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European alternatives for digital services and products, like cloud services and SaaS products.

In this excelent blog post Tomas Stropus explores The Art of Finishing. He concludes with some solid advice I can take into my next project.

“As long as you’re working on something, you feel productive. Jumping from project to project gives you a constant stream of “new project energy,” which can feel more invigorating than the grind of finishing a single project.”

I love this new project energy. It generally tends to coincide with those times when I really should be working on something else or have little time to start anything new. The excitement is real.

“unfinished projects carry a mental weight. They linger in the back of your mind, quietly draining your mental energy and enthusiasm.”

But as someone with a folder littered with unifinished projects I can attest to the weight carry. I’m forever wondering when I’ll pick them back up or what I need to do next to move the project forward. The reality is, that many of these projects are finished. They weren’t started with a view to being long lived. They were started to explore a curiosity. By not declaring them done I’ve let them lagnuish.

“we learn different lessons from finishing projects than we do from starting them.”

“With every thought we outsource, we miss out on a chance to grow. Love it or hate it, AI is here to stay. However we use it, we need to think more, not less.”

This is one of the best guides on how to use generative AI writing assistants that I have seen to date. It is practical, gives solid examples, and handles common objections that we are bound to raise. The team at iA not only build incredible software, but also write with a real sense of clarity. I love their work.

Some of the best days travelling are those filled with the awkward experiences that come with a language barrier.

“But I love the experiences that can only come with travelling. The awkwardness of the language barrier, the grace that is being shown despite all the communication difficulties and misunderstandings, the challenges that come with navigating and being in unfamiliar environments.”

But why do we have to travel in order to experience this awkwardness? How can we afford ourselves these moments of awkwardness when surrounded by the familiar?

“We are constantly trying to experience our country with renewed eyes, but we cannot overcome our subconscious being in auto-pilot mode.”

Picking up a camera is one way to try and see the familiar in a new light. But even with a camera in hand, I’ve found it very hard to wander the streets of our local neighbourhood and see things differently. We become blind to the routine.

In her Digital Garden, Rachel offers an important reminder, it’s OK to lower the bar. As someone who has mixed success with using streaks as a motivational tool, I can relate. Sometimes we just need to do enough to keep the streak going.

“I had to remind myself that it’s okay to lower the bar. That an average version of something is better than a perfect version of nothing. All I can do is have a go.”

I’ve also learned, despite the somewhat traumatic experience of losisng streaks that are thousands of days old, it is also OK to give ourselves a break. Taking a conscious break is not the same as giving up.

At work, I spend a lot of time listening to customers talk about their developer experience. Everyone is trying to improve it, but very few have a clear vision of what a great developer experience is.

I present you this video from Allan Blomquist at Tommorrow Corporation.

• lightning fast compile times
• hot-reloading after every keystroke or graphics update
• sharable timestamps into any run

But there is more. Make sure you watch to the end of the video to see what a great developer experience could look like. Thanks to Nathan Manceaux-Panot for sharing this with me.

“Fluency on the command line is a skill often neglected or considered arcane, but it improves your flexibility and productivity as an engineer in both obvious and subtle ways.”

I’ve found that familiarity with the command line has been a real asset throughout my career. There were many times in my early career where I was pulled in to help triage and fix issues because I was familiar with the terminal. This GitHub repository is an excellent starting point.

“This page is not long, but if you can use and recall all the items here, you know a lot”

You don’t need to be an expert, but spending some time getting yourself comfortable will be time well spent. You don’t need to remember all the commands and all the options, just enough to know what to type into your favourite search engine and you’ll be well on your way.

Customers often highlight supply chain security is a regular pain point. Very few would claim to state they understand the problem let alone how to solve it. All have heard from vendors (including my employer) who are offering to solve the problem. This talk by Russ Cox is excellent. It attempts to define, with examples, the problem of open-source supply chain security.

“Open-source supply chain security is the engineering of defences against both open-source supply chain attacks and open-source supply chain vulnerabilities.”

In some areas, customers I speak to are confident. Everyone is doing some form of vulnerability scanning. Yet Russ has this to say.

“Vulnerability scanning is far from a solved problem more research is needed into how to avoid the many kinds of false positives and into effective ways to present the information.”

Russ is core member of the Go team at Google. The talk highlights work to secure the supply chain within the Go ecosystem, but is not constrained to Go. The principles and solutions offered are applicable to all open-source software. The talk is well worth a watch.

Rachel is not the only one who is tired of timelines. But it isn’t just timelines that have grown increasingly disapointing. The interaction models on supposedly social platforms leave a lot to be desired.

“Maybe it is just a case that if I want that interaction, I have to make more of an effort to get it: comment on people’s blogs, send emails to authors who don’t have comment forms and encourage people to do the same here.”

I find myself increasingly turning to email as a way to interact with people online. Even better, is email that comes with no expecation of an instant reply, or even a reply at all.

When searching for items in an array, you might decide to stop your search as soon as you’ve found the item you’ve been looking for. At a first glance, that is the efficient thing to do. Who doesn’t want their code to finish as fast as possible? But is speed really the most desirable characteristic?

As any architect will tell you, it depends. Sometimes we value predictable behaviour over outright speed. This is never more true than in the event of a complex systems failure. This article by Colm MacCárthaigh introduces the idea of the constant work. He uses the analogy of a coffee urn to illustrate the desirable characteristics of such a system.

Sometimes a solution that may seem counterintuitive can have desirable properties.

“Besides being simple and robust, this approach is very cost effective. Storing a file in Amazon S3 and fetching it over and over again in a loop, even from hundreds of machines, costs far less than the engineering time and opportunity cost spent building something more complex.”

The article provides two examples of the constant work pattern deployed at the heart of AWS. Both Route53 and the Network Load Balancers use constant work to ensure predictable behaviour in the event of failure.

Whilst walking around the Tremenheere sculpture park, my son collected an armful of fallen leaves. As we waited for the family to re-group he began to lay them out in a pattern on the stump of a tree. My sister asked if I’d ever shown him the work of Andy Goldsworthy. I’d not heard of Andy, but his work is incredible.

“Goldsworthy is rarely attracted to the idea of permanence — contradicting most artist’s concerns with permanence and endurance. But there is always a record with Goldworthy’s photographs being an essential part of the installation.

“Each work grows, stays, decays — integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit,” says Goldsworthy.”

– Andy Goldsworthy: Art of Nature.

As my son faced the prospect of abandoning his leaf pattern to the whims of the weather, he looked up in tears and asked, “Can you take a photograph of it?”. Learning to accept impermanence can be hard.

“Web browsers are ubiquitous, but how do they work? This book explains, building a basic but complete web browser, from networking to JavaScript, in a couple thousand lines of Python.”

I stumbled across this book in Robin Sloan’s newsletter Attention Router. There is no need to go building your own web browser, but this strikes me as a project that would leave you with a deeper understanding of how the web works.

In addition to some beautiful images captured on the streets of Tokyo, Winnie has this to say on travelling.

I wrote about my psychological health improving when I travel, I think a part of it is that travelling increases the opportunities for positive and warm human interactions. Because of all the awkwardness that exists due to language and cultural differences, there seems to be a special kind of grace reserved. We do have our fair share of negative encounters but in general there is warmth.

As someone who lives both language and a cultural differences almost daily, I can only attest to the opportunity for warmth, grace and shared moments of joy that they bring. We all need to travel more, to experience these barriers and the warmth they can bring.

“the difference between students isn’t in their potential to learn particular things, but in how fast they can learn them”

I love this idea that anyone can learn anything, it just takes us different times to learn it. I used to hold the belief that I couldn’t learn languages. Yet I’m now (occasionally) able to survive social gatherings entirely in Mandarin Chinese. It has taken an inordinate time to reach this point though. I can learn, just slowly.

“I believe that talent and prior experience drive our learning rate more than our learning potential. But we mostly measure rate of acquisition, not ultimate attainment, in schools. Because of this, we end up selecting for talent, rather than total potential.”

This leads to something that I’ve long believed: Academic performance is not a good indicator of potential.

This choose your own adventure style YouTube game from CGP Grey is a real labour of love. What starts as a video about Rock, Paper, Scissors quickly gets into large numbers and probability. If you don’t win the game (you won’t) it is well worth trying again and clicking through to the final video. Just what does it mean to say that something is improbable?

If you want to hear CGP Grey talk about the experience of making the video then this episode of the Cortex Podcast will reveal all.