. What matters are the real friends and connections we make along the way.

I found your site essentially through pure randomness: Hadn’t I subscribed to Robert’s blog, I wouldn’t have ever known about the existence of your blog. But still – I’m here and typing out these words. What are the chances?

I hope this post reaches you somehow as well. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. It’ll be a surprise – for both of us.

Cheers ✌️

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We’ve arrived at the next continent on my quest to learn all the countries in the world, so I can complete the “Countries of the World”-quiz on Jetpunk: Asia.

Now, I didn’t really learn all the Asian countries as rigorously as the ones in Africa. Partly because I already knew way more countries (and where they are roughly located within the continent) to begin with, but also because with a few trials, I already almost always achieved a 100% score on the Asia quiz on Jetpunk. That said, I still sometimes forget to name Bhutan or Brunei (but funny enough, only one of them each time), confuse the location of the -stan countries and for some reason, Malaysia is almost always the last country I enter into the quiz. But I think these minor hiccups will take care of themselves, as I continue to complete the Asia quiz (nearly) every morning, as I’ve done with the African one as well.

That said, as with my last post, here is my list of interesting facts about some countries in Asia:

The Mountain “Ararat”, an important symbol for Armenia, is actually located in Türkiye.

Bangladesh was formerly known as “East Pakistan”.

Bhutan measures their success via the “Gross National Happiness”-Index instead of the GDP. They also have not a single traffic light in the whole country (what?).

Speaking of GDP, Brunei has the 9th highest GDP per capita and provides free education and healthcare for all its citizens.

Despite its ginormous size, China has only one time zone.

Georgia is considered the birthplace of wine.

The world’s largest film industry is not Hollywood, but Bollywood from India.

Indonesia consists of a whooping 17’000 and some more islands.

Iran was formerly known as “Persia”.

Iraq is considered the cradle of civilization (Mesopotamia).

The world’s oldest company exists in Japan and was founded in 578 AD. They are a construction company and mainly work on the construction but also restoration/repair of mostly cultural heritage buildings. How fitting!

The largest landlocked country on earth is Kazakhstan. You might have already known this fact if you’re a regular over on /til.

The world’s strongest currency is the Kuwaiti Dinar (from, surprise, Kuwait). One KWD is currently worth over 3 USD.

Laos is the only landlocked country in Southeast Asia.

The Gobi Desert in Mongolia is the coldest desert in the world.

Myanmar’s former name is Burma.

Nepal just has the most distinctive flag design ever.

Number of rivers in Saudi Arabia: None.

Chewing gums are banned in Singapore.

In South Korea, you’re considered 1 year old at birth. Speaking of it, the country also has the lowest fertility rate in the world.

Sri Lanka was formerly known as Ceylon.

In some international contexts (like the Olympics), Taiwan is called “Chinese Taipei”.

The only Southeast Asian country that was never colonized by a European country is Thailand.

Istanbul, Türkiye, is the only city in the world that lies on two continents.

Turkmenistan is home to the “Door to Hell” (just check it out for yourself).

The only doubly landlocked country in the world is Uzbekistan. Again: This fact has been first published over on /til (you should totally check it out wink wink).

Phew, these were plenty of countries that have had a different name just 100 years back. Let’s hope I don’t have to relearn half of Asia’s countries in the future…

Do you have any more interesting facts about Asian countries that you want to share with me? Please send them my way!

See you in the next note about the next continent I’m gonna tackle: Northern/Middle America.

All the posts in this series:

1. Africa
2. Asia (you’re reading it right now)

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First and foremost, this is very relatable:

So why have I got over 50 books sat on the coffee table gathering dust. Why is it I can't just pick one up and start reading?

If I stopped buying books today, I would still have enough material to read for the next two years. After all, buying books and reading books are two different hobbies. It’s not as bad as it used to be, though. This year to date, I already read 18 books, which is 2 more than I read in 2023 and double of what I read in 2022. Still, I have bought more than 18 books this year.

But maybe this is just a somewhat natural thing that happens when you love the medium book, but reading is not your No. 1 priority in life? I mean, having a collection of books that you never read cover to cover but that just bring you joy, that you can flip through just for fun and discover something new every time is fantastic. That’s also the reason I am a sucker for coffee table books.

On the contrary, I find it fascinating how Alexandra has no problem getting words out on the page and blogging regularly (if not daily). Because I would say that I have the opposite struggle: Reading has become a daily habit by now. Especially since focusing more on fiction than non-fiction books. But writing… Writing is way harder for me.

Maybe it’s because English is not my native language? Maybe I am being too much of a perfectionist and not allowing myself to just write about whatever, however? Or will the organic flow of writing maybe only kick in after writing for a way longer time than I already do?

I don’t know.

And so, I read. I read a lot. But write?

Maybe tomorrow.

This post is part of the #JulyReply2024 challenge. More information in this post: Replies are this month’s comments.

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If you just stumbled upon that greeting, it means “good day” in Flemish (a Dutch dialect spoken in a region of Belgium). You’ll find out very soon why I choose that language (or have already figured it out, it’s not hard 😉).

I hope you’re enjoying the summer so far! I certainly do. Although it’s more the mornings and the evenings that do it for me, since during the day, it’s not really pleasant to be outside. So right now, I’m sitting next to a fan while typing these words. I hope you have one next to you as well, or live near a cool pool.

With that being said, let’s dive into edition number three (one of my lucky numbers) of Tiny Sparks:

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

• Who might have guessed it from the title, I was on vacation (and am sadly already back home now). Together with my girlfriend, I visited Belgium. We had our “home-base” aka Airbnb in Ghent and also visited Brussels and Antwerpen. It was beautiful, so I thought I could include one thing to do for each city, should you ever visit one (you definitely should!):
  • Ghent: A historical boat tour through the canals. You’ll learn a lot about the (medieval) history of the historical heart of Flanders.
  • Brussels: Visit the House of European History. It’s a free museum right next to the European Parliament that is packed with interesting facts and anecdotes from Europe’s (not just the EU’s) past.
  • Antwerpen: Take a look at the Central Station. It’s the most beautiful train station I’ve ever seen and really worth a visit:

• Obviously, I took some pics on the trip and uploaded a small selection over on my /photos page…
• …but also reflected on my dilemma regarding taking too many photos and not really experiencing the moment.
• Since I’m still in the process of building my Forever Diary but figured, I don’t have enough knowledge of Laravel Livewire, I’m currently following Josh’s TALL-Stack Tutorial. I’m enjoying it so far and learning a ton.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

This week, I’m recommending you a handy little iPhone app (sorry Android peeps, unfortunately it only exists on iOS) that has become the backbone of my financial life (or my overview of it). Well, maybe apart from Microsoft Excel.

It’s Dime, the best, and most beautiful budget and expense tracker out there. I’ve been using it for over a year now, and it really makes keeping track of your expenses (and also income) a breeze. It’s minimalistic and made by a great indie dev.

The app is open source on GitHub and 100% free (although you should definitely leave a tip if you can).

📚 Content Piece

A recent podcast discovery of mine is “If Books Could Kill”. Every two weeks, two guys talk about “the airport bestsellers that captured our hearts and ruined our minds.” And it’s just great.

Partly because the chemistry between the two hosts is excellent, but also, it debunks some of the most famous PopSci and self-help books out there and does a fantastic job at doing so.

One episode I can recommend is the one about “The 4-Hour Workweek”, a book I actually own but have always found equal parts inspiring and douchey. Now I know exactly why.

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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If you’re a regular visitor of my /photos page, you might have noticed that I uploaded some new photos on there.

The past week, I was in Belgium, together with my girlfriend. We had an Airbnb in the northern part of Ghent, but since Belgium is compact and public transport is excellent (kinda like here in Switzerland), we also made day-trips to Brussels and Antwerpen. All three cities were nice, but ultimately, I liked Ghent the most. The medieval charm of the city with its canals just had something.

As with practically every place I visit abroad, I took loads of photos. And in hindsight, I really like having some visually pleasing memories to look at. I enjoy editing my favorite shots and sharing them with others.

But while I’m actually there, in this foreign city, I’ve noticed that my internal pressure of trying to “capture the moment” as best as possible often stresses me out. I always take far too many photos and end up with snapshots, that don’t really mean anything to me. I’d say that in the end, only about 5 – 10% of all pictures taken are worth keeping, organizing and editing. Is this the price to pay for these couple of nice shots?

I honestly don’t know. But what I know is that when I actively decide not to take out my camera for a couple of hours and not feeling the need to constantly look for the next motive, I feel way more relaxed. I’m actually living the moment. Sure, there is a bit of FOMO involved, but generally speaking, it’s a liberating feeling¹.

On the other hand, in a vacuum (meaning without the constant lookout for subjects), I also enjoy taking photos. Framing the shot, repositioning myself, maybe adjusting some settings and then pressing the shutter button. It’s like painting a picture, a craft where I can express my viewpoint of a location or situation.

Intentional capturing

So what do I plan to do in the future about this dilemma?

Well, I definitely want to be more mindful about taking photos. I would rather not amass a plethora of snapshots of your typical tourist destination. The kinds of photos you’d also find when googling the city. I wish to capture real situations, the people I’m with or just a random view I enjoy. The kinds of photos that tell a story. Not the picture of a picture in a museum that I’ll never look at again.

I want to leave my camera in my pocket more. Because it forces me to actively decide to take it out and compose a picture. It shouldn’t take a split second decision, it should require a feeling of “that’s a moment worth capturing”.

I’m also contemplating of getting an analog camera. Having a physical limit for possible images is somehow a freeing thought. As with everything creative, constraints are great. Plus, I think I would thoroughly enjoy the process of getting into analog photography.

But one thing is sure: When in doubt, I want to prioritize living the moment and forget about my camera for a bit.

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Hope you all are doing well! I was unfortunately sick last week, so I didn’t get to participate in the race I mentioned in the past newsletter. Luckily, I’m fine now and was able to complete a few runs meanwhile. So everything is alright on my side and quite a few things happened the past 14 days regardless.

This week’s edition will be international, so buckle up.

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

• I expanded my personal website with a /til page. On there, I collect random bits of knowledge I pick up as I go about my day.
• In my attempt to get more involved in the IndieWeb community, I also joined the #JulyReply2024 challenge by Robert. I already wrote two replies myself, but the even better news is: Chris wrote a reply to my “personal home on the internet”-post. That really made me happy and also introduced me to another great blog I can add to my RSS feed (you should do the same!).
  Note to self: I should create a /blogroll page 🤔
• I finished the book “Going Mainstream (How extremists are taking over)” and jotted down some interesting parts I took from it.
• After mentioning in the last newsletter, that I’m deciding on what to build next, I’ve now settled on a Forever Diary. What that is you ask? You can read more about it in this post: https://dominikhofer.me/building-a-forever-diary
• The JulyReply-challenge is not the only one I took on the past two weeks. I’m also now in the process of learning all the countries in the world (because many parts of the world are still a black box in my brain where I virtually know nothing about). I wrote more about my why and sprinkled in some interesting facts about countries in Africa (the first continent I tackled), that you hopefully don’t yet know: https://dominikhofer.me/learning-all-the-countries-africa

🔮 Tool Recommendation

Let’s stay on the topic of geography, shall we? This week’s recommendation is more a game, but you’ll enjoy it regardless.

If you also, like me, want to broaden your general knowledge regarding the countries of our planet, I can wholeheartedly recommend Seterra. It’s by GeoGuessr (the Google Maps game) and has many quizzes that help you “become a geography expert and have fun at the same time!” (that is true). They also have an app, that is free (even though it’s titled “full version” on the App Store). You should check it out!

📚 Content Piece

Taylor Swift played two concerts this week in Zurich, and my girlfriend and I went to see the second show on Wednesday. Although I’m not a “Swiftie” by any means, it was still a really entertaining show.

As luck would have it, my YouTube algorithm recommended me two videos by the Wall Street Journal that both revolve around the topic of music concerts. One is more design focused (How do venues control the crowd?), the other one dives into the tech between these LED-wristbands you see more and more often. Fascinating deep dives into areas I didn’t know I wanted to learn more about. Check them out below:

Expert Explains the Hidden Crowd Engineering Behind Event Venues | WSJ Pro Perfected

How Concert LED Wristbands Work | WSJ Tech Behind

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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Inspired by my girlfriend and my brother, who are both somewhat huge geography buffs, I’ve decided to challenge myself to learn all the countries in the world. I would say I already have decent geography knowledge, but compared to them, I’m still in noob territory. The end goal is to be able to complete the “Countries of the World”-quiz on Jetpunk.

I started with Africa because it’s such a huge continent that I know embarrassingly little about.

Whenever I have trouble remembering a country, I usually look it up on Wikipedia and try to find one interesting fact about that state, that helps me form a better mental connection.

So here is my list of interesting facts about some countries in Africa:

Over 90 percent of the Algerian population lives along the Mediterranean coast (that is only 12% of the total land mass).

Botswana has been very successful economically recently and has been dubbed the “Switzerland of Africa”. It’s also the oldest democracy in Africa.

Burkina Faso has Ouagadougou as their capital (my grandmother taught me this at a very young age, and it stuck with me ever since because it sounds so iconic).

Djibouti has many foreign military bases because of its strategic location on one of the world’s busiest shipping routes.

Equatorial Guinea is the only country on the continent that has Spanish as their official language.

Eswatini used to be called Swaziland until 2018. One of the reasons was because foreigners apparently confused it with Switzerland. The official spelling is eSwatini.

Ethiopia is the most populous landlocked country on earth.

The Gambia is the smallest country in continental Africa and named after the Gambia River. It wanted to merge with Senegal at one point (Senegambia Confederation).

I found this interesting video, that explains, why there are so many Guineas: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and also Papua New Guinea in Oceania.

Liberia was the first African republic to proclaim its independence.

Sierra Leone’s capital is Freetown, which is essentially the same name as Gabon’s capital Libreville, just in English instead of French.

Within Somalia, there is the unrecognized country Somaliland.

South Sudan is the youngest country in the world (2011) and plans to have a new capital, that doesn’t even exist yet (Ramciel).

Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt.

Tanzania is the result of the union between the former states Tanganyika and Zanzibar.

Uganda is where the Nile originates.

Do you have any more interesting facts about African countries that you want to share with me? Please send them my way!

See you in the next note about the next continent I’m gonna tackle: Asia.

All the posts in this series:

1. Africa (you’re reading it right now)
2. Asia

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I get quite irritated by people who seem to make it their life's goal to bash AI.

— Yordi in AI Critics: You're Using It Wrong

This morning, I read this post by Yordi, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who feels that way.

While when I was still active on X, AI was coined the best thing ever happening to humanity, here on Mastodon (or the IndieWeb), the sentiment is quite the opposite.

I truly understand, that AI has its shortcomings. It hallucinates (or rather makes errors), it has to be trained on other people's content (without them getting compensated) and it definitely makes some people lazy.

But why does everything have to be so black and white? Where are the gray tones in this conversation?

AI is not perfect yet, it’s far from it. But especially LLMs have become irreplaceable in my daily life. Particularly for coding and ideation, it’s like having a very knowledgeable friend always by your side.

Another example is learning something new: I often use ChatGPT to give me a primer on some topic I want to learn more about. That’s a really great use case in my opinion because when you know nothing about something, it’s really challenging to figure out, where to even start. But ChatGPT will happily give you some keywords that you can dive deeper into.

But guess what, I’m still going to google these keywords later on, visiting websites, going down rabbit holes. I’m not doing my whole research in ChatGPT. It’s just a tool in my arsenal, not the tool (or as we call it in German, an “Eierlegende Wollmilchsau”). And critical thinking is still needed very much.

Sure, there are people that will believe everything ChatGPT says and not check out the source. But hasn’t this been happening since, like, forever?

And if you’re worried that people won’t read your content because AI gives it to them as well… Do you think these sorts of people would have actually taken the time to read a full article if they hadn’t used the LLM?

Let’s not make this whole thing more controversial than it needs to be.

This post is part of the #JulyReply2024 challenge. More information in this post: Replies are this month’s comments.

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As luck would have it, a couple of days later, I stumbled upon a video titled “How To Record Your Entire Life In Apple Notes”. TL;DW: The video presents a concept called a “Forever Diary” and how to set it up in your notes app.

A Forever Diary kinda works like these 5-year-diaries, where you have one page for each day of the year. Every year, you just add another entry to that day’s respective page. This way, you always see, what you did 1, 2, … years ago on that day. And it hopefully makes you appreciate how far you’ve come.

But, since these journals are finite, you have to start over after 5 years. Wouldn’t it be great, if you could keep your journal, like, forever? That’s precisely what the Forever Diary does. Since it’s digital, you can start today and hopefully still add entries 50 years from now. How awesome would that be?

If you’ve read my “what should I build next”-post, you maybe recall that this isn’t exactly one of the ideas mentioned. But it comes close to idea number 3, the daily companion. The Forever Diary will be the successor to this, since the diary feature would’ve been a key part of the companion app anyway.

Why I’m building it

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

In the spirit of this Chinese proverb, I want to start building this diary as soon as possible, to start documenting my life. In a week, I’m going on vacation, so it would be great to have it ready by then.

Plus, I think it’s a good scope for an app to build in a couple of days while still being expandable in the future.

Features

The app will be pretty simple, you can just add an entry for each day, maybe rate your mood and add some tags (e.g., habit tracking). That’s it. And of course, you can see what you did on this day in other years.

It will also have an import (so I can upload the entries I wrote with Punkt some time ago) and export (so I can export and backup the entries) feature.

Since I don’t intend to implement E2E encryption from the get-go (just the built-in one from Laravel), I’ll mainly build this app for myself. At least for now.

That’s it, I will keep you up to date :)

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Julia Ebner has been known to me since she appeared in an episode of the German late night show Neo Magazin Royale over 6 years ago. When I saw her new book “Going Mainstream” (the German version, which I read, is called “Massenradikalisierung” → mass radicalization) and skimmed through it, I knew I wanted to read it fully.

The main part of the book contains 6 chapters. Each one of them takes a look at one extremist group, that has gone mainstream in the past couple of years. Groups like incels, climate change deniers, or anti-vaxxers. Alongside each group, Ebner also introduces one tool they use to appeal to the masses. Tools like alternate media networks or provoking backslashes.

While these chapters were interesting to read and offered a glimpse into subcultures of today’s society, most of the topics discussed won’t be anything new to you, if you’ve read other things about these groups.

What I found fascinating, though, was the last chapter. In there, Ebner talks about what we, as a society, can do to “win” people back. Since I believe polarization and the rage-bating nature of Social Media is a huge problem of our times, it got me thinking about how I could help tackle this problem one day.

My learnings

But before we get there, here are my favorite facts/snippets from the book:

If a social movement can mobilize just 3.5% of society, it can influence the course of history in favor of its cause.

Gen Z is the most conservative generation since the end of WW2 (that one baffled me). Many of the members of Gen Z, who consume conservative content, come from liberal households. Conservatism is a tool for rebellion to them.

When Ebner joins an anti-vax demonstration and hears other conspiracy theories, she asks herself if we’ve entered the “digital Middle Ages”. I think that’s quite a good analogy.

Polarization is about identity and affiliation, not facts.

The fusion of the personal and collective identity within a group is a crucial factor for the willingness to use violence.

State-controlled media from Russia advertised the Covid-19 vaccine domestically, but spread negative rumors and fear on its international channels (English and German).

The “mainstreaming-process” of radical ideas presents itself as follows:
They start as marginal subcultures → strong international networks are formed → alternative media outlets pop up → a public backlash against progressive ideas is promoted (this leads to a shift in the Overton-Window¹) → radical ideas become accessible to the masses → “proxy culture wars” happen.
This cycle is the key thesis of the book and really eye-opening in my opinion.

Theory and practice are complete opposites in these radical circles, i.e., they refer to their human rights (in theory) while massively curtailing those of others (in practice).

Possible solutions

A radicalization oftentimes starts, when a chain of unfortunate events happens. One expert says that we need better tools to analyze these global fears and problems in realtime to combat radicalization.

While authoritarian regimes often use censorship, liberal democracies have to focus on transparency and responsibility when it comes to media systems.

To make young people more resilient to radicalization, we need to operate on the intersection between psychology and media literacy. And they need to be exposed to people from other socio-economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds instead of learning about these concepts in theory.

For older generations (“digital migrants”), it’s important to highlight the similarities of current hate-narratives and historic examples.

Language manipulation and “claiming” terms is an often used tool by extremists to win over the masses. One example is the term «Critical Race Theory», that is misused very obviously in the US.

Fake news is like medicine: Preventing is better than curing. We can use “pre-bunks²” (the opposite of “debunks”) for this.

How could technology help in all of this? My personal conclusion.

While technology is obviously a key part in the extremists' arsenal, it could also be a part of the solution. As you’ve read above, being able to monitor these networks and the general feelings in public discourse with the help of big data is and will be even more crucial in the future.

While I read this, it got me thinking that maybe, this would be an area I want to dive deeper into in the future. I’m going to university this fall to study computer science, and if I happen to choose to go into research one day, this would definitely be a field I’m interested in.

But I also thought, how could technology help younger people help gain more media literacy? This topic lies near and dear to my heart, as I’ve truly come to believe that the availability of Social Media and their algorithms do way more harm to a young individual's brain than we can really grasp yet.

I hope we’ll see a trend reversal in that area in the foreseeable future. And maybe, I can play my tiny part in that, who knows.

Until then, read “Going Mainstream” if you’ve found this post even marginally interesting. It’s pretty good.

4/5

Finished: 04/07/2024

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We "blog" even when we are not sitting in front of a computer screen. We see or hear something, draw parallels to our lives, and make a mental note of it. Then, when the opportunity arises, we sit down and create something unique based on our history.

— Robert in “We Blog 24/7”

This immediately reminded me of something James Clear talks about in his bestseller “Atomic Habits”. When establishing a new habit, you first have to take on a new identity. Acting according to your new identity will then lead to you being able to establish the habit way more easily.

It’s fascinating, how much this small shift in your thinking can influence your behaviour. For example, when I learned to code and began to understand the magnitude of possibilities this opened, my brain automatically began searching for issues in everyday life that I could solve with code.

Just today at work, I had to find out on which pages an instance of a class is present in a Webflow site. Since Webflow doesn’t offer such a search functionality natively (and I was far too lazy to go through each of the 20+ pages manually), I just threw together a quick Node.js script that did it for me in 20 seconds. How great is that?

(As a side note, that’s also the reason I’ll never catch up with my “coding project ideas”-list – the ideas never stop coming.)

Same with blogging: When I started to write my first posts back in spring, I started a new list in Things 3 titled “Blogpost Ideas”. I just took a look right now, it still contains 60 ideas that I haven’t even touched yet.

So when Robert states that “We ‘blog’ even when we are not sitting in front of a computer screen.”, I 100% agree.

It’s like flipping a switch in your mind that you can’t turn back. And I love that!

This post is part of the #JulyReply2024 challenge. More information in this post: Replies are this month’s comments.

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With two weeks passed since the launch of this website, I want to cultivate my blogging habit and make sure that I keep the flame of enthusiasm for writing on the IndieWeb burning. And what better way to do that than by joining my very first blogging challenge?

It’s #JulyReply2024, a challenge brought to life by Robert. And it’s a love letter to the art of blogging, the community around it and getting inspired by each other. Whenever I come across an interesting post this month and want to reply to it, I will do so on this site. Like in an email thread, each of these reply posts will start with “Re: [Original Title]” (or “Re: Re: …”, depending on how many conversations a post sparks).

These posts can be long or short, but they will always be one thing: Sincere and an appreciation of the original post and its author.

These are my entries:

• Re: We Blog 24/7
• Re: AI Critics: You're Using It Wrong
• Re: To Read or Not to Read…

I will regularly update this list, so make sure to come back :)

Want to join the challenge yourself? Head over to Robert’s post to sign up, and share your replies with the #JulyReply2024.

Happy reply-blogging!

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To set the stage, you can expect to receive this newsletter pretty regularly in your inbox. For now, I plan to send it every other Saturday. That might change in the future though, we will see. But thanks for coming along for the ride!

Every Issue of Tiny Sparks will be structured in the same, easy to digest way:

1. Personal updates from me, mainly related to my personal website and the things I create.
2. A tool/app I regularly use and that might also be helpful to you. Often times design and/or code related, but you’ll enjoy most of them, even if you aren’t necessarily a designer or dev.
3. A piece of content I enjoyed recently. This can be an article, blog, video, book, podcast – you name it.

Why “Tiny Sparks”?
Pretty easy: In our daily life, we frequently have these random moments of inspiration. A good conversation, an interesting view, a cool discovery. I like to think of them as tiny sparks. Little seeds of inspiration that are planted in your mind and might grow over time or ignite a small flame – aka an idea – that can turn into something even bigger. And that’s precisely the idea of this newsletter: Give you something to think about or try out, and maybe inspire you to do whatever you want to do!

Without further ado, let’s dive into this first issue. Enjoy!

🗓️ Personal Updates

Here’s a quick rundown of the things that happened in the past two weeks:

• I finally launched my personal website! It took way longer than I expected. Like waaaaay longer. I bought my personal domain in 2018 and for six years, I just had a simple static index page containing a couple of sentences on it. Luckily, that’s a thing of the past now. I wrote a little bit about it: dominikhofer.me/personal-internet-home.
• I finished the “30 Days to Learn Laravel” course on Laracasts and now want to create an app with my newly acquired skills. But because I know myself and my tendency to start 10 things and finish none, I have to commit to a project before I write a single line of code. You can help me decide, what I should build: dominikhofer.me/what-to-build-next.
• I ran the Midsummer Run in Bern last Sunday. It was a beautiful 10k run that started incredibly early in the morning (5:15). But it was so worth it, the course was beautiful, and the feeling afterward was wonderful! Because I run another 10k race this Sunday, I decided to run the Midsummer one a bit more relaxed and was still pleased with the finisher time. If you’re interested, both results are/will be available over on my /races page.

🔮 Tool Recommendation

No matter if you’re a designer or just creating slides for your next PowerPoint presentation, choosing good colors can be hard. One of my favorite resources to create a color scale for my designs is uicolors.app/create. It's particularly useful if you're using TailwindCSS for your websites, but it can assist with any of your color needs.

📚 Content Piece

Did you know, that clicking on the first link in any Wikipedia article repeatedly will inevitably lead to the same page in practically every case? And do you know, which page that is?

42 isn’t the answer this time, sorry. It’s actually Philosophy. The whole thing even has a name: “The Philosophy Game”. And here is a fantastic video explaining it:

It becomes nerdier the longer it gets, but I’m a sucker for these videos that use code to analyze something and then tells the results in an engaging kind of way.

Well, that’s it already, thanks for sticking around. If you have some feedback, a recommendation of your own or just want to say hi, don’t hesitate to reach out! All the contact options are listed over on my /hello page.

And if you enjoyed this particular issue, consider forwarding it to your friends. That would mean a lot.

See you in two weeks!

Cheers ✌️

Dominik

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But, as you probably know if you’ve learned to code, following tutorials is just one part of the equation. To make things actually stick, you have to keep going and exposing yourself to unknown problems to solve. That’s why I also feel like you can never really fully understand something in CS. There’s always more to learn.

So, to stay on that learning path, I’m going to do two things now:

In true Aaron Francis and Josh Cirre fashion, I’ve started to read the Laravel docs front to back. Yes, like everything. Sounds silly, I know, but RTFM¹ isn’t just a saying. It’s true. And I’m lucky, cause the Laravel docs are actually written in a pretty logical, understandable and enjoyable way. I’m only currently in the Views-Section. But since I’ve done the Laracast course as well, many concepts make even more sense now. So I’ll keep going on that front.

But reading the manual is of course not enough, you have to get your hands dirty. Create something with your newly acquired skills². And that’s where I’m kinda stuck right now.

See, I would rather not fall into that trap again where I build 3 projects in parallel. Because doing that will lead to 0 launches. So I’ll decide beforehand and build and launch at least an MVP of that product before moving on to something else.

That said, I need a bit of help with choosing what to create: I’ll quickly go over 3 project ideas that I have at the top of my mind. Two reasons for that:

1. Maybe it helps me decide by just writing my thoughts down.
2. You are very welcome to tell me your favorite (and why)! Just shoot me an email.

The ideas

Calm content consumption app

Kinda like a basic and minimal Feedly or Innoreader, but not with an RSS focus (at least in the beginning). The primary feature would be that you get your custom email address when signing up that you can then use to subscribe to newsletters. Afterward, the app collects all the issues, groups and presents them in a beautiful fashion. This way, your personal inbox doesn’t get clogged up and you’ll actually read your newsletters.

The site would also have a /today (or /week) page, where all the issues from the past 24 hours are displayed. Kinda like a digital newspaper you can read in the morning while sipping your coffee. I could also send this to your actual email, kinda like Mailbrew does it.

Later on, I’d also like to integrate YouTube channels and Fediverse profiles you can “subscribe” to (not actually subscribe, but the videos/posts would also show up in your feed). And maybe good ol’ RSS feeds as well.

Pros

• At the time of writing this, this is my favorite idea that I feel most excited about.
• Feels very modular so that I can easily scope the MVP and not get lost in building tons of features.
• Feels very IndieWeb-y with its RSS-like nature.
• I would learn about email routing.
• An app like this would help me move away from Social Media even more

Cons

• Similar apps already exist, although they don’t really work the way I envision my app to work.
• Will be harder to monetize, I think (but that won’t be my no. 1 priority anyway in the beginning).

Site-monitoring app

At work, I regularly have to do quality assurance for the websites we launch. I have to be honest, this part usually sucks because 80% of all these tasks could easily be automated. Things like checking all links, alt tags for images, meta tags for SEO (and generating them) and so on. So I’d like to build an app where I can just enter the url of the website, and it gives me a report with all the things I have to do in order to make the page launch-ready.

I recently came across ohdear and really like the vibe and features of that app³. Although for my use-case, it feels a bit overkill. So what I’m proposing is essentially just a stripped down version of that, focused on launching marketing sites without any errors. Think of it like an automated launch checklist.

Pros

• I have already built a little prototype in Next.js, so it should be relatively easy to get started.
• Since it’s more B2B, it should be easier to monetize.
• It would strip away one of the most annoying tasks of my work.
• It could be the starting-point of a powerful website monitoring tool (with automated checks, for example).
• I have already bought the domain, don’t ask me why.

Cons

• Again, not the most unique idea out there.
• I wouldn’t use it daily, unlike the other ideas.

Daily companion app

I used Punkt (a journaling app) for a while and really liked the idea of just recording your day in one sentence. I’m also an occasional user of the Bullet Journal Method, meaning that I quite often take (ephemeral) notes in that fashion. That got me thinking, what if there was a simple daily companion app that you could use to quickly record things that are happening each day and have a log to look back over time?

I’m thinking of things like:

• What happened (journal)
• Saving special photos from that day, so they don’t just get lost in your gallery
• Locations you visited (holidays, trips, …)
• Habit tracking
• Emotion tracking
• Quick notes, that self-archive after a certain time or can be copied to another notes app

It would also be able to display things like: “This happened a year ago today” or “These are your most completed habits in the past 30 days”.

Pros

• If marketed well, it would have the biggest target audience of these apps.
• It’s the oldest idea on this list, meaning it would solve my personal biggest need.
• I think it’s a pretty unique idea, that’s not out there yet.
• The earlier I build this, the longer back my personal log would reach (I love tracking things and analyzing them).

Cons

• Out of all these apps, it will be the hardest to monetize, since it’s the most “casual” one.
• An app like this would need to be a mobile app (at least eventually). So it violates the initial purpose of building it: Getting better at Laravel.

That’s it, these are the three ideas I’m most keen to build right now. I’ll take a few days to properly decide which one I’m gonna tackle first. But the good thing is, regardless of which one I’ll end up choosing, I feel an excitement for all of them to bring them alive.

What do you think? Which app is your favorite and would you use them? Do you have any ideas how to make these ideas even better or unique? Please let me know!

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The why’s, what’s and how’s behind the creation of this website. After reading this post, you’ll want to create your own – I hope.

On the evening of February 21st, I posted the following Tweet:

I’ve been diving into the indie web world these past few days.
Really like it so far, so I’ve decided to be more active on Mastodon (and probably less active on here – at least for now).
Feel free to join me :D

It took a tiny bit longer than I anticipated but now, I can officially announce: My first personal website is finally live!

But Dominik, what took you so long?

Great question, I honestly don’t know. If I did, I would plug my anti-procrastination course instead of writing this section.

Jokes aside, I do see the irony in the fact that I build websites for a living but never have made my own. At least if you don’t count the little learning journal from my apprenticeship (which is still online, thanks Netlify!) and the few one-pagers I put up in a desperate attempt to have somewhat of a personal brand online.

You probably already know the big catch: Designing & building something for yourself is damn hard. You feel like the most competent but at the same time the most annoying client of all time. “What is enough for others is surely not enough for me. Like, I brand myself as a coder and designer, so my personal website has of course to be perfect!” Sounds a bit arrogant, I know – but these are actual thoughts that come up in the process (and I guarantee you, all designers have them).

To fight this perfectionism, on March 4th, I posted a Toot announcing, that I will launch the MVP of my personal website asap. Task failed successfully, I’d say. It is the end of June now, and the site only launched last week. Plus, it doesn’t feel so MVP anymore. But it is online, and you are reading these words, that’s the most important part.

By the way, if you’re wondering why there are already a couple of posts on this site: Since having nothing to put on my blog when I launch only would’ve delayed things further, I went on a writing spree in spring to remove this excuse.

Why is building a personal website important? A couple of thoughts.

Since rediscovering personal blogs at the start of this year, I really got into the IndieWeb.

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

— https://indieweb.org/

Basically, everything in this community comes down to a few basic principles that really resonate with me:

• Own your own domain
• Own your content
• POSSE (“Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”)
• Document your stuff
• Longevity
• And many more

To put it short, everything revolves around creation, autonomy, and authenticity. And connecting with other, similar-minded people – through email, the Fediverse, guestbooks, Webmentions, etc.

As someone born in the early 2000s, I only got a tiny glimpse into the internet-world before the rise of Social Media. With becoming more mature and seeing the downsides of these platforms, I became more and more jealous of the people who got to live through the early internet times. But now, with the IndieWeb, I partly feel like I’m travelling back in time and experiencing a calmer, more honest and authentic part of the web with less drama. It surely feels great!

But all this philosophy aside, having a personal website does, of course, have many advantages and I truly think, everyone should have one. And no, a polished Insta profile doesn’t count.

With this website, I have unlimited creative freedom:

“I want to share the photos from my latest trip? Sure, I’ll put them up on my /photos page.”

“I want to create a page that shows others what I’m currently doing and holds me accountable? Great, I now have a /now page.”

“I should save my running results somewhere… /races to the rescue.”

You’re getting the point. A personal website is and can become anything. For me, it’s equal parts:

• portfolio
• cv
• brain dump
• photo album
• content hub
• business card
• creative outlet
• public accountability
• starting point of internet friendships
• journal

…and much more.

Plus, it also serves as some sort of time capsule. In the IndieWeb, it’s not uncommon to visit blogs with posts that are nearly as old as I am. These are always especially great, since they feel like a look back in history. And I always imagine myself looking back at my blog in a couple of years and rediscovering things I thought, made and felt during that time.

So, 40-year-old Dominik from 2041, if you are reading this – I hope you are happy, and thanks for preserving this document!

The tech

Now, for all the nerdy people out there (like me, I truly enjoy reading these things on other people’s sites), here’s a quick rundown of the backbones of this website. I’ll probably create a /colophon page soon, but for now, here are the most important bits and pieces:

Under the hood, this website is powered by Astro. I briefly considered using Eleventy first, but Astro just felt easier to pick up for me. And it’s really great, I love it already!

The interactive parts (essentially just the mobile menu) use a tiny bit of Alpine.js.

For styling things, I use TailwindCSS. I’ve picked it up years ago and couldn’t imagine building websites without it anymore.

The design was mainly done directly in code. But for the initial ideation, I used Figma.

Visually, this site is a remix of many minimal sites I find stunning, first and foremost the one from Paco Coursey. If you are looking for other similarly clean and simple sites, check out deadsimplesites.com.

The site is currently hosted on Vercel, but I’ll look into self-hosting it on my VPS in the future. It redeploys with every Git commit.

All the collections (posts, images, …) are simply *.md or *.mdx files. To make editing them easier, I use Darkmatter.

If you would like to take a look at the code, just go to /repo and the site will redirect you to the GitHub repo. You are welcome to grab elements you like, tweak them if you need it and add them to your own, no credit necessary. Just don’t copy the whole website, but I think that should be obvious.

What should you do now?

If you take one thing away from this post, make sure it’s this: If you weren’t faster and more disciplined than me and haven’t already launched your own, build your personal website now! Just look up “How to build a website”, “Build Wordpress website”, “How to build a website without code” or something similar on Google. Or simply ask ChatGPT.

One day, I’ll create a more detailed guide for this, but meanwhile, just write me an email, and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Email is a good keyword: If you have a personal website, please write me an email and send it to me. I’d love to check it out!

And no matter if you have a personal website or not, please write to me and let me know: Who you are, how you discovered my website, what you think of it and (optionally) one thing you learned today. Or anything else you want to tell me.

You can find my email address below or by going to /hello.

I’m looking forward to hearing from you!

Webnotes

• Chris published a reply to this post: Re: My personal home on the internet.
  Thanks for sending it my way, Chris!
• This post was included in Jay's weeknotes: 30 Pages A Day

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This thought came about two thirds into my run: “I love running in summer rain!”. This song was playing at that moment, the pace was steady and pretty high for a foundation run, and everything felt great.

Just before starting the run, I really had to convince myself that it would be a good idea to go. Because my weather app told me, that it wouldn’t be. But since it only rained very lightly, I just went anyway and simply trusted that this wouldn’t turn into a full-on downpour. Which it – spoiler-alert – didn’t. Lucky me :)

Light summer rain means everything is calmer, fewer people are on the streets, things feel easier. It brings me more into the moment, I truly appreciate being able to run right at that moment (try doing that with 35 °C outside and the sun burning) and just the next step matters. The pace isn’t relevant anymore (although it often rises since the run feels easier) and I just run how I feel.

It’s like this never-ending cycle of happiness and good vibes, just because there is water dripping from the sky.

If your next run happens to also be a rainy one, and you contemplate skipping it – don’t. Just go out and enjoy it. You won’t regret it – promise!

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To keep things short, it was my favourite fiction read of the year to date. 5/5 stars, no question. And if you have a similar taste to mine, you’ll like it as well.

The premise of the book already sounds intriguing: A big tech company (very Meta-like) collaborates with the CIA to create “Fusion”. A tool that promises to be able to track down any citizen anywhere in the world. Basically, the best surveillance program that has ever existed.

To test it, the company has selected 10 random people who are tasked with disappearing for 30 days. If they remain undiscovered, they win 3 million $. We get to meet all of these ten “Zeros”, but the most important one is Kaitlyn Day, an inconspicuous librarian from Boston. Will she be able to stay under the radar for the full month?

If you think this plot has “Catch Me If You Can” vibes, you’re right. But it feels (and is) way more techy, which suits my taste. And with all the technology that is readily available in our world today, the whole scenario seems plausible (who knows, maybe Fusion exists already?). Even real companies like Google or Amazon are mentioned regularly and Cy Baxter (the CEO of WorldShare, the company behind Fusion) is portrayed like a mixture between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Mask. This only adds to the realism I felt when reading it.

Anthony McCarten is an Academy Award-nominated screenplay writer, and you feel that on every page. The sentences are really short, so are the chapters. Almost every chapter catapults the reader between the two locations: A Zero on the run and Cy Baxter in the HQ. You can feel the clock ticking down (the chapters are even titled with the remaining time) and the suspense builds up from page to page without any real downtime.

If that already intrigued you, definitely give it a read. And without wanting to spoil you – be ready for a big twist in the middle of the book. It makes the story even better. And demonstrates, how intelligent the characters in this story are.

Last but not least, since I’m a sucker for beautiful book covers, look at the cover art for the German edition I read:

Perfection!

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From the Shelf is a series where I distill my favourite books in an enjoyable and quick to read format.

Feel Good Productivity by Ali Abdaal (2023) is a book about how to live a healthy and productive life without all the stress. This is my personal book summary.

The one thing to remember

Living a healthy and productive life has three key components: Energise (gaining motivation to do something), unblock (getting started with that thing) & sustain (make sure to not burn out while being at it).

My three biggest takeaways

1. Generally speaking, three things can energise and give us the motivation to do something: A playful attitude, power (aka autonomy and skills) over our actions and time, and people that can support us (and that we can also help in return).
2. Getting started with something is usually the hardest part (see Newtons Law of Inertia, our psyche works kinda like this as well), since motivation follows action and not the other way around. To get started, you need to lower the barrier of doing something as much as possible. Time-block and start with small chunks.
3. There are three types of burnouts: Doing too much, not having enough time to recharge, and doing things that don’t align with one’s values. The solutions are relatively simple: Commit to fewer obligations, do “unproductive” things to regain energy, and regularly check in with yourself and assess your values.

Digest in 9 paragraphs

Energise

Gamify your life! With enough creativity, even the boring tasks can be turned into a challenge that your brain wants to complete. Being too serious hinders your productivity – have fun and remember, that even if you “fail”, you’ll learn something.

Power in this context means having autonomy over oneself, not others. Self-confidence plays a big role. The good news: It can be faked until you actually feel confident. Working on your skills also helps. And even if you don’t have any control over what you do, you can almost certainly decide how you want to do it. Taking responsibility over a process makes you feel powerful!

You should see the people you work with as colleagues, not competition. Because helping others boosts your mood as well as the other person’s. Which also means, that asking others for help is encouraged as well! And, you should probably communicate more than you think.

Unblock

Before we can get unstuck, we need to figure out, why we’re stuck in the first place. Find your “Why”, your “What” and your “When” (probably the most important one). Instead of defining SMART goals, you should switch to the NICE framework: Near-term, input-based, controllable and energising (see above). Then, plan your concrete steps and add them to your calendar.

Fear is a powerful productivity blocker. To combat it, recognise it and apply the 10/10/10 rule. Will this hypothetical worst-case scenario still hurt in 10 minutes/weeks/years? Probably not. Also remember the spotlight effect: Everyone is busier with their own life than with what embarrassing thing you did yesterday. If knowing this doesn’t help, having an Alter Ego that you can tap into might do the trick.

To get started, you have to remove as many barriers as possible. Design your environment so that you’re essentially “forced” to do the thing (e.g., put your running shoes in front of your door in the evening so you see them first thing in the morning). And, since getting started is the hardest part, use the 5-minute rule: Just commit to doing the activity for 5 minutes. Once the time is over, you have the freedom of doing something else. Most of the time, you’ll probably continue what you’ve started. When you’re at it, create systems that help you stay consistent.

Sustain

To mitigate the risk of having too much on your plate, use an energy portfolio where you define where your current priorities lie. When a new thing lands on your table, decide if it’s a “Hell yeah!” or a “No” thing. And if it’s something that has to be completed far in the future, imagine if it were done tomorrow. Do you really have the time to do it? And remember: Taking breaks is important as well!

Activities that help you feel CALM (competent, autonomous, liberated and mellow) are a great way to recharge. Most CALM activities involve doing something creative, but without the pressure of creating something perfect. Spending time in nature is another way that will help you feel more relaxed. And finally: Allow yourself to do nothing or watch your favourite trash-tv show from time to time. If not done too often, these things can help you recharge your batteries as well.

Making sure you work on the right thing is a lifelong task. Hence, you must regularly decide what’s essential to you and your life in the three main categories health, work, and relationships. Make sure you work towards your longterm goals in these areas by asking yourself: “What can I do today that brings me a step closer to them?” But be careful not to live too firmly in the future. The present is the most important time.

Personal conclusion

I’ve been a subscriber to Ali Abdaal’s YouTube channel for quite some time now (I think I started to follow him way before the pandemic started, so that would make it 4+ years by now). I’ve always liked his videos (and still do to this day, at least most of them) since they revolve around topics that also matter to me. And just like me, I feel like Ali has made a transformation away from falling into the Hustle Culture™ trap and having a “you can always optimise more” type of attitude towards a more healthy relationship with productivity.

So when Ali announced that his first book would be about Feel Good Productivity, I knew that I wanted to read it myself. And to tell you the most important thing first: He delivers on the promise of teaching the reader how he or she can live a healthy and productive life.

Apart from the content, I liked the format of the book. Ali follows a 3×3×3 structure for practically the whole book: 3 main categories with 3 subtopics each, where most of them also feature around 3 ideas. Combined with the handy summaries at the end of each chapter, this leaves you with a very well-rounded and polished book that is easy to read.

My only issue with the book, at least from my perspective, is, that the individual ideas presented aren’t really new – if you’ve read other similar books (or watched Ali’s videos for some time), most things won’t really be eye-opening to you. While it overall feels more like a summary of other authors' work, the combination of the ideas and the order and way in which they are presented, is still refreshing. Sprinkled with anecdotes from famous people and Ali himself, it’s a short and pleasant read.

For someone who is new to the whole world of productivity books, though, this one is an excellent introduction to some crucial concepts. If you’ve read Feel Good Productivity, you can save yourself some time and skip most of the other books on your TBR list. Work smarter, not harder – just like the book teaches you.

4/5

Finished: 14.03.2024

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…it’s so f*cking addictive.

In the past few weeks, I’ve significantly reduced my social media usage. The only social media apps remaining on my phone are Snapchat (still a great way to communicate with a few friends for me), Mastodon and YouTube. And it works great. I don’t miss anything and I don’t check these apps very often (turning notifications off is a game changer here).

But I have one problem: When I end up on YouTube, I stay there way longer than I would on another platform. It’s even worse on my Mac and the worst on my iPad and TV. There is a constant stream of content I’m interested in and that I want to watch. The FOMO is real here; I regularly have multiple tabs open in my browser for videos I want to watch. Because if I don’t, they’ll be lost. Forever. Sounds stupid, but that’s how I feel in that moment.

Now, I would say that I watch pretty good content for the most part. “Good” in the sense that it’s something, where I might learn something new, gain an interesting perspective, or get inspired. But that’s the crux. I feel like I’m doing something “productive” in the moment. When I think about it later however, I recognise, that I’m moving between the same 3-4 things, just packaged differently. A little bit of programming news, a sprinkle of self-help/improvement content and maybe something about books, or a Kurzgesagt video about the universe and how life is essentially meaningless (and why that’s a good thing).

If I were doing this for, say, an hour max a day, I wouldn’t consider this a problem. But if I sum up all my YouTube consumption over all my devices, I’m averaging about 2-3 hours daily I’d guess. And that’s way too much.

You could argue that other people watch Netflix for that same amount of time every evening. I think that’s a better alternative though. Because you have to stay with a piece of content longer (e.g. a series) and thus don’t experience this constant switching and FOMO on the next video that will definitely change my life.

The absolute worst part about all this is however, that watching YouTube has become my default activity when I’m eating alone. The reasons why this is bad are self-explanatory.

What I’m going to do about it.

I don’t have a masterplan yet, but here are a few ideas:

• Uninstalling YouTube on my iPhone (doing it right now as I’m writing this) to prevent on-the-go use. Reading on my Kindle should become the new default.
• No YouTube on my TV unless I’m ready to go to bed and when I have read for at least 5 minutes that day.
• No YouTube while eating alone. Make reading the newspaper or listening to a podcast the new default. Or doing nothing at all except enjoying the meal (but that’s hard mode for now).
• Using Focus for YouTube to remove the addicting parts of YouTube on my Mac (already doing that for a few days, works great so far).

Don’t get me wrong, YouTube is awesome and I’m still gonna use it regularly. Mainly on my MacBook and more intentionally (for researching purposes). But I could do so many other great things with my time that I’m not spending on deciding what video to watch next: Read, write, code, draw, exercise, meditate, …

What about you?

Now I’m intrigued to hear what your YouTube consumption looks like. And let me know if you have any other tips, that worked for you!

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This is something I feel with many people whom I see creating things, but most prominently in musicians. Something about their craft feels different than, say seeing a digital artist draw something in Procreate or a coder bringing a creative project to live. Music sparks emotions like almost no other medium (maybe film/photo could do the same) and can be created on the spot (which no other art form can in the same way). And watching a great musician improvise while something beautiful comes out of it is fascinating.

A recent example of this emotion was when I watched a Piano Live Concert on YouTube by Fred again. The whole vibe of the video is awesome. I mean, who wouldn’t want to be able to play a piano like this on a rooftop in London during sunset time?

Fred is an especially good example for sparking this inspiring feeling. I like his music but it’s not something that I listen to every day. Still, his dedication to his craft and his creativity (especially how he samples existing sounds) is unbelievably admirable. For example, his “Actual Life” albums contain songs made out of TikToks, voice memos or other audio snippets. And he manages to create fantastic stuff with it. How cool would it be, if I were also able to sample sounds from my environment into songs? I’ll learn it one day.

I think the reason I admire these types of people so much, is that they have a real foundational understanding of whatever they are creating and working with. Another example here is Finneas, who produced the album “When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?” of his sister Billie Eilish in a bedroom. That album won 3 Grammys, including “Album of the Year” and “Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical”. How crazy is that?
(There is a documentary about the creation of that album that you should definitely watch.)

It feels really inspiring and empowering when you see what can be achieved with enough passion, dedication, creativity, and knowledge, no matter what equipment you have.

These are just two examples, but you get the point.

I’m not sure, if I have found “my thing” yet like these two people did. As of right now, I would say that the web is the thing I have the most foundational knowledge of (although I’m still barely scratching on the surface). Mostly frontend stuff, but I’ve been doing more backend stuff in Laravel recently as well. Let’s see where that takes me.

I feel like it doesn’t really matter what exactly you do, as long as you do it with dedication. Musicians are my personal example, but maybe I can inspire someone someday with the digital products I’ve coded, essays I’ve written, or something entirely else. Who knows.

Until then, keep inspiring!

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I want more moments like this in my life. Moments that feel cozy and where I don’t feel any pressure at all to do something. I can just go with the flow, dig into internet rabbit holes, talk to someone about anything that comes to mind or read a good book. The moment is not confined by a time where I have to stop doing what I’m doing. I just stop when I want to.

I’ve noticed that my everyday life often feels time-boxed. In 20 minutes I have to do X, in 1 hour my alarm clock goes off, by 10pm I need to be in bed so I get my 8 hours of sleep (which is important, don’t get me wrong.).

But on the other hand, I also observed that the moments where I feel the happiest, are the ones where I don’t have this sense of urgency and “rushing” things. Thus, I want to embrace and integrate them more frequently in my life.

For instance, I want to finally pick up playing the piano. I bought one during the pandemic but never got into learning it. Because I always felt there was something better to do. But that’s the problem. Sometimes you have to do things simply because you like doing them, not because there is a clear goal attached.

I’m an adult now, but rediscovering the childlike ability of enjoying the moment without thinking about the future feels great.

Here’s to more cozy moments where I can read a good book, discover and listen to a new song, make my own music, draw something or just do nothing.

Because that’s also ok.

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There is a very easy solution to this problem that uses a service called “JSDelivr”. Just go to the projects Github page and locate the file you want to use.

Then, copy its url (just the one you see in the browser). Remove everything up to (and including) /blob/main. You should end up with a path like this: /path/to/file/script.js.

Your final step is to add https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/{username}/{reponame}in front of the path and voilà. You got yourself a blazing fast CDN link!

An even easier solution

While writing this note, I came across this handy tool on JSDelivr’s own website: https://www.jsdelivr.com/github. It automatically converts your Github links into CDN ones. Just paste the Github url and you’re good to go!

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I get recommended way more videos that have this raw, authentic feeling to it. Just a person talking to a camera without fancy equipment or someone filming their everyday life with a phone. And these are frequently videos with under 1000 views. Since more views does not equal quality on YouTube, I would have this sense of feeling lucky to have found these gems when I do.

Two recent channels I discovered recently are
lrnjulie and geezatrix. The former creates study livestreams and video essays with an almost philosophical touch, underlined with hand-drawn presentations (I especially liked her “I deleted all my social media and made a website” video, that’s how I discovered here when going down the SmallWeb rabbit hole). The latter makes cozy a-day-in-my-life videos (a “digital diary”) you can leave on in the background and create something yourself.

More prominent examples of this new trend are Life Of Riza and Colt Kirwan. Although their production value is immensely high (while using minimal equipment, they are simply great filmmakers and storytellers), the videos themselves still have a very down-to-earth vibe. Some even call them the main creators of the YouTube “New Wave”.

I’m curious to see how long this trend will continue. Or if it even is here to stay (was it even ever gone?). More “Broadcast Yourself” again, less “MrBeast videos with 120 cuts in 60 seconds”.

Feels like a breath of fresh air.

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let count = 0;
$: doubled = count * 2;

This essentially means that whenever count changes, doubled would change as well (obviously, hence the name).

For a current project, I needed similar behaviour in a Laravel Eloquent Model.

This model has a one-to-many relationship. For the sake of this tutorial, let’s say it’s a task-list that has many tasks. Apart from returning all tasks (via the tasks attribute), I also wanted to add a filtered_tasks attribute. If there are from and to query params in the request, it should only return the tasks in the specified timeframe.

There are two steps for accomplishing this:

1. Create the new attribute with an accessor

From the docs:

An accessor transforms an Eloquent attribute value when it is accessed.

The cool thing is, you can also “define” new attributes that are not even available in the original model. For example, if you want to derive them from an existing attribute (like we want).

Quick heads up, I’m using the older syntax with getXYAttribute here, as I find it easier to use.

Here’s how you can do it:

public function getFilteredTasksAttribute()
{
    // Get query params
    $from = request()->query('from');
    $to = request()->query('to');

    // Validate date format
    try {
        $from = Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', $from);
        $to = Carbon::createFromFormat('Y-m-d', $to);
    } catch (Exception $e) {
        $from = null;
        $to = null;
    }

    // Build the query
    $query = $this->revenue_events();

    // Filter items, if params are available
    if ($from && $to) {
        $query = $query->whereBetween('created_at', [$from, $to]);
    }

    // Return data
    return $query->get();
}

Note that I’m using the request() helper for accessing the query parameters. You can’t pass the request into the accessor via a parameter, like you would in a controller method.

The only thing left now is to append this new attribute to the model.

2. Append the attribute

This one is pretty easy. Just use the appends property of the model and add the new attribute in snake case to it:

protected $appends = [
    'filtered_tasks',
];

More info on that part in the docs as well.

That’s it already! You can now access the new attribute like normal: $taskList->filtered_tasks.

I hope this tutorial helped you. If you know a better or more efficient way to do this inside an Eloquent Model, please reach out!

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Since getting the ball rolling is usually the hardest part, doing something similar is crucial to trick your brain into doing something. And once you're at it, every subsequent action will feel easier to do.

I typically do this by writing out a small todo-list, either in the evening or first thing in the morning (also gets my brain into “action mode”). These checklists are often ephemeral, I’ll throw them away when I’m done. They solely serve the purpose of telling me what to do next.

That’s also the reason I don’t write them out in my regular todo-list app (this one’s more for planning things in the future). I normally just use a loose sheet of paper, Taskpaper on Mac (great one for quick checklists in general!) or in my newest discovery, Twodos on my iPhone.

The design of all of these apps is so minimal and straightforward, they actually trick you into wanting to write things down.

But this is not about apps. If you take one thing away from this, just make sure what you should do next. Either by having a physical todo-list on your desk. Or finishing your sentences in the.

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But it becomes a problem when it hinders you to actually doing the thing you should be doing in the first place. Since I tend to be that person, here are a few things that helped me that maybe also help you:

Create a dedicated outlet for “imperfect” things

Taking off the pressure of writing the perfect blog post has helped me tremendously with getting into the craft. The main thing that I did: Creating this notes section on my website. An outlet for my thoughts, even if they are not perfectly polished and backed by 10 scientific studies.

For you, this could for example be a separate account on Instagram or a new YouTube channel. Whatever suits your creations best.

“Perfectionism” is just an excuse

Typically, when I excuse my inaction with “perfectionism”, I’m actually just procrastinating. I’m trying to avoid seeing the thing being created in real life and thus, maybe realising, that it’s not as perfect as it was in my head.

But knowing this can sometimes help you get over that first hurdle. Sometime, you’ll have to start. Do it now.

Obsess over quantity first

Especially when you’re new to something, quantity is more important than quality. Before you’ve filmed, edited and published 100 videos, you shouldn’t really care about doing advanced motion design in After Effects. By creating more, you’ll encounter more problems to solve, and you’ll see opportunities to improve your process. Which helps you much more in the long run.

Create a bunch of things, document your journey, see your improvement. It will be rewarding when you look back at it in a year.

You can always improve the thing later

This one is especially true when what you create exists in the digital space. Making a copy and tweaking things you’re not happy with is a trivial action. Don’t be scared of that. Share your things, even if they have big “WIP-energy”.

Iterations are your friend.

No one cares as much as you

Harsh truth, but as long as you’re not world-famous, nobody will care about the tiny little details of your work. What sounds sad is actually a relief. You can get away with doing imperfect things. To many, they will already look perfect.

This also applies to many other things in life. Read about the Spotlight effect, if you’ve never heard of that one.

Learn new things

When you’re a beginner at something, you almost certainly won't be perfect at it. You’ll have that child-like naivety of approaching the craft with curiosity and excitement. Which feels great in contrast to our professional world, where we always have to pretend we’re an expert.

Be a beginner at something and allow yourself to be bad at it!

These were the tips that immediately came to mind. I hope they serve as inspiration to you and as a reminder to myself.

The list is probably not perfect, but who cares (except previous me 😉).

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There’s #doomscrolling… but also there’s my passion for #nerdscrolling. […]
— @davidbisset@phpc.social

Do you know this feeling when you discover a new word, that immediately resonates with you? That’s how I felt when I read the Toot above.

Finally, I have a word for these moments, where you just get lost in a random rabbit hole. You scroll through blogpost after blogpost, and your browser history suddenly looks like you’re doing some serious research.

I’ve begun to associate this kind of behaviour with me procrastinating “productively”. But the weird thing always was, that it didn’t feel like wasted time at all. I even remember writing down one evening in my journal in a side note, that I had taken a roundtrip down a rabbit hole that day (forgot the topic unfortunately), and that I felt delighted at that moment.

I don’t know about you, but discovering something new always sparks a precious feeling. Discovering something, that you haven’t come across yet during your time on this earth. Or that you now see in a different light than you used to. You immediately want to know everything about it. And you want to read other people’s opinions on it.

For me, it sometimes gets so intense, that I even contemplate taking this subject at uni for studying it on an academic level. For example, last year, I somehow got really invested in the works of Richard Feynman (the well-known physicist) and his ability to explain things in relatively simple terms. You might have heard about the Feynman Method for learning something new. That was him. Subsequently, I thought to myself a surprising number of times that I also want to study physics someday.

That’s the power of nerdscrolling, apparently.

And while I might not actually push through on that front, there’s something else I definitely want to do: Share more about what I discover during these sessions. Write about it, talk about it, have conversations. If it even inspires one other person, it was worth it.

So, thanks, David, for confirming that I’m not the only one who loves doing this. And for introducing me to a new word I can use to justify these moments, when I have an embarrassingly large amount of open tabs in my browser about Quantum Mechanics.

Let’s all nerdscroll a bit more!

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It’s simple, not easy.

He was saying this in the context of writing 1000 words every day². But I thought to myself, that this mantra actually applies to everything in life, that will have a sustainable impact on the quality of it:

• Eating clean food.
• Exercising every day.
• Using your smartphone less.
• Getting off Social Media.
• Journaling.
• Coding daily.
• Reading a book a month.
• Spending quality time with loved ones without any distractions.
• Sleeping 8 hours every night.

It’s simple, not easy.

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One example: I always considered myself to be someone who wouldn’t adapt his writing style and submit to X’s algorithm. If you’ve spent any time lately on the platform, you probably know what I’m talking about. These over optimised tweets and threads, that are written for maximum reach and engagement.

For example, by not including a link in the main tweet, but later down in the thread. Because, the algorithm might punish you for it. Which it actually does. Or using these “thread hooks” that are overused to death.

That’s a reason why I found the switch to Mastodon so refreshing. It feels less “hustle culture-y” and more authentic. People just share whatever they want and aren't really concerned about reaching thousands of other users.

Which makes the content actually better, not worse.

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But the weird thing was, that I couldn’t really pinpoint, what exactly I found great about it.

Sure, from a cinematography standpoint, it’s made brilliantly. The actors were great as well, just as the music selection (especially the montage at the end of episode 7 felt really emotional).

But what I’ve come to think is that the real reason this show was a great watch, was its rawness. It felt like a snapshot into the life of the characters. Their struggles, wishes, and desires. And the writing was so great, that each character was almost equally like-/hateable (with a few exceptions maybe).

At its core, it’s an everyday story told in a very compelling and relatable way. Partly also because it's inspired by the show runner’s (Lee Sung Jin) personal life.

I want to watch and read more such stories in the future. A breath of fresh air between all the blockbuster movies I normally go watch at the cinema.
Do you have any recommendations that have a similar vibe?

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It pulls me back into the moment, makes me more present, and before I know it, a couple 100 meters have passed already.

What works for running also works for life in general.

Once you have a rough plan on what you need to do (a quick brain dump is usually enough), just take the first step. Focus on it, and the result will be better than if you were overthinking it.

Or at least you will be faster. Which leaves more time for iterations and gathering feedback.

And once you’re done, just take the next step. And the next. It’s all that matters right now.

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When I’m using a proper journal, I’m always debating on whether the thing I intend to write down is actually essential enough to put it there.

And when I don’t have one, just writing something on a loose piece of paper feels wrong somehow (“What if I lose it when it becomes important later?”).

Luckily, I found a solution for this “problem” that is simple and works great for me:

I have a small little spiral ring notebook, that always sits on my desk.

It is the place for “messy” thoughts, and I will throw it away if it’s full. That last part is key. It gives my inner perfectionist peace of mind, when I simply want to jot something down. Plus, I can easily tear out a sheet if I need to give it to someone or pin it to the wall.

Saving the split second thought of “where do I put this thing I want to write down?” is what enables me to stay in my flow. Which is great.

And on a meta-level, this is precisely the reason for this fleeting notes section on my website where you’re reading this text right now. This is my place for those “where do I put this not-yet-fleshed-out thought of mine that I want to publish regardless?”.

A mouthful of a question, so I’m glad for every time I don’t have to ask myself.

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