What happened in March? Can you believe that my head feels like the Belgian weather of late: damp and very cloudy? I tried keeping my head above water in the complete chaos at work. I gave more talks about my creativity research. Kev and I exchanged lots of friendly emails as part of his monthly PenPal project. We talked about academia, baking, living in the countryside, board games, and more. I really enjoyed our digital conversation, thanks Kev!

Our daughter turned one, which is an unbelievably huge milestone for us. We celebrated our survival as much as as her transition from baby to toddler. It all feels very surreal, thinking back on the different life we had and the obstacles we had to overcome during and after pregnancy. We're very thankful that she's healthy now and are enjoying every little moment together.

Previous month: February 2024.

Books I've read

After finishing the fiction series of last month, I seem to have hit a reader's block. I tried getting back into John Cleese's Life And How To Survive It but the conversational form hampers my understanding and forming of aha-moments, especially if read just before going to bed. Chances are high I'll be picking up something less dense.

My new role at work comes with a lot of challenges I plan to tackle by compiling and systematically working through a tech-related reading list. Perhaps one that could also be published as a blog post.

Games I've played

Two small ones that serve as an intermission: Goblin Sword, a port of a 2014 mediocre mobile platformer, and Shovel Dungeon: Pocket Knight---no wait, Pocket Puzzler Shovel Knight? No wait, Shovel Pocket Puzzle Knight? No wait, Shovel Knight Pocket Dungeon---a puzzler cleverly coated with Shovel Knight sauce to conceal its roguelike blandness. I tried my collector's edition of Flashback yesterday and didn't like it. High time for a decent one.

As for the board games played this month, I've again dutifully kept track:

The more my work requires me to stare at a screen, the more I'd rather play a(n offline) board game than a video game. Three Sisters is a new favorite of us and a recurring appearance. Those "roll/flip & writes" are getting quite popular and are very easy to get to the table, even on a tiresome weekday night.

Selected (blog) posts

• Ana Rodrigues wrote a short note about the browser's intersection observer which I didn't know about and can come in handy!
• Samantha Cole claims that Tumblr (and Wordpress) staff compiled users' data as part of a deal with Midjourney and OpenAI to train data. Yet another disgusting AI report.
• Speaking of which... Hidde de Vries proves that AI-generated front-end components are anything but accessible.
• More great AI news: some LLMs hallucinate software packages potentially poisoned with malware. Good Luck Have Fun.
• Brandur prefers as little dependencies as possible in his software projects: he calls it the single dependency stack. I wish we'd do this at work: simplifying instead of over-engineering. On the other hand, his static site generation approach is far from simple. I don't understand why a personal blog needs a CDN.
• Brit Butler shares thoughts on teaching versus the SaaS industry I can very much relate to:

I love the deep intentionality of teaching. I'm not trying to grow revenue, not trying to scale the hell out of something. I'm focused on deeply connecting with and enabling whatever students are under my care. In my experience, it is difficult to be intentional in the same way in a modern "growth at all costs" SaaS company. The focus on constant movement distracts from the reflection needed to chart a course efficiently. Or maybe we're just poor at data-driven product development.

• On a related note: Growth is a mind cancer, writes Manuel Moreale. I agree.
• Tom Critchlow put forward the idea to share a desk with friends when working from home. Crashing at friends who've got a spare desk at their home office sounds like a great way to reduce loneliness.
• Ruben Schade got his retro KVM setup finally working! I'm so happy for him and the hardware stack looks very yellowy---like it should be.
• This is an older one but I stumbled upon it recently: Mark Rosewater explains Timmy, Johnny, and Spike, personas used to develop new Magic: the Gathering cards every new set.
• Ted Gioia sounds the alarm in The State of Culture 2024: art is being eaten by the entertainment industry who's being eaten by the age of distraction who's being eaten by the biggest fish of them all: addiction.
• I really enjoyed Gregory Szorc's Rust is for Professionals post and really want to pick up the language this year.
• Alan Pierce shows us how to access unexported functions in Go using five different attempts. Reflection only works with structs, not top-level functions. The answer seems to be go:linkname.
• Zalando built their own Technology Radar back in 2018 and we're using a variant of their open sourced project to spin up our own. Here is their public version of it.
• To top it all off, Carl Svensson wrote a great an extensive article on how DOOM didn't kill the Amiga like everyone thinks it did. Highly recommended reading for retro enthusiasts.

Other random links

• Here's a job queue for PostgreSQL written in Node in case you need it: https://worker.graphile.org/
• NuxtJS's fascinating hybrid rendering technique sounds like I need to fiddle with it. This is in line with the composable frontend architecture trends.
• Pipedream.com sounds like the If This Than That system for developers?
• Sccache is a compilation cache for compiling C/C++/Clang and Rust code. If you're building Go, use Bazel.Build as your build system---see this Uber engineering blog post for more info.