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Today April, 1st 2025 marks the 25 years anniversary (quarter of a century sounds more impressive, doesn't it?) working professionally in ICT. My first working day as an ICT professional was on April 1st 2000. I had just graduated from uni (literally the week before) and one of the profs offered me a position at this company. The daily commute over bus and train was about one hour and a half, but I got to work on something really fancy: writing a c-shell script to daily sync data over ftp from an Oracle 7 database running on AIX (looked a lot like this one ) to a Bull mainframe. Development occurrent from a Windows NT4 workstation over telnet (I think). c-shell was a b1tḉh to work with and vim wasn't available (only vi IIRC) so my productivity wasn't great but I got it done and it ran until one of the two system (AIX) was eventually decommissioned. The AIX system might still be in the basement at my $OLDJOB. After that I moved on to more interesting e...

Came across this interesting article  by Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya on sw ownership vs stewardship (think of Github codeowners feature) and I love how it explains why stewardship is a much better term to use in this context: Owners are concerned with the value of what they own. Stewards are concerned with how well it can serve the group. And this makes all the difference in producing better outcomes.

TL;DR: impressive 🤯 I wanted to play with D3 to create a visualization, so I picked an example ( Bubble chart) and then started hacking at it (literally) in VS Code. Before long, I realized I had just downloaded Cursor , but not had an occasion to try it out. I thought this might be as good as any. Opened the project folder and its one HTML file, then stated prompting away. It got all the modifications right: add axis labels add labels to the bubbles change the tooltip to show all the data of the particular record; one of the attributes is confidence and goes from 0 to 1: Cursor guessed it is a percent and formatted it as such!  added a line showing the break-even point Cursor edited the file for me, and I just had to accept the change, save, reload in the browser. Made some tweaks myself where it was simple enough. Much better than copying and pasting in the chat. Where it blew my mind was when I resized the chart and added a section below which I titled "Explanation:" ....

I recently added Acquired to my go-to podcast short list and picked the Enron story from 2022. The story comes out hot on the heels of the FTX scandal/tragedy/fraud because of their similarities (and why the regulation that came after it helped prevent other Enrons). It's a long episode (1h 50m) but it's narrated so well and the story is so riveting that I didn't even notice. Theres this passage that I found interesting about half-measures and how they can and will be gamed (emphasis mine):

Many moons ago I was an enthusiastic user of OpenDNS  (when it still was a standalone company), then between one move and the other I forgot to enable it again and found Google/Cloudflare to be equally capable and fast. However I always missed the protection capabilities of OpenDNS, and today I spent some time looking for alternatives. That's how I came across Quad9 : an open DNS recursive service for free security and high privacy. Importantly: Quad9 is operated by a Swiss public-benefit, not-for-profit foundation with the purpose of improving the privacy and cybersecurity of Internet users. Quad9 is headquartered in Zürich and is subject to Swiss privacy law (Swiss government extends that protection of the law to Quad9's users throughout the world, regardless of citizenship or country of residence). I enabled Quad9 on my home router and then proceeded to test it. But first I had to find a malicious url, which funnily enough is harder than I thought :D Quad9 does not support ...

In his book Clear Thinking , Shane Parrish explains how to avoid finding the perfect solution to the wrong problem have two meetings: one to define the problem and another to find the solution(s) At least to me, it seems immediately apparent how a well conducted post-mortem facilitates exactly that. In the first phase we gather the data, establish facts and timeline. Once that is written down (emphasis on written!) we can start exploring solutions to prevent, detect and/or mitigate. At the same time, what we're achieving is slowification  (i.e.: taking work outside of the normal flow and make time to analyze it), which is another critical step towards continuous improvement. It's a simple process, but not an easy one.

Came across this inspiring post by Psych Safety on Ikigai last week, and I immediately felt I had to save it here, if not for the sake of better interiorising it by writing about it. The post immediately resonated with me because it captures exactly how I felt, many moons ago, when I came across the Internet, around 1996. I felt that the internet, with its rebel, distributed architecture would have changed the world, and for the better. I wanted to be a part of it because I thought I would be good at it, I would enjoy it and I could earn an income at the same time. 25 years later I still find that it's the same combination of things that motivates me the most deeply and ultimately allows me to be effective: Am I good at this (or willing to improve)? Does this benefit others and have a positive impact on the world? Will this help me make a living (or am I consciously choosing to do it for free)? Does it feel good? Do I love it? If I had to point at something that I feel is missing ...