I still remember my first proper VO2max test. The mask that made you feel like you couldn’t breathe. The prickle of the needle every three minutes, drawing blood for a lactate reading. The poster of Lasse Virén — or maybe it was Martti Vainio — on the wall of the lab at the Paavo Nurmi -keskus, the only thing to look at, and so the only thing to keep my mind off the pain. The clock that refused to…
Imagine the scenario. Two juniors on the sand. The smaller one serves short into the middle. Both stay back. The opponent picks a corner and lands one in the empty front court. Easy point. “One of you, up!” I call out after the rally. They glance back at me with blank stares. Two rallies later, her partner serves. Both back again. This time the opposing reception comes off the arms badly and…
Your freedom to carry a gun messes with my freedom to walk around without fear. Your freedom to “stand your ground” with force is at odds with my freedom to run anywhere in the woods freely. Your freedom to refuse to pay taxes diminishes my freedom to fall ill without the fear of it bankrupting me. There are many kinds of freedoms. Yours might not be the only ones or the right ones even though…
Last fall – on the brink of transferring to the masters series in sports – I started a new triathlon project. I’ve been looking for something new for a while and this seemed like a good opportunity to take it into action. I’ve also always loved triathlon. I’m a bit of a generalist in everything and always looking for variety1 in everything I do. The big problem in triathlon for me was that I was…
Dear specialty coffee roaster, Let me start by saying that I love you, each and every one of you. I love what you’re doing and respect the work you’re doing to bring better coffee to us all and fight the apathy of people sinking in them chain-oil-like substance just to get a fix of caffeine. That said, it’s time for some tough love. Tough in the sense that I’m going to be quite outspoken and love…
If you missed it, I just wrote a long write-up of my Monitorama.EU talk in the Bear Metal blog. If you’re working on big data, design, or visualizations, you probably want to read it.
The common perception is that sales and marketing is mostly about telling how good you or your product are. That it’s all about me, me, me. Us, us, us. I tend to disagree. People don’t really care about you, they care about themselves. And while that sounds selfish, it really isn’t, it’s just a natural fact of life. Why should they really care about you? So to be successful both in creating…
A few months ago, several friends announced taking a few steps back from their hectic work life, taking perhaps on some freelance clients but mostly enjoying life, family, getting into shape, or whatever they felt they had been neglecting in their busy lives as software professionals and entrepreneurs. The term they often used for this was funemployment. June 30th was my last day doing full-time…
Bootstrapping Resources In the Scottish Ruby Conference, Tekin Suleiman gave a great talk about his experiences in bootstrapping a web app. At the end of the talk there was a question about further resources into the subject. I’ve been into this thing for years now (both in the form of building Wildfire, dribbling with personal projects, and now with Bear Metal), so here’s my take on the subject.…
Here’s my deck from the Tampere Web Dev meetup on the 10th of November, 2012. Thanks to Thomas Fuchs for retinafy.me and Thijs van der Vossen. If you enjoyed the talk, you might consider signing up for my up-and-coming eBook, Forgotten SVG.