Newsletter - Péter Szász (Page 3)

A collection of 69 posts

Week 38, 2024 - Floods

Sunday evening, out of boredom, I checked my blog's stats and saw that 239 people were reading my site. I don’t share visitor statistics much, so you have to believe me that it’s not usual that 239 people read my site concurrently. Having a handful at

20 Sep 2024 4 min read

Week 37, 2024 - Sick Data

In 2002, a friend of mine used to work in CERN on a cool project: writing the software stack for a new generation of network cards that could transfer an unprecedented amount of data in a very short time. You know, all the stuff you want to record when you

13 Sep 2024 6 min read

Week 36, 2024 - Photos and Fires

Yesterday I published the first non-hiring-related Engineering Leadership article since May: How to Lead Your Team when the House Is on Fire. I felt the desperation in discussions with various peers, especially line managers, about the pressure of the current wartime climate in tech companies, so I spent a day

06 Sep 2024 5 min read

Week 30-35, 2024 - Endless Summer

I’m back from a month of travel around France, something we try to do every year (we’re a French-Hungarian family living in Budapest). This is an opportunity to get a lot of cycling done, meet friends I rarely see, spend more time with family, and enjoy long drives

30 Aug 2024 5 min read

Week 29, 2024 - Summer Break

We’re starting our yearly family vacation very soon, so this is probably the last Friday update until the end of the summer. We haven’t managed to publish more The Retrospective episodes, editing is a tedious process and we got distracted by life. Watch this space though, we have

19 Jul 2024 3 min read

Week 28, 2024 - Riding the Heat

It’s another crazy hot summer here, like at most of the northern hemisphere I guess. What do you do when you’re stuck in a big city on days when the temperature is nearing 40ºC? Well, we went to a museum to cool down and watch a photo exhibition

12 Jul 2024 3 min read

Week 27, 2024 - This Too Shall Pass

As I guessed in the last issue, there was not much else I got done this week, so this will be a short update. Part of this newsletter was written on the train home from my three-day bike trip around Hungary. I love the feeling of freedom these trips give

05 Jul 2024 2 min read

Week 26, 2024 - Offers and Tiles

As the school holiday started, I was mostly off this week spending time with the family, hence the short update this week. On Wednesday, I managed to complete a 40x40 max square in Tiling, a cycling and hiking game I’ve been playing since 2017. To celebrate it, I created

28 Jun 2024 2 min read

Week 25, 2024 - Fixes, Improvements and AI Agents

Summer is on, at full speed. Temperatures are getting dangerously close to 40ºC on some days. School is over too. All these will make me slow down a bit in the next few weeks. I’ll try to keep the Friday updates on, but realistically there’s going to be

21 Jun 2024 4 min read

Week 24, 2024 - AI coding, Search and Creativity

As some of you are probably aware, we had the European Parlament and local elections in Hungary. As we discussed on Monday in our podcast with Jeremy, the Budapest mayoral election was a crazy race. At some point during the vote count the difference between the leading candidates was only

14 Jun 2024 4 min read

Week 23, 2024 - Destroying and Creating

I’ve got the perfect timebox for this week’s newsletter: I took my daughter to soccer practice, and she finishes in an hour. Go! 📋 What I learned this week I distilled my notes from Craft Conference and finally chose a listicle format: 10 takeaways from the 10th Craft Conference.

07 Jun 2024 3 min read

Week 22, 2024 - Craft

I write this newsletter sitting in a slowly filling auditorium just before the second day of the tenth Craft Conference is about to begin. I haven’t been to a professional event this big since the pandemic, and it’s great to see the scene buzzing like nothing happened. It

31 May 2024 3 min read

Week 21, 2024 - Frustration and Happiness

An important milestone in our young podcast series with Jeremy this week: we had our first guest on the show! We talked with the CPTO of Lunii about their introduction of a 4-day workweek and the use of AI in educational toys. Watch it here if you missed it! In

24 May 2024 5 min read

Week 20, 2024 - Collaborations and Layoffs

Today’s downpour made me grateful for the sunny spring weather earlier this week. During a short cycle trip, I saw a dozen rabbits standing on their back legs to see what was up, then sprinting away from me. The week went away slowly, with steady progress on multiple fronts.

17 May 2024 4 min read

Week 19, 2024 - The Retrospective

Some weeks start slow, forcing me to cram everything into Friday — and there are ones where I can pick up momentum on Monday, sustain it through Tuesday, and then deflate towards the weekend. The current week was an example of the latter. It didn’t help that I spent most

10 May 2024 4 min read

Week 18, 2024 - MCU Jam

The week was cut in half because of Labour Day, most of which I spent with the family harvesting elderflower and making strawberry jam with it. It took the whole day, but I enjoyed the first hike of the season — and the process of making jam is also a fun

03 May 2024 6 min read

Week 17, 2024 - Substack and AI Assistants

What an awesome week, full of spending time with great people. I managed to publish my thoughts on why companies should go one step beyond just tolerating, and fully embrace Celebrating Failure. I finished yesterday afternoon, and the first feedback is great, somebody even added that FAIL is just an

26 Apr 2024 4 min read

Week 16, 2024 - Tidying Up

I spent 45 minutes Thursday morning cleaning up the walking labyrinth and its surroundings that I discovered last week. All the trash, cigarette butts, beer cans, paper tissues, pieces of plastic toys, candy wrappers, and empty bottles created a strong contrast with this peaceful little forest not far from the

19 Apr 2024 4 min read

Week 15, 2024 - Slow circles

Monday morning I discovered the above labyrinth nearby and spent some time trying to walk it. Slowing down between taking the kids to school and starting the day felt energizing. In the spirit of trying out new things, I also went to my first-ever yoga class this week, and found

12 Apr 2024 5 min read

Week 14, 2024 - Writing, debugging and history

We saw the temperature climbing consistently above 20ºC this week, allowing us to fit in a nice small hike. Our noisy steps startled a deer couple, causing them to run away right before us. It’s great to be out in nature. That said, I took the above photo right

05 Apr 2024 4 min read

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