Week 09, 2024 - Rock and Roll

The blog is 1 month old now, and just like this week, February seemed to go by pretty fast. I had a good talk with a friend about mindfulness, and he shared a quote that he found funny in its absurdity (and I agreed with him):

How to walk a tightrope:

1. Find a horizontal cable that can support your weight.
2. Stand on one end.
3. Step forward by placing one foot directly in front of the other.
4. Repeat.
5. Don’t fall.

Sam Harris used this to illustrate how simple, but at the same time, absolutely not easy it is to meditate. However, I think this could be adapted to how to create successful products:

1. Find a healthy team that can support its members.
2. Start one project.
3. Work in small steps, delivering incremental product changes to users.
4. Repeat.
5. Monitor and course correct when needed.

Simple. Not easy.

📋 What I learned this week

I wrote the article I planned about dealing with negative behavior. It was a hard birth, taking most of my Monday. I kept on searching for a structure, some scale or matrix of the different kinds of negative behaviors (impact size from the individual through the team to the company; active vs passive, etc.), but settled with a semi-unorganized list of aspects. The result captures most of my thoughts on the topic but sounds a bit like rambling. I think the learning for the week is that I write too long, I should focus on shortening and leave the unstructured blurts of thoughts for the Friday updates.

Adding dark mode to the blog started with the trivial idea of just inverting every color on the page, but the implementation, filtering out images, emojis, etc turned out to be too complex. Finally, I settled on implementing a ready-made solution. It should check your device's settings automatically, but you can switch to your preference in the footer with the little ☀ / ☾ icon. There are some bugs still in the dark setting that I'll iron out eventually.

Finetuning JS, CSS, and HTML templates at the same time was a good test for my local Ghost theme development setup (based on this), and I’m pretty impressed with the hot-reload speed of the yarn + gulp stack that Ghost uses.

[21:15:19] Starting 'css'...
[21:15:19] /Users/eszpee/projects/ghost-themes/GhostThemes/packages/journal/assets/built/screen.css reloaded.
[21:15:19] /Users/eszpee/projects/ghost-themes/GhostThemes/packages/journal/assets/built/screen.css.map reloaded.
[21:15:19] Finished 'css' after 110 ms

By the time I switch to the browser window, the builds are ready for reloading. Nice!

🎯 What I want to try next week

Just as I planned last week, my LinkedIn presence was on my mind these days, but I haven’t done anything concrete yet. Next week I want to try blocking in my calendar a few daily timeslots, to prevent creeping into the day-to-day. I removed Facebook from my life a while ago, but I'm noticing LinkedIn slowly filling that space, and I’m not happy about that.

👨‍🎤 Something cool: A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs

Not new in any way, but I recently started to follow this podcast. I don’t listen to music podcasts, but this is a shining unique exception: Andrew Hickey, the author manages to keep me entertained with nerd-like accuracy and historical detail, using the actual songs to illustrate (I love how he mentions “Any DMCA notices will be fought vigorously.” on the site).

This New Yorker article does a much better job of raising interest than I could, so head over if you’re curious. I’m currently at Episode #33, and equally excited about catching up (Part 4 of song 172. just came out today) and dreading the day when I’m going to have to wait two weeks for a new episode.

That’s it for today, have a rocking weekend,

Péter