My first month back in the software engineering industry as an independent software architect is behind me. I'm still adjusting to the big change of pace. The paper work involved to set up a company (besloten venootschap or bv) in Belgium took longer than I anticipated and there's still administration to do, but at least my first invoice left my hard drive, so that's worth celebrating!

I also finally managed to get my Advice for Engineering Managers: Enabling Developers To Become (More) Creative article published on InfoQ to hopefully help drive sales of The Creative Programmer. Yesterday's talk at the Creativity Expert Exchange conference was also part of that campaign---the video will be put out free of charge shortly (edit: the concurrent session videos are online!). I'm not sure whether or not it's worth the trouble, but it was a fun conference to attend with lots of talented academics researching the topic.

Previous month: January 2024.

Books I've read

I blame the change in work pace. Again, besides the continuation of the Mallorea series by David Eddings, nothing much. I'm currently at Book Five; the last one in the series. On non-fiction front, I still have Schopenhauer's work to finish that deserves more attention.

Games I've played

Same problem. I did finally slog through Triangle Strategy, a pixelated turn-based strategy game reminiscent of the classic Final Fantasy Tactics with way too much cut-scenes for its own good. The game felt like an interactive novel instead of a proper game, and although the alternative pathways make for interesting replays, I never want to touch it again.

I bought Balatro, a poker-like roguelike (a who-what now?) made by a small team that came out of nowhere. It's the perfect game to play in handheld mode on the Switch in short bursts---exactly the kind of gameplay time I have available. Considering I'm generally not a fan of roguelikes and taking the randomness inherent to poker into account, I'm sure I'll lose interest soon, but it's a lot of fun while it lasts. I'll try to have a review up this month.

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

18 plays of which quite a few new ones, not bad! Three Sisters quickly became one of our favorite "roll & write"-style games, and it includes dice drafting! I'm using the BGG Catalog Android app to keep track of things and hope to continue to do so for the rest of the year.

Selected (blog) posts

• Ruben Schade's retrocomputer page of retrocomputers is nothing short of awesome!
• Lee Holmes invites us to think about the security risks of Postman. We're not quite there to eliminate the tool, but it's good to know.
• In case you want to upgrade your board game tokens to glass ones, you can Do It Yourself using a special resin coating. If you don't want to bother, there's Burger Tokens for you.
• More troubling AI news: Adobe AI scrapes your personal PDFs and info from your documents? See this Mastodon post at Infosec.
• As already posted before, Natalia Waniczek talked at FFConf 2022 about Working towards a greener world from behind the keyboard.
• Trevor Taubitz offers three interesting pathways to embed your VueJS frontend into your Go backend and compile it as one big binary.
• UCI summarized new findings on CAPTCHAs that attract world-wide attention, suggesting that these systems to separate bots from humans are no longer effective. Who would have thought.
• Stijn played a solo game of For Northwood! and urges us to go buy the tiny trick-tacking game.
• Federico Viticci used a Game Boy Camera for FaceTime video calls---and it was glorious!
• Azura26 analyzed all the expansions for the BGG Top 1000 Board games and provided an interesting summary on Reddit.
• Mandy Brown tells us not to give a fuck about our work---after all, it's just work.
• Brian Bankler visualized his Board Game Geek play log using a lovely online tool.
• Ruben Schade asks himself: is it worth it collecting cassettes in 2024? Spoiler: the answer is yes and no.

Other random links

• The browser plugin StreetPass allows you to discover people on Mastodon based on the sites you visit; pretty neat.
• I should have installed ZorinOS on my mother-in-law's laptop. Yet another friendly Linux flavor?
• Slime Mori Mori Dragon Quest 3 received a full fan translation so I went ahead and pressed the Buy Now button on eBay. Oops.
• I didn't know about the IndieWeb Carnival, and now that I do, I might join in.
• For the small sum of $38.000, Wordpress will make sure your online legacy lives on for a hundred years. You're still paying $31 a month then...