December

• Journal • Writing

Coming back from New Zealand I managed to warm up at home (technically cool down, it’s Berlin after all) for 8 days before heading to São Paulo for a tribe off-site. 2025 will be a busy year with multiple large initiatives but the main personal goal of 2024 is to bring SumUp closer to representative state when it comes to developer experience. Our developer website needs a breath of fresh air and robust SDKs for integrators are a must to hide the low quality of our APIs and make it easier to migrate to newer - better - versions in the future.

Frosty leaves during a hike to Lovos, Czech Republic.

Reading

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

I finished Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves in 4 days over the Christmas holiday and loved it. Seveneves feels like 2 books in one. First part grounded in the science while the final chapter ventures further into the territory of speculative fiction. The book also leaves just enough loose ends to keep one thinking about it long after while at the same time providing satisfying end. It’s no coincidence that it has an opening sentence that drags you in from the start and the tension doesn’t let you put the book down for next few hundred pages.

This month’s dose of long-form journalism: Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The untold story of EgyptAir flight 804 by Kyra Dempsey.

Watching

I got nerd sniped learning more about aviation. After reading the Hard Landing (still in progress) and admiring the magnificence of A380-800 on our way to and from New Zealand I went down the rabbit hole of flight mechanics (e.g. Airfoil by Bartosz Ciechanowski) all the way to How YOU can land a passenger aircraft! 12 steps.

The other deep dive this month was toying with Bevy and learning more about game development. The highlight of which is Rendering Tiny Glades With Entirely Too Much Ray Marching talk by Tomasz Stachowiak, one of the people behind Tiny Glade.

Last but not least, December is the time of the Chaos Computer Club. I am still catching up with the most interesting talks, one that I finished though and enjoyed in particular is Self Models of Loving Grace by Joscha Bach.

And there’s more fun stuff too such as We’ve not been trained for this: life after the Newag DRM disclosure, Hacking yourself a satellite - recovering BEESAT-1, or From Pegasus to Predator - The evolution of Commercial Spyware on iOS.

Listening

Liquicity Year Mix is going on since 2012.