June

June was a rollercoaster, from failed Ironman to fun weekend in Prague with friends from Berlin.

I haven’t learned my lesson for 3rd time and inflamed my soleus after buying new running shoes and Birkenstocks and not easing into them well enough. Now writing this with 7 days left before another attempt at Ultratrail Val d’Aran and not being able to properly train the last couple days.

Writing

The Wiki page on Writing grew quite a lot and I found a plenty of interesting resources from University of Minnesota - Style Manual to the US Federal plain language guidelines. The interest in writing came again with multiple ongoing RFCs at work and miserable attempts of fighting psychological load by putting thoughts into words.

Common Bugs in Writing is a concise list of the most common bugs in technical writing. It seems to follow closely takeaways from the aforementioned resources as well as books such as On Writing Well or Sense of Style.

What all sources agree on is: Know what you are writing about and why and Be concise, strong, and clear.

Note taking

I still struggle to find the right tool and approach to note-taking, knowledge retention, and bookmarking. My wish would be to maintain all of these in one place, but no tool so far seems to do exactly what I would like.

Notion is the closest I got to ideal setup. The UI is clean, it supports exports into Markdown (albeit not great), and there’s integrated search. On the other hand, it doesn’t work that well for bookmarking. One alternative that I haven’t tried at is ClickUp with extensive list of features and support for integrations and apps (such as tags).

For knowledge the wiki is working great, I like the simplicity of markdown files and being able to edit straight from the command line. What I miss though is being able to tag and full-text search all the collected links. As far as I am aware there’s no tool that would support this (maybe some bookmarking tools do?).

One day I might try to build a thing of my own; backed by markdown files, with simple web UI and search, self-hosted, and persisted in GitHub. The flatnotes UI looks good and close to the goal (exaplained in details in I built a perfect note taking system blog post).

Reading

• Accountability for Effective Teams - the important part of accountability is about behaviour, accountability tied to measurable outcomes might focus on things that people don’t have under their control. Accountability is about being able to explain yourself and to care.

This accountability-to-understand is compatible with systems in ways that accountability-for-outcomes is not. If your job depends on moving a number, you’ll move that number, even if it puts your widget in everyone’s way and pisses off customers. If your job depends on the whole business succeeding with your contributions, then you’ll make your widget compatible with its surroundings, and highlight it in ways that improve the product.

• Full Time - on quiting a job and going full time on a side-project.
• Bits about Money by Patrick McKenzie (advisor at Stripe)
• On the Value of Not Reaching Your Goals by Simone Stolzoff
• The HN discussion under Demystifying burnout – A deep dive into its symptoms and remedies

This month I learned

There’s new Payment Request API standardization by W3C that seems to be close (API wise) to WebAuthn and looks promising.

• Dark forest hypothesis is one of the possible solutions to the Fermi paradox.

  The dark forest hypothesis is the conjecture that many alien civilizations exist throughout the universe, but they are both silent and paranoid.

Listening

Kanine’s latest set is fire and I had it on repeat for most of the month:

Last episode of People I (Mostly) Admire by Steven Levitt with Talithia Williams was a joyful listen on one of the long car rides.