Blog about Books, Programming, IT related topics, JavaScript, React, Psychology and everything that I find interesting
Books I'm reading # The Opposite of Worry: The Playful Parenting Approach to Childhood Anxieties and Fears Lawrence J. Cohen . Trying to be a better parent. Some extreme stories, but the overall message of the book seems to make sense. Books I've read # Generative AI in a Nutshell: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of AI by Henrik Kniberg . Quite good and short intro to LLMS and working with…
New Posts # Impact of LLMs on Interviewing in 2024 . Updates # Adding link to LifeMemo to my post Want to remember more of your life? Books I'm reading # A11Y Unraveled: Become a Web Accessibility Ninja by Dimitris Georgakas A World Without Email: Find Focus and Transform the Way You Work Forever by Cal Newport Books I've read # Advanced Web Application Architecture by Matthias Noback . I'm stuck…
Building on top of my notes in Fake Jobs I recently have seen a couple of interesting discussions around: AI is the reason interviews are harder now by Prakhar Gupta For past few weeks, I've been prepping for interviews. One thing that caught my eye was the difficulty of questions have dramatically increased. In 2021, you were expected to solve a question in DP/recursion/trees etc in 45 minutes.…
Books I'm reading # Advanced Web Application Architecture by Matthias Noback . I have mixed feelings about it. The general premise is good, but it's hard to say how those things apply to React/UI development. I lack advice about when to follow a particular pattern. But, most of it makes sense so I'm still reading. Books I've read # Polish: Wałkowanie Ameryki by Marek Wałkuski . That's a book I…
Books I'm reading # Advanced Web Application Architecture by Matthias Noback . I'm stuck after the first chapter. I've heard some great reviews, so I'll probably give it a couple of more chapters before I make up my mind about it. Books I've read # Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller . It's an interesting, but shallow read. At least I learned a little bit…
This book got me angry at times. The level of injustice and the gaslighting of people with free market natural and inevitable order is horrifying. I can recommend it. Some of the ideas I've picked: There is nothing natural in the market. It's just a set of rules for the involved to follow. Ayn Rand "market fundamentalism" creates a false narration that your wealth and income are your worth. CEOs…
Books I'm reading # Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich Elsewhere on the Web # 42,000 Tech Layoffs in 2024 Already - AI is the cause - Deny, Downplay, Distract [Propaganda] by David Shapiro . 4D: Deny, Diminish, Distract, Defend. The myth of technological inevitability by Dave Karpf Lessons from…
Books I've read # Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin . Weird book, but it's still Le Guin. Elsewhere on the Web # Noam Chomsky - Are Corporations Legitimate Institutions? | Chomsky's Philosophy Why XKCD's Earth Temperature Timeline is Such a Good Online Graphic | Science Communication Media When a STUDENT asks about JK ROWLING this happens | Secret Scholar Society Real-Life Superheroes Caught on Camera…
Blogs Posts # How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett . Books I'm reading # Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio . The Sun Eater series second book. It has even better reviews than the first book so my expectations are pretty high. Lavinia by Ursula K. Le Guin . Books I've read # How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Feldman Barrett . Goodreads book profile . Elsewhere on the Web # What The…
TLDR; # While it has some interesting ideas, it's illogical and while the author makes a lot of extraordinary claims they are now followed with extraordinary evidence. I stopped reading after the 10th chapter, as it went into applications of the idea into various domains - I was already too irritated to care. Good # Still, I got a lot of interesting ideas out of it. Emotions are constructed - they…
# Catppuccin Theme Material Icon Theme GitLens — Git supercharged Auto Rename Tag Live Preview tldraw or Excalidraw Prettier - Code formatter Formatting Toggle Quokka.js CodeSnap ESLint EditorConfig for VS Code Other: # Shell Command: Install 'code' command in PATH Settings # "editor.formatOnSave": true, "editor.renderWhitespace": "all", "editor.accessibilitySupport": "off",…
Blogs Posts # Midlife: A Philosophical Guide by Kieran Setiya . Books I'm reading # Howling Dark by Christopher Ruocchio . The Sun Eater series second book. It has even better reviews than the first book so my expectations are pretty high. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett . I heard about this book so many times that it was time to finally read it. I'm 25%…
TLDR; # Midlife [1] is an interesting blend of philosophy and self-helf and the author trying to test different ideas on himself. I can't say I agree with everything, but I've picked some ideas for myself. But, if you're interested in Midlife and like me you're interested in productivity then I would recommmend reading Four Thousand Weeks [2] instead. Good # I expect different people to focus on…
Blogs Posts # Fasting Diet . Some notes on using fasting for weight loss. Techno-optimist . Notes on techno-optimist manifesto. An Intuitive Approach to Understand Electricity . Hydraulic analogy helps you to finally understand electricity. Open-Source . Collection of interesting articles about open-source software. Astroturfing . Beware of fake grassroots organizations without knowing who…
TLDR; # You can lose weight with prolonged fasting, but it is not the best approach. If you can lose weight with other strategies then do it. Long fasting has the bad effect of losing a lot of muscle along with the fat. It can be a big problem especially when you get older. [1] What to do instead, try body recomposition: Low caloric density food. Eat a lot of protein. Think as high as 2g/kg of…
TLDR; # Read Dave Karpf response [1] . It's great. Do it now. Why can't our tech billionaires learn anything new? by Dave Karpf Manifesto # You can skip reading it. It's long and not that great. If you read the response you will get most of the interesting points in much shorter time. My take # Unfortunately the Manifesto isn't that great. Even if we focus only on technology, planes and nuclear…
TLDR; # If you ever struggled with making sense of electricity then I can recommend watching An intuitive approach for understanding electricity by AlphaPhoenix . It's based on hydraulic analogy [1] , but seeing live experiments and animations makes it so much easier to understand. An intuitive approach for understanding electricity by AlphaPhoenix [2] # Hydraulic analogy | Wikipedia ↩︎ An…
Discalaimer: Please read the whole articles, the quotes are only to make it easier for myself to remember what they are about. A Generation Lost in the Bazaar by Poul-Henning Kamp [1] # Quality happens only when someone is responsible for it. Criticism of the impact that Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Media, 2001) had on the tech industry. Must read. That is the sorry…
TLDR; # From Wikipedia [1] : Astroturfing is the practice of hiding the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious, or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from, and is supported by, grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial…
If you prefer a presentation then I can recommend Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality • Adam Tornhill • GOTO 2022 Or you can read the whitepaper Code Red: The Business Impact of Code Quality – A Quantitative Study of 39 Proprietary Production Codebases | Adam Tornhill, Markus Borg The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers’ time. ... By analyzing activity…
TLDR; # It's the best way of writing colors we have on the web right now. Built-in future-proofing of your colors. They will improve as hardware improves. The same numerical change in coordinates produces the same perceptual color difference. This one makes it a lot easier to create color palettes. Format: oklch(Lightness Chroma Hue[ / Alpha]) In practice: .blue { background-color : oklch ( 60%…
I got asked about fake jobs I mentioned in my last newsletter and decided to put what I know into one place, so here it is. High-level view on the current market (including fake jobs) # Why Is It So Damn HARD To Get A Job?? | A Life After Layoff . Fake jobs # It's Official...Employers Now Admit To Posting Fake Jobs! | A Life After Layoff Survey: Job Seekers Beware of Ghost Jobs | Clarify Capital…
I heard about the book [1] because of the ByteByteGo System Design YouTube channel [2] . While this review is about the book I want to mention it because some of the videos cover the same topics and are much better than the corresponding chapters. TLDR; # It's focused on making you pass the interview and will do a good job with that. But, if you want to learn more about designing systems and…
Books I'm reading # System Design Interview – An insider's guide by Alex Xu . Books I've read # Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig . I have a hard time with this one. I've found it disturbing, insightful, boring, incorrect, and too vague to be useful. Didn't change my mind, but I've enjoyed the philosophical take on quality. Grokking Algorithms An…
Books I'm reading # War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . I'm listening to an audiobook in Polish and I'm 16 hours in of 65 hours. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values by Robert M. Pirsig Grokking Algorithms An Illustrated Guide For Programmers and Other Curious People by Aditya Y. Bhargava Books I've read # Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by…
Books I'm reading # War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . I'm listening to an audiobook in Polish and I'm 16 hours in of 65 hours. Point and Line to Plane by Wassily Kandinsky . I've seen a recommendation for it to get a little bit of art theory. While I'm skeptical I want to make my own opinion. Books I've read # Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M.…
Books I'm reading # War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . I'm listening to an audiobook in Polish and I'm 16 hours in of 65 hours. Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg . Books I've read # Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--and Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M.…
Books I'm reading # War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . I'm listening to an audiobook in Polish and I'm 14 hours in of 65 hours. Inteligentny Inwestor XXI wieku Tom IV by trader21 (in Polish) . Last book in a series about investing. Books I've read # Effective TypeScript: 62 Specific Ways to Improve Your TypeScript by Dan Vanderkam . Good book for intermediate TypeScript programmers. It would make a…
New posts # Golang . I've spent some time learning Golang last 12 months and wanted to note what I think about it after passing the syntax and marketing. Books I'm reading # War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . I'm listening to an audiobook in Polish (65 hours long). I don't remember why I bought it, but I decided to finish all my existing audiobooks before I purchase anything new so here we go. In…
"There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses." Bjarne Stroustrup Disclaimer: While I'm quite critical of Golang and its use I'm not going to say you shouldn't use it. It's more important for me that you like your tools and that your team is comfortable with the language you're using. My Context: Business Services # I'm writing from the context of…
New posts # Teaching Tech Together Book Summary . I finally had time to read it, and I'm pretty happy about it. If you're going to teach programming, then it's a must-read. Want to remember more of your life? . I want to improve my memory of everyday life, and I've put together my research and experiments I'm going to try in this post. Books I'm reading # You Are Not a Rock: A Step-By-Step Guide…
One nice thing about the book is that you can read it online for free: Teaching Tech Together by Greg Wilson . I like how the book tries to show all the methods it teaches you in practice. You are reading about the importance of learner personas or learning goals, and you can see them in the book. It is a living example of how to do things. Exercises help solidify knowledge and avoid…
Memories? I've started questioning the quality of my memory after hearing about People who remember every second of their life . This hyper autobiographical memory symptom is now called Hyperthymesia or HSAM . The second reason is noticing how much my Wife remembers. It turns out people have all kinds of memory systems memory and autobiographical memory is only one category of explicit memory, but…
Books I'm reading # Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming by Jon Bodner (audiobook in Polish) Zły by Leopold Tyrmand Prometheus: Up & Running: Infrastructure and Application Performance Monitoring by Brian Brazil Books I've read # Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp . The book is a collection of blog posts; some are better than others. Part of it is…
I've got asked about some examples of Community Habits in the context of my post about Keystone habits . It's best to read it first if you're unfamiliar with the idea. Done? Ok, Let's go into it. Dayil Keystone Habits: Community # The idea of keystone habits is to do something small daily to support the given part of your life. In my case, I wasn't so successful in implementing daily community…
Books I'm reading # Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming by Jon Bodner Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by Michael Lopp (in polish) TypeScript na poważnie by Michał Miszczyszyn Books I've read # The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester . I stumbled upon a list of Sci-fi classics, and this was one of them. I found much more fantasy than expected, but it's a decent…
Books I'm reading # The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester Learning Go: An Idiomatic Approach to Real-World Go Programming by Jon Bodner (in polish) TypeScript na poważnie by Michał Miszczyszyn Books I've read # No Self, No Problem: How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up to Buddhism by Chris Niebauer Monolith to Microservices: Sustaining Productivity While Detangling the System by Sam Newman 100 Go…
Books I'm reading # 100 Go Mistakes and How to Avoid Them by Teiva Harsanyi . This is a pretty great book. The author always starts by explaining the context you need to know to get the mistake before talking about the mistakes and how to avoid them, which makes this book surprisingly good even when I'm pretty new to Golang. Books I've read # Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New…
I'm adding an emoji to all youtube links now so I can mix articles and videos into one category. It's a simple heuristic but should work most of the time. CSS, if you're curious: a[href*="youtube"]::before { content : "🎦" ; margin-right : 0.25em ; } The only thing I'm unsure about is the icon I should use. Some alternatives: 🎦 🎞️ 🍿 📺 🎬 🎥 ▶ 🖥️. If you have any feedback, then let me know :)…
New posts # Prolonged Fasting . It was almost nine days of not eating anything. Books I'm reading # Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright . It can be intimidating and boring, but I strongly recommend it. You can find nuggets of non-intuitive advice that will compensate for it. You can read it online , and for…
Disclaimer : I am not a doctor so whatever you do is up to you. Why fast for multiple days? # If you're healthy, then it's a great way of exposing your body to a healthy dose of stress. Your body starts to burn any weak, malfunctioning, or old cells it can. There is some evidence of helping with some versions of cancer as well. It's not a magical cure, but if you have some excess body fat to lose,…
New posts # Life categories. Work-life balance and much more . Books I'm reading # Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright . The Shadow of What Was Lost (The Licanius Trilogy #1) by James Islington . This one finally started being interesting in the middle of the book. Prepare for the first part to be pretty bland. In…
Have you ever found yourself in unsustainable circumstances? Everyone from time to time will focus too much on work or maybe sacrifice exercise because of family. Whatever that is, it's good to start categorizing your life. To see what's actually out of balance and assess your values to see how do you want the balance to look like. But, here is a problem. There are so many ways of looking at our…
New posts # Designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that are themselves pathological. Books I'm reading # Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright . Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven C. Hayes, Spencer Smith . The Shadow of What…
I've found myself recommending That Wild Ask A Manager Story by Jacob Kaplan-Moss so much that I've decided to write a short note about it. I will quote the essential ideas below to prevent them from disappearing. But, I recommend reading the original if you can That Wild Ask A Manager Story . The premise here is simple: designing a human process around pathological cases leads to processes that…
Books I'm reading # Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time by Titus Winters, Tom Manshreck, Hyrum Wright . Docker: Up & Running: Shipping Reliable Containers in Production by Karl Matthias, Sean P. Kan . Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life: The New Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Steven C. Hayes, Spencer Smith . Courses # Docker Mastery by Bret Fisher…
Books I'm reading # Designing Your New Work-Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness and a New Freedom at Work by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans . Courses # Docker Mastery by Bret Fisher Books I've read # The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim . I didn't enjoy this one, but YMMV as I've heard some good reviews on the book club. Still, I won't recommend it. The Source by Tara Swart . I think that I…
Books I'm reading # Designing Your New Work-Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness and a New Freedom at Work by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans . The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim . The Source by Tara Swart . Courses # Docker Mastery by Bret Fisher Books I've read # The Institute by Stephen King . It's ok, but I wasn't enjoying it that much. Play It Away: A Workaholic's Cure for Anxiety by…
Books I'm reading # Designing Your New Work-Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness and a New Freedom at Work by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans . Courses # Docker Mastery by Bret Fisher Books I've read # The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans . The version I got didn't feel like "finished" just yet. There are chapters where I highlighted a lot and ones that I wasn't sure why I was reading…
Books I'm reading # Those are the same books as last month. I've made some progress, but I'm not sure I'll make significant progress right now. The Programmer's Brain by Felienne Hermans . Designing Your New Work-Life: How to Thrive and Change and Find Happiness and a New Freedom at Work by Bill Burnett, Dave Evans . Books I've read # Kings of the Wyld (The Band #1) by Nicholas Eames . I started…