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 a simple site where I explain what this game is about: whatistiling.com.
This hobby has given me so much joy over the years, I hope I can inspire others to try it out. (Plus now I don’t need to get into a 5-minute monologue every time I mention it to someone, I can just send them the link.)
📋 What I learned this week
I confirmed that setting up a site on GitHub Pages and pointing a domain to it from CloudFlare is really as easy as I imagined. I’m getting into the habit of doing most stuff I used Google for with ChatGPT instead. The instructions it gave on the DNS and SSL setup were perfect. Even small and straightforward things like converting Markdown to HTML are flawless with ChatGPT, making it my go-to assistant nowadays.
I published the last episode in the Get Hired as an Engineering Manager series, covering The Offer phase. I learned that I should better plan what I’m committing to: I knew the topic was huge, yet I didn’t realize fully that writing 5 articles would mean not much other content on the site. Almost 2 months and more than 80.000 characters later I hope it was as educational for those who followed as the research and discussions with Péter Batiz, my co-author were for me.
Note: We’re planning a special The Retrospective podcast episode with Péter Batiz as a guest, discussing the hiring scene in 2024 with him. More to come on this soon!
🎯 What I want to try next week
I’m planning a lot of my yearly bike tours next week, so everything beyond that is a stretch goal. But should I get there, I’m planning to evaluate my earlier LinkedIn experiments and do some homelab optimizations finetuning automatic updates.
🤔 Articles that made me think
A Large Langue Model in a Font
It’s the summer so here’s something lighter and funnier than usual. Did you know fonts can execute arbitrary code*? Me neither. Watch the video on the page to see how this concept can be taken to its logical conclusion in 2024: including an LLM in a font to battle writer’s block.
*To be precise, it’s the font shaping engine that can execute code.
🖼️ Something cool: Free Responsive HTML Templates
I needed a simple, customizable template for whatistiling.com, and stumbled upon this small gem called HTML5 UP. I checked a few alternatives before, but this site gave me the best experience and helped me quickly find the template with the layout I had in mind. Everything they host is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0, free to use for personal or commercial purposes, only requiring attribution.
That’s it for today, go out and explore your neighborhood this weekend,
Péter