The feed of updates to Julian Paul
The Claude Code statusline is a shell script that renders at the bottom of your terminal on every tool call and user turn. By default it shows almost nothing. You can point it at a script and render whatever you want to show your current model, context usage, session cost, and plan limits. The thing I actually needed to know while working: how full is my context window, and how deep am I into my…
If you want something, you’re ready for it. If you’re not ready, you just want something else, even if slightly different. Life always leaves you with two options: double down by trusting you’re ready OR recalibrate what you actually want by taking a step back. Either way, the goal is to clarify exactly what you want out of life as fast as possible, so you can close the gap between who you are and…
I kicked off a Claude Code session this morning. A big frontend refactor across early.tools repos, estimated 14 minutes of compute. Opened a new tab. Thumb already hovering over the X bookmark. Caught it. Closed the tab. Sat there for a second, slightly annoyed. The model goes off and does 20 minutes of what used to take two hours. You’re not typing, not thinking. You’re just… there.…
My biggest weakness has nothing to do with work. It’s not laziness. Not distraction. Not a lack of ambition. It’s this: the moment I feel a real connection with someone, the version of me who knows exactly what he wants quietly steps aside. And the version who just doesn’t want to be alone takes over. I’ve recently discovered my kryptonite is codependency . What Codependency Actually Is Most…
Google Drive was driving me insane. Not because of the price — though paying $100/year for 2TB of someone else’s storage isn’t great — but because of how badly it works on a Mac. Google Drive’s desktop app doesn’t give you a real folder. It gives you a mounted virtual drive that streams files on demand. Files disappear when you’re offline. Finder sidebar integration is flaky. You can’t just drag a…
The terminal is the most direct interface to your Mac. No icons. No menus. Just you and the machine. Most people never open it. That’s a shame — because once you know a handful of commands, it becomes the fastest tool you have. This is an intro for people who want to get comfortable with it. We’ll cover the basics, the power commands, and how to set up aliases so your terminal starts feeling like…
After setting up multiple OpenClaw agents on dedicated Mac Minis, I condensed every step — including the bugs, silent failures, and undocumented gotchas into one chronological checklist, so you can set this up in the most secure way possible. The fastest way to use this: open a new Claude conversation, paste this entire article, and tell it your agent’s name, role, and timezone. It’ll walk you…
Remote work broke geography, but salary conversations didn’t catch up. If you work for a US company from Europe, your comp gets compared in ways that quickly fall apart under scrutiny. Exchange rates shift. PPP adjustments inflate numbers. Gross and net get mixed into the same sentence. Both sides walk away thinking they agreed on the same thing. They didn’t. I went through this recently. Tools…
24hrs fighting Oracle Cloud’s free tier. Cloudflare timing out. Here’s what worked. Why Most VPS Options Suck Oracle Cloud Free Tier: Days of debugging iptables rules, blocked ports, UFW conflicts. WebSocket connections drop randomly. Cloudflare Workers: WebSocket breaks under load. Execution limits hit. Debugging edge timeouts at 2am. Render, Railway: $7-20/month for 24/7. Too expensive.…
Building software is trivial now. A solo developer ships in a weekend what took teams months. Features that required specialized expertise? Available through a conversation with Claude. When building becomes easy, defending becomes everything. The AI gold rush of 2025 proved this: $ 190B deployed into AI startups, most will be dead by 2027 . But casualties weren’t just AI wrappers. Traditional…
Claude Code is Anthropic’s terminal-based AI coding assistant. Unlike IDE plugins that suggest code, Claude Code autonomously reads files, runs commands, executes tests, and implements multi-file changes through natural language. This guide covers essential patterns for production-ready AI-assisted development. Understanding Agentic Coding Claude Code operates differently than traditional code…
Based on Professor Tim Spector’s interview on The Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett Professor Tim Spector is one of the top 1% most-cited scientists worldwide. His mother has dementia. For seven years, she hasn’t recognized him. This drove him to research the brain differently. What he found: we’ve been treating brain health backwards for 40 years . The Data That Changed Everything Your vagus…
Let’s set the stage: one website returns 403 Forbidden on your Wi-Fi but works perfectly on mobile data. Same carrier. Same ISP . DNS resolves fine. Ping works. Everything should work. But it doesn’t. You quickly restart your router once. Same IP address, doesn’t work. Then a longer reset. Same IP address, suddenly works. Your first thought: IP blacklist. You check AbuseIPDB , IPVoid , and…
You run a custom blog. Maybe Ghost, maybe Hugo, maybe something you built yourself. You write. You publish. Your RSS feed updates. And that’s where it ends. Because your custom blog doesn’t build an email list. It doesn’t send newsletters. It just sits there, publishing to RSS feeds that fewer people check every year. So you’ve probably thought about building a list. But the moment you picture the…
Newsletters kept piling up in my inbox. Unread. Ignored. Taking up mental space. The problem wasn’t the content, it was the delivery. I didn’t need another notification telling me when to pay attention. I needed control over when I chose to engage. The Problem with Push Every creator, founder, and publication wants a direct line to your attention. Email newsletters promised intimacy but delivered…
I kept getting sick. Flu. Food poisoning. Flu again. Constantly fatigued, fighting inflammation. My immune system was out of whack. Blood and stool tests revealed: leaky gut and elevated inflammation markers. The surprise? Zero digestive symptoms. No bloating, no discomfort, nothing that screamed “ gut problem.” Turns out food poisoning damaged my gut barrier. Everything cascaded—immune…
Last weekend I sat on the couch having a candid discussion with my girlfriend about her obsession with cooking since she opened up 3 restaurants some years ago, but got sidetracked with business building instead of indulging in what she loves most: creative cuisine. She’d been wondering if she should lean more into it, put in the hours, maybe even start working at a Michelin Start kitchen to learn…
Currently, I’m the Head of Product at Valley , an AI-powered LinkedIn automation platform that books sales calls through hyper-personalized outreach. We compete in a space where product experience IS the differentiator. And I lead that experience from the design side, not the engineering side. Here’s what most people get wrong: they assume a great Head of Product does everything—technical…
Let’s set the stage: you just got your analog film developed. The lab sent you scans. You rotated a few sideways shots to fix the orientation. Then you imported everything into Apple Photos expecting a beautiful chronological timeline of your roll… and it’s chaos. Photos from the same roll scattered across different days. The order completely broken. This happens because rotation changes the file…
Image is a fractal courtesy of visual.garden What does it mean to feel validated in your existence? To feel as if your life has meaning, your actions are of service, and your skills have real utility to others? I’ve been pondering this for quite some time now, but struggled to find a good explanation until “ Daseinsberechtigung”, a German word resurfaced to perfectly capture everyone’s struggle…
Willhaben and ImmoScout24 are where everyone looks. Which means the off-market gems, the exclusive new builds, and the properties that never need mass-market exposure rarely show up there. If you’re serious about high-end Viennese real estate—whether you’re hunting for a penthouse in the first district or a villa in Döbling—you need to know where the premium inventory actually lives. These are the…
Scheduling a meeting to discuss the work isn’t doing the work. Attending the alignment call to sync up on the work progress isn’t doing the work. Having a pre-meeting to prepare for the meeting about the work isn’t doing the work. Writing a follow-up email to recap what was discussed in the meeting about the work isn’t doing the work. Creating a deck with 14 slides to visually represent what could…
Jordan Peterson’s “ 12 Rules for Life” isn’t your typical self-help book. It’s a dense philosophical framework wrapped in practical advice, drawing from psychology, mythology, and evolutionary biology. Published in 2018, it became a cultural phenomenon—and for good reason. Beyond the polarized discourse surrounding Peterson, the book offers a compelling case for taking radical responsibility for…
Seth Godin’s The Dip is a deceptively simple book that dismantles one of our most cherished beliefs: that quitting is a moral failing. Instead, Godin argues that winners quit all the time—they just quit the right things at the right time. In a world that glorifies persistence above all else, this 76-page manifesto offers a framework for strategic quitting that can transform how you approach every…
No matter how deeply we understand talent, strategy, or innovation, most of us still struggle with the same fundamental question: why do some groups thrive while others falter? Daniel Coyle’s The Culture Code cuts through the noise with a deceptively simple answer: great cultures are built on three learnable skills, not abstract concepts or motivational speeches. Culture comes from the Latin word…
This lesson took countless heartbreaks and weeks of pondering to understand. You can’t force anyone to want to be in your life. If they want to go, let them. Losing you will be their loss. Just let them be. This obvious truth so oblivious to its own nature. Probably because it begins and ends with the human spiel that is: words vs. actions. Too often in life do people share grand statements…
I’m admittedly a sensitive human. Not in the uncontrollable sense, but more in the way that I feel every emotion deeply and can sense the feelings of people I care about by just looking at them. It’s a blessing and a curse, and mostly the latter because it’s often overwhelming to feel so much. But this article isn’t about a curse. This article is about the blessing in sensitivity and how to…
I am increasingly bullish on the idea of a non-linear lateral approach to life. Why? Because it’s lighter on the mind and soul. It takes away the pressure because life isn’t a game to be won, but a game to keep playing. So here is a framework of mindsets I’ve developed over the past months with the goal to see my business, project, brand etc.:. flourish, regardless of what phase they find…
Paul Graham just released the released the essay Founder Mode after a YC event with Brian Chesky and it made some waves on 𝕏 with lots of people sharing their takes on it. But why is it so important for the business and especially startup world? Three key ideas you need to know: Founder mode is a different way of running a company compared to manager mode, focusing on what founders can uniquely…
After writing the founders.menu newsletter consistently for 35 weeks to what are almost 750 subscribers now, I sadly saw minimal revenue growth in the platform for the digital library after adding over 1129 ingredients [tools, reads, streams] and handmade templates on the web. I still find it odd that free signups have grown fairly well, but paying members who also return regularly are very few,…
I chose to read this book because I found myself in a dilemma. I found myself at a life intersection where I was weighing the Pros & Cons of quitting or sticking to my job in 2024. Every angle I tried to adopt only increased my willingness to stick, but I felt there were more rational reasons to consider doing the unconventional. And so this book found me at the right time, as I visited a book…