Just updated the design of my little hospital shift scheduling system ZoFA , for the benefit of its 550 active users and for the third time in its 19 years of existence. Thanks to AI, it only took me around 6 hours of work, not even that focused. I probably wouldn’t have done it without AI, even though it was clearly looking outdated. The result is nice, but I have to admit that this is a…
My tendency is to write my messages with minimal words. Maximum throughput. Omit needless words. But in practice, most people need the 12 extra words of social padding to know I’m not mad at them. Also, as I learned when teaching, verbally, everybody needs a bit of repetition.
Currently reading Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck on Indonesia’s independence, and I love it. Among many things, I’ve learned, for example, that the Dutch once held a lucrative monopoly on nutmeg, one that was broken in the 18th century when a Frenchman named Pierre Poivre smuggled the spice to Mauritius. Fun facts aside, I’ve really missed this level of intellectual honesty and subtlety in my…
I often think that I cursed myself picking the domain name multitasked.net for my home on the internet. I picked that because I’d just had twin daughters at that point, but since then, I’ve been multitasking in my life like crazy. And now, with agent programming, I’m able to work on 3 projects at the same time. Multitasking intensifies. That said, contrary to a lot of developers,…
Woah, using Claude, I made in 3 hours a decent v1 of a website that I wanted to do for years and for which I was struggling to find time. I had the domain name for months if not years. It’s a lightweight website called woatlas.com with some key stats per country, aimed at answering my questions: where is it, how rich is it, how is healthcare there and how does it rank compared to other…
Apparently, Google connected the chat of Google Meet to Google Chat. That means that I’m now receiving chat messages from a call that I’m I’m invited to but not connected to. This is going to create awkward situations….
Little imperfect experiment of yesterday night: visualizing one of my bike route in 3D to see elevation. This uses three.js, OpenStreetmap for the route and https://open-elevation.com/ for the elevation. The end goal will be to have all the options that I use to go to the office with the corresponding amount of required energy associated. madewulf.github.io/bikemaps/ (drag or pinch to rotate/zoom)…
Wonderful article on how to build an (AI coding) Agent . It greatly increased my understanding of the subject. In short, it’s a CLI that pipes your requests to an LLM, but it’s also authorized to execute CLI commands on your machine and feed the output back into the context. After reading that, I came across Simon Willison’s blog post showing the prompt of Google’s version…
The rules of tables on a website are as predictable as gravity. As soon as you put one on a page, a client will ask to: Enable column sorting. Seeing the data isn’t enough; they need to see it in order. Add pagination. The initial 25 rows were fine for the POC, but now you realize it doesn’t work with 10,000. Pick filters on all columns. “Only the validated records from…
In the context of a Django application (but this probably applies to any web development) I’ve been trying devin.ai. It creates pull requests to your repositories from the request you express to it through the browser or Slack. It works well and the quality of the code produced is quite convincing, as I expressed in a previous post, but this process is still full of friction. I still have…
I think this is the most destructive popup in Google Drive. It has caused countless problems for us—people lose access to important files simply because someone tried to make a directory private and clicked the blue button. Why? Because it’s presented as the advised next step. It’s clearly the “call to action.” I really struggle to see how “it will make permissions easier to manage” , as the…
It’s often said that if you really need something done, you should ask the busiest person in the company.The phrase is half-joking, but it rings true: people are often busy because they’ve delivered good work before—and are trusted with more as a result. Corollary: The usual reward for good work is more work.
Giving a try at one of these AI tools making pull requests to your repository based on chat commands, and I must say that the productivity of that workflow is super high. And since I’m using that for a task that I do think can avoid hundreds of hours of admin work for health workers, it’s hard to argue against any of this. It’s a bit mind boggling. Feeling like I’m at major…
After testing AI Chatbots’ knowledge on topics I’m familiar with—including myself, my company, and the projects I’m involved in—I’ve noticed that all of the content they reference comes from the open web. None of my old posts from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram appear in their sources, likely because these platforms are closed and block data-gathering bots. In contrast, my blog, along…
I will leave here a few notes about using an Interrail pass in Spain so that people thinking of doing that can find them in the future. First, a word about Interrail passes: they are a wonderful idea. You can buy a pass from the Interrail site that allows to take as many trains as you wish in Europe during a given period. We took the option of travelling 7 days over a period of a month, for a cost…
Brussels has gotten cooler and cooler throughout my life so far. Many more interesting foreigners, nicer restaurants, more culture, more bikes and bike lanes, fewer cars, renovations everywhere, tons of fun and inclusive events. And we’re entering a new era of rooftop bars everywhere, while I knew only one for years (the music museum roof one) and I’m all for it.
We still have a video rental shop very close to our home here in Brussels: www.videoexpress.be (and I can use my Playstation 4 to view these legacy things…). We don’t go that often. It requires to walk! There AND back! That said, the movies or documentaries that I rented there have made a long lasting impact on me. I for example strongly recommend: Rafiki, a story of love between two…
Was very happy to attend a talk by one of my heroes, yesterday: Peter Piot He had so much impact through ebola discovery, UNAIDS, COVID management, and so much more. He contributed to save millions of lives, and yet, he’s very humble. Inspiring.
A visualization of the the Global Migrant Origin Database (previously located at migrationsmap . net , now squatted). I made that map in a few evenings in 2011, manipulating SVG with Raphael.js. At the time, libraries for vector maps were not very good yet, so, I built something myself. The code is my most starred project and was reused all over the place (e.g. in an Australian newspaper). This…
Iaso (it’s iaso, not laso, damn sans-serif fonts) A product I started more than 3 years ago now. Based on an open source form engine, ODK, we built an offline-working data collection tool that is structured around organisational hierarchies (think Province - Region - District). It’s now used in Africa health financing, in multiple facility/location census activities (it turns out that…
In 2014, I made a little iOS game in a few evenings: Matchador. Silly trailer here: youtu.be/QjOAq9GRE… I had a small article in a Belgian newspaper: belgium-iphone.lesoir.be/2014/06/2… It made 1500 downloads approximately and like 4€ of revenue through a little ad banner. Definitely inspired by Flappy Bird’s strange success. Mastodon link
Like many people, in the context of Twitter seeming to be mismanaged by Elon Musk after the surprise acquisition, I went back to use Mastodon, and found quite some interesting activity there. Simon Willison launched there the idea of explaining daily one of your projects (until you run out): read the idea here in his own words . I like this idea, so, I started a thread like that here but it felt…
I have recently bought a cheap fixie from Decathlon for 200€. This thing is super light and silent, a pleasure to ride. So, lately, I have been doing evening rides, discovering some places in Brussels. Tonight, I went to Anderlecht and I discovered the Garden City of Moortebeek which is very charming. It is quite similar in spirit to the garden cities of Boitsfort In the middle of the ride, I went…
Surprisingly, there is a new photo lab that has been open in Brussels: Mori Film Lab and they even have a dark room that you can access. I discovered the lab thanks to Yannick who is sending his films from France, where he lives now, to receive scans by Dropbox. This made me feel like unshelving my beloved Minolta Dynax 5. I never found the same pleasure in digital photography that I had with this…
I’m the CTO of Bluesquare now, since February. If you had told me at 20 that I would become the CTO of a company specialized in software for public health, I would have been totally satisfied with the idea. On top of that, the team is great, and the projects are numerous. So, I consider myself a lucky guy.