Article: “More new mindsets, fewer new technologies” by Manuel Moreale

If someone’s out there on the web, it probably means they want to be found.

Tool: “Overland”

Mobile app to track your GPS location and send it to any endpoints (aka can be yours, you own the data). I wish more softwares would let me how the data so I can extract it and manipulate it as much as I want.

Article: “How I Take and Publish Notes” by Jim Nielson

I like to let my notes sit for a couple days (or even weeks). I find that if I come back to a note and still find it interesting/insightful that means it’s worth keeping, so I put in the work of cleaning it up and publishing it.

the reverse is probably why twitter/social media are horrible. People feel like they need to share things instantly. Sometimes waiting a bit to think it through or discard it is good.

Article: “I am a poem I am not software” by Robin Rendle

But despite my jealousy of how clean and straightforward they are, within twenty seconds I’ve forgotten about them. “Hello, I am XXXX and I’m an XYZ”—are everywhere for a reason. They’re safe. They work. And I’ve made many of those websites!

Sure the website might be a little broken and so strange that it pushes some folks away. But at least we’ll remember it later.

I guess it is time to update this website with all crazy ideas I have.

Video: “The Arc of Computing — Revival of Browsers”

It is worth watching the whole video, and a few points sticked out for me:

• Optimize for feeling, not metrics
• Update UI about summarizing webapges from couple of sentences to bullet points. It made it from a “meh” feature to one of the most used one.
• Browsers being boring, it opens space to innovate.

And on the last point, another article unrelated to the video mentions building a browser and the financial aspect of the default search preference:

Which kind of gets me thinking that perhaps a rather reasonable business idea is: make a kick-ass browser that people love, strive for even 0.5-1% of browser market share, and then sell your default search preference.

Article: “Blogging and Composting” by Jim Nielsen

Similarly, blogging recycles experience to enrich future projects (and self) with wisdom.

In the context of software, write a blog post no matter the outcome of a project:

• you finish it, great, write about it,
• you don’t finish it, write about this too!

Article: “African Influence on French”

More than 60 percent of those who speak French daily now live in Africa, and 80 percent of children studying in French are in Africa.

Demographers predict that by 2060, up to 85 percent of French speakers will live on the African continent. That’s nearly the inverse of the 1960s, when 90 percent of French speakers lived in European and other Western countries.

I am curious how France is going to react to this in the next decades: embrace it, deny it or reject it?

Article: “Year in Review” by Tom MacWright

I’ve lived through Web 2.0, the metaverse, crypto, chatbots, audio assistants, the sharing economy, VR, the mobile web, the internet of things, wearable technology. AI is another thing to put on the covers of magazines. My job hasn’t changed that much: designing and implementing technology is still hard and worthwhile. The reasons I got into it – that I love learning, understanding, solving problems – aren’t affected by the trends.

The view on crypto, AI, and tech trends in general is spot on!

Article: “Optimism” by Steph Ango

One day, I decided to become an optimist and life became much more fun. The life of a pessimist is easy but dreary. The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed. In the face of a hostile, cynical world, it takes effort to show that positivity has merit.