Music took me through several life changing experiences. This article goes through the arch that culminated with one of the most exciting periods of my life 1 . The Sound of Lisbon First contact My first consequential contact with music was while working on a school project at a friend’s place. He was playing in a band at the time, and showed how to play the initial riff from Nirvana’s “Come as…
Ever since 2017 I’ve made at least one long walk or hike per week. I love walking , and shared that passion by organizing several walks via meetup, eventbrite, in my local community, in my company, and with friends. I’ve accumulated a fair amount of miles under my feet and progressively built a catalog of favorite trails, and an opinion on what makes for an enjoyable walk. I think many others…
AI powered backlog burner Ideas come cheap. That’s why my backlog of project ideas keeps growing - there is only so much time and energy. The recent agentic AI advancements are changing that equation. All of a sudden, projects I long relegated to an uncertain future can now be brought to fruition with a single human pair of hands (read, mine). A good example of this is vivotime.net . There is no…
Precedent: How Nintendo did it I’ve consumed several Acquired episodes , and one I found particularly interesting was about Nintendo, where they describe how lateral thinking shapes how to company thinks about their products: instead of always going after the new shiny thing that still has several unknowns and will need time to iterate on, know and perfect, use instead cheaper, already established…
There is something interesting about our psyche, or at least mine. Simple and concise rules, when applied for a long time, are much harder to break 1 than rules which make room for exceptions, or rules that are broad or ambiguous. No desserts at the office canteen, ever Let me give you an example: I never have desserts at my work office’s canteen. No exceptions. This makes my decision process…
You don’t do Scrum? I once struck up a conversation with someone during one of my trips where I told them that there wasn’t a prescriptive way of organising work at the company I was working on at the time. We were not dogmatic in using kanban, scrum, lean or waterfall, we used whatever worked best for the problem at hand, many times resulting in a mix of these approaches, and even changing them…
The average human body consumes energy at a rate of approximately 100 watts 1 day consumption = 100W * 24h = 2.4k Wh 365 days * 2.4k Wh * 18 years = 15,768k Wh = 0.015768 GWh GPT-4 took about 50 GWh of electricity to train. It takes 3,170 times more energy to train a model than to raise a human to 18 years old. GPT-4 is really good at specific tasks, but is nowhere near as generically inteligent…
Launched vivotime.net , a website focused to help you make the most of your limited life, with ideas aligned with your goals. Origin Story During the past years I’ve been wrestling with the idea of building a website that could be: Useful Aligned with my views Lean: debloated both in terms of experience, but also behind the scenes Low Maintenance: minimally dependent on outside sources of…
Almost two years after visiting New York City , I’ve come back to NYC and its two neighbouring cities: Boston and Washington DC. Again, I’ve asked several people about their perspective of these cities, which helped immensely when planning out my itinerary. Let’s pay it forward: here is my guide / personal perspective of Boston, Washington DC and (more) New York. Moving between cities Boston and…
See the video version of this article here I really like to walk. Let me tell you why. How it started Eight years ago I injured my knee. The following 2 months I could hardly walk 10 meters. It took me 6 arduous months to fully recover. Even though I had done several types of physical activities up until that injury, like surfing, biking, rock climbing, running, etc, the only capability I wanted…
If you had a video call with me, if you happened to see my videos, or if you visited my flat, odds are that a question came up to your mind. The same question that I’ve been asked at least 8 times (and counting) over these past years: “How do you keep your kitchen so clean?” With a possible follow up of “Do you even cook?” or “Have you just moved in?” , amongst others. I even got a prize for it,…
Dangers of over-consumption One’s life can very easily be wasted away on non-consequential, “time passing”, filler, short-term hedonistic experiences. It’s a blessing to enjoy life’s little pleasures, but it’s perilous to lead a life consisting of only discrete pleasures and experiences that are not, or cannot be chained together in any way shape or form. Essentially, a life spent as a passive…
I’ve recently finished reading Napoleon: A Life , a well researched book by Andrew Roberts about the full and well travelled life of Napoleon Bonaparte, his rises and falls, and glimpses of what made the famous soldier-statesman tick. These are my main takeaways: Leadership Spirit de Corps “A general’s principle talent consists in knowing the mentality of the soldier and in winning his confidence.…
Earlier this year I saw a Tech Ingredients episode where a laser gimbal automatically tracks drones and shoots them down. I was fascinated by their motion control mechanism, specially the usage of a PI Controller, a high-frequency clock Teensy microcontroller , and their integration with custom hardware and a machine vision powered tracker. Soon after I was researching the underlying electronics…
After nearly 4 years of continuous usage at work, taking calls and listening to audiobooks during long walks, my wired in-ear Bose QuietComfort 20 MK2 Active Noise Cancelling Earphones are finally starting to become faulty 1 , so I went on a search for a replacement. Searching for replacement wired ANC earbuds To my surprise, not only have these types of earphones been discontinued by Bose, but…
I’ve recently finished reading The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health, and Disease , a book from Daniel Lieberman of how the human body evolved over millions of years, that I would recommend all Humans to read. These are are my main takeaways: Why we are, the way we are It is all about how energy is used Us humans and other living beings are essentially organisms that use energy to…
It’s time to wrap up and celebrate 2024, an eventful year that fueled my yearning for internal growth and curiosity, with challenges and lessons I am grateful for. I’ve recently built a set of Grafana dashboards to track my personal goals, which I’ve been finding incredibly interesting to explore and visualise (something that might be interesting to share in a later post). Final Tally There are…
Over the past 4 years, I’ve written about 1820 pages on the 13 A5 notebooks shown in the picture above. This tool has become essential for my job, and in this article I’ll describe the simple process behind it, which I’ve found to deliver consistent results, reliably. See the video version of the article here . Write, Consolidate, Repeat The process I’ve been using for…
I’ve recently finished reading Diary of a CEO: 33 Laws of Business and Life , which draws from both Steven Bartlett’s entrepreneurial journey and interviews from the homonymous podcast . These are are my main takeaways: Building high performance groups Incentives and culture If you want to predict what a group of people will do over the long term, you need to look at their incentives, not their…
This ad struck me as the culmination of a long-standing trend. I struggled to articulate it at the time, but I’ll attempt to do just that in this article. Let’s start by the ad itself. It carries implicit symbols and memes, whose interpretations will vary wildly from person to person, but in general I believe it attempts to convey these subtle messages: In order to be seen and acknowledged as an…