Jói Sigurdsson's post-employment adventures
TL;DR: This will only be interesting for those who have young kids (1st/2nd grade roughly) learning to read in Icelandic, it’s a flash card game with the 100 most common Icelandic words. Thus the rest of this is in Icelandic. TL;DR á íslensku: Leikurinn er hér 😃
After upgrading from macOS 13.x to 15.x (Sequoia), I was getting “bus error” when trying to run any Erlang or Elixir tools. Trying to reinstall Erlang with asdf was failing as follows:
CrankWheel uses Maxio (née Chargify) for subscription management. It’s OK but I’ve never been super duper happy with it (mostly because I chose it for its flat fee structure, then later they switch to charging a flat fee plus percentage… and the switching costs are high). Today, I present another small gripe with it: The filename of invoices sent by Chargify looks something like _541780067.pdf ,…
This won’t make much sense if you don’t speak Icelandic, but the gist of it is, every year since we moved into our house in 2016, we’ve put together a treasure hunt for the kids, who still love it although the majority are teenagers or young adults by now. For posterity, here are the clues from this Easter! 1. Þvæ ég og þurrka þó án sápuslurka Vænt sem er vott vindur sig, verður gott Sýna lausn…
About an hour ago as of this writing, one of CrankWheel ’s EC2 instances spontaneously stopped responding to anything - it wasn’t serving requests and I couldn’t SSH into it. Looking at the AWS EC2 console, I could see that in the Status Check column, instead of saying X/X passed, it said “Insufficient info”. Digging a bit deeper, I found that AWS admitted that the “System Reachability Check…
TL;DR: You can use GPT-4 as your own personal nutritionist. It does a pretty good job! It started with my public food journal I started a renewed focus on my health a few weeks ago, and one of my commitments to myself was to keep a public food journal, logging everything I eat. You can find it on Beeminder . It’s not exciting reading, and I don’t really expect that many will take more than a brief…
I love the note-taking app Bear , available on macOS and iOS. I’ve been a paid user for years, and it’s where I do most of my writing (outside of emails). I had the idea to use Bear as a CMS for my personal site, joisig.com, and started hacking away at it an embarrasingly long time ago in my so-called “free time”, and I have finally launched an updated version of this site that runs on my custom…
TL;DR: After one of the updates for Chrome 100, my company’s browser extension stopped working for a small percentage of users, and after lots of digging, it looks like the same issue occurs in several of the most popular Chrome extensions out there. We are certain it’s a bug in Google Chrome itself. The bug is very elusive and remains hard to reproduce, even after 8 weeks of non-stop legwork.…
Recently, I was working on some tricky, destructive database manipulation code, that we needed in CrankWheel’s Accordium product to automate GDPR data erasure requests. Because Accordium is an e-signature product, it’s not as simple as just deleting all data related to the user who is requesting that their personally identifiable information be removed. We still need to be able to attest whether a…
I was interviewed recently by Phil La Duke of Authority Magazine, on the top 5 trends to watch out for in the future of work. I thought I’d republish the interview here as it’s an interesting topic to me. All questions (in bold) are Phil’s; all responses are mine. My colleague Birgir Már Daníelsson reviewed a draft of the interview and provided insightful input, for which I am thankful. Thank you…
I ran into this absolutely confounding error today and figured I would document it here in case somebody else runs into it and can’t find the solution. The error was: “You don’t have permissions to edit. After you or your AWS administrator have updated your permissions to allow the s3:PutBucketPolicy action, choose Save changes.” That didn’t make sense - I was logged in with administrative…
This was a favorite of our au pair who left a few days ago, and I’m publishing it here for her (hi Helmiina!!) and for anybody else who would like to try it. It’s very tasty and easy to make, you need to start about an hour before you want to eat but all of the prep and hands-on cooking is only about 15 minutes. Ingredients for 3-4 servings: 8 boneless chicken thighs, roughly 700g (can also use…
Here is the best recipe for Icelandic pancakes that I’ve found. This patent is public domain! Most Icelandic pancake recipes are virtually identical, but the devil is in the details. The recipe I use is a slightly modified version of this one by Eva Laufey Kjaran (I use a bit more butter). It tastes great and is very unlikely to stick to the pan. I’m publishing my variation in English so…
I’ve been intrigued by programming ever since I was 6 years old and first became highly interested in computers, and I’ve programmed professionally for almost 25 years now. This year was the first time I spent a fair bit of time doing “competitive” programming, participating in the Advent of Code 2020 “holiday calendar”. The most I’d done before this was to try my hand at a handful of Project…
This article was originally published on the CrankWheel blog We reached a pretty big milestone for CrankWheel on November 7th, when we released a public-facing update of our software for the 100th time. Internally, we number our releases as M1, M2, and so forth, where M stands for milestone. This one was M100.
Over the last 5 years of bootstrapping, I’ve tried a lot of things, and discovered there are many ways to create hassle for yourself that wastes time and energy and distracts you from building value in your business. This is my second post on lessons learned from bootstrapping; you can subscribe to updates to this page if you want to continue following along. Avoiding hassle is especially…
I’ve developed some ideas based on running a bootstrapped startup for about five years now, and I want to write blog posts about some of them. We write a very sales-focused blog on the CrankWheel site, so instead of posting there, I’ll be posting them here on my personal website. This is my first post on this subject. You can subscribe to updates if you’d like to read my future stuff. The first…
This is quite a bit off my usual topics of startups and tech, but a good friend of mine asked for the recipe and I figured I’d write it up here for posterity. It’s an eggs Benedict recipe I put together out of a few others that I can no longer find, and that I have made many times. I’ll also describe a nice keto/LCHF variation on the recipe.
The IPCC’s recent report on the effects of global warming of 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels show that humanity clearly needs to strive for this goal. The difference between 1.5ºC and 2ºC of warming are already predicted to be huge, as summarized well by the Guardian , and current political commitments predict a much higher 3ºC (we’re currently at 1ºC). I am not an expert or even particularly…
This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog . I was recently asked by a founding team I know, how to go about hiring a CTO. They are experts in a significantly deep domain, but need a technologist with them to build their company, ideally one with a background in the same domain. So far, they’ve been outsourcing technical work, but they’ve realized that this is not be the…
This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog . A lot has been written about the European Union’s new data protection regulation, the GDPR , but not much of it is tailored for startups and small businesses, and a lot of it just muddies the picture of what you really need to do or gives you an incomplete picture. In this guide, it is my intent to give you a simple set of steps…
This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog .
This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog .
This article was originally published on the Startup Resources blog . I’ve been building a SaaS startup for a couple of years now, and one of the things I noticed after a few months of operation is that all those small subscriptions I had for various things needed for the operation of the startup really start to add up. We have enough revenue now that those subscriptions don’t matter so much, but…
For the last three summers, I've participated as a mentor in the Startup Reykjavik accelerator programme. Today, I was honoured to be voted by the 2014 alumni as "mentor of the year" for last summer's programme.