I love watching Lamar Jackson play, he makes everything look so effortless. He must run backwards faster than most top athletes run forward

I don’t get why everyone is so complacent about the second DT presidency. He has had his practice run and dismantled all the systems limiting his actions. And still, people are making jokes about it like he was still a candidate from 2015 that we ought to take “seriously, not literally.”

We are going to see so many literal things he does this year. That is what populists do when they get into power

I couldn’t navigate Facebook anymore to deactivate my account. At least on Threads and Instagram, it was relatively easy. I will have the energy to find the hidden menu item someday.

I thought of cutting down on text-based social media anyway and going full POSSE , and Mr. Zuckerberg made the decision easier

2024 wasn’t a particularly good year for my reading: seems that I’ve only recorded 13 books in Epilogue (I also completed two Finnish language books not in the database. The theme was “year of the re-read”, plenty of Ann Leckie, The Hobbit, and Leviathan Wakes. Good times, great books

2025 my plan is to go outside my comfort zone, read books that I would not normally consider. There are two parts here, one is genres and one is borrowed from a Finnish reading challenge (see the Finnish language post here Mitä luimme kerran: LUE MAAILMA VUODESSA )

1. A book written by a North African author
2. A book written by a Central or South African author

3. A book written by an indigenous author

4. A book written by an author from a Middle Eastern country

5. A work translated from Japanese, Korean or Chinese

6. The book deals with immigration or is diaspora literature

7. A book written by a South or Southeast Asian author

8. The author is from an Asian country that has a name that ends in -stan

9. The author is from a non-English speaking island nation

10. A book written by an author from a Central American or Caribbean country

11. A book written by a South American author

12. A book by an author who belongs to a nation whose state is not (fully) recognised

There is a lot here, considering the 13 books in 2024, but I’ve promised myself to have more time for reading in 2025. I’ll be happy to read six from this list, twelve would be awesome.

Other part of this theme to read genres I usually don’t touch, I’ve not yet completed the list of potential genres to visit but at least following:

• Spy stories
• Romance
• Detective stories, true crime, cozy crime
• Biography of a politician
• Biography of a pop musician, celebrity or an athlete
• Books related to a franchise: Star Wars, Star Trek, D&D

Anything you can recommend from these genres, and I will be happy.

And, finally, I plan to read Mercy of Gods by James S.A. Corey. Not part of the challenge but will read it this year.

Year 2024 was something. I went from meat-eater to vegan in 12 months and I am pretty proud of that. Work almost was too much for me, needed to stop and reconsider everything. All and all, my life is good, but I need to take better care of myself going forward.

Theme for 2024: Food

My main theme was “food”. At the end of 2023 my doctor suggested I start medication for lowering my cholesterol. I don’t mind medication, it is the only thing that keeps my arthritis manageable, but I thought I should try fixing my diet first. I was not making very good choices, neither in terms of culinary nor in terms of my health. My diet was not taking into account welfare of the animals or the planet. I was in for a big change.

Plan 🌱

I came up with the following principles for my food:

• Treat food like French people do. Food needs to always taste good, never compromise on that. I should never put something in my mouth that I don’t like
• Never compromise on health. Food must be healthy to eat
• Food needs to be good for the planet and good for animals. No compromises there either.

My idea was that I would go “mmm… bacon” to 100% vegan in two years, first building up the routines I need to be vegan all the time everywhere. I was more relaxed on the healthy principle in the start, but has been more and more successful in making healthy choices as well

Execution

First few months I concentrated on eating out and making sure I choose well. It worked better than I planned and I moved on to phase two: home choices, and when that worked out well chose to go full vegan already in May. Happy to say change was mostly complete in May…

Exceptions and Failures

I seem to eat by accident eat something non-vegan every few weeks. The only major problem arose when travelling in France and England. At the end of my trip I remember thinking in one pizzeria “well, at least pineapple counts as vegetable”. But after the trip I went back to my routines fairly easily and only exception after that was Christmas when I enjoyed my dad’s smoked salmon. Many times!

I still cook chicken and even meat for my kids occasionally and I don’t lose my sleep over random days I can’t make a good choice for some reason. Pareto principle applies: it is better to make good choices most of the time than to try to stick to rules that are impossible to follow.

Hobbies 🎹

I finally started playing piano after all these years just talking about it! I will never be great but I will be better and have fun. I also borrowed a guitar and slowly getting into practice playing that as well

My gym routine has been good all year, though my summer break was longer than planned to tennisleg I suffered from in August.

I am pretty sure my kid is supposed to study for a test now. Obviously, she has cleaned the whole apartment. Amazingly well I might add

Long-term me might regret this, but short-term me is very happy

Currently reading: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré 📚

Theme for 2025 books is going to be ”outside my comfort zone”. I will read books that I would not consider and let’s start with a spy story. First a classic, then a modern one and then a Finnish one. The same routine for all the genres I will have time to visit. Other part of this tour is geographical

Now hear me out: Expanse the animated series. One season per book (+novellas happening in same time frame). Easier to show certain developments in the story and hopefully get to telling the complete story. Still miffed about the end of the TV series

I know what my ”helicopter dropped me $1 billion” vanity project would be

Finished reading: Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey 📚

🥺 this is such a good book (again)

Weird thing about AWS S3 is that while it is everywhere it is hard to find actually working example code with proper error handling beyond the simplest things. I can’t be the only one using multipart uploads over a network where failures are common? Or find proper documentation on error codes

Happy new year everyone! This was my favourite moment of 2024. Walking on sand during low tide at Blackpool in early August. Just wind, sound of seagulls, sand and the Irish sea

Currently reading: Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey 📚

Final re-read of the year 2024

Unpopular opinions: unpopular opinion posts are very interesting look into minds of people and their inability to assess popularity of opinions

Currently reading: The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong 📚

Recommend me fantasy books written in 2024

Read a book: Finnish fantasy this time. Nice, easy read (if you know Finnish natively, that is). Mixes Finnish realism with fantasy elements. Midnight sun comes with spirits and monsters and tells also a story of climate change and forgotten and dying countryside. Highly recommend it

Thinking of a yearly theme for 2025. 2024 was food, went from big-time meat eater to vegan and succeeded in creating the necessary routines in my life. I will continue to do that, my goal was and still is to create routines that everything I eat would be good to eat (taste), good for the planet, and good for my health.

I am thinking along the lines of being more conscious and intentional about my time and attention. I want less distractions and more time spent on things that I want in my life (reading, writing, playing the piano, exercise, and maybe studying) and far less doomscrolling.

I am looking for a word, would it be mindfulness, or something else? What would be a good, one word for this idea?

Finished reading: Hobitti eli Sinne ja takaisin by J. R. R. Tolkien 📚

Read this book in three different editions: English paperback, audiobook and in Finnish. You can’t tell me this isn’t a perfect little book. Similar to what ”Paranoid” is to rock songs

I’ve been debugging CSS that looks weirdly off for days and can’t get it to look nice. Then I realized I was looking at a 150% zoomed-in window I had opened for presenting the page at a meeting. How is your day going?

This will be my first and last election post, I just can’t deal with the dread of everything coming, but on those ”election forecasts”: isn’t 2024 the final nail in the coffin for them?

No way this election was ”too close to call”, or ”50/50 but my gut says”. If you could start 10000 parallel universes from Tuesday morning, Trump would have won pretty much in all of those? And that models can’t predict correctly in this kind of an election makes those models more than useless in all cases, no? Maybe polls are something you can’t sum and average over at all?

It is curious to me how most of the software engineering advice and best practices are based on mostly anecdotes. Software organization generates so much artefacts and other data that could be measured but I rarely see it turned into actual numbers. For instance I have never seen monetary value (or some other value) assigned to (say) a CI/CD-pipeline or something obvious like having a revision control system in use

I once sold this at the customer by calculating the cost of making manual updates to a production system, but I didn’t go further than that. One could probably assign probabilities of mistakes and their cost but even just the cost of work was enough that time. I’d like if I had framework for this and I wonder, if frameworks like DORA and SPACE could help me?

I recently read a book called Build: Elements of an Effective Software Organization | Swarmia and I’ve read before Your Code as a Crime Scene, Second Edition: Use Forensic Techniques to Arrest Defects, Bottlenecks, and Bad Design in Your Programs by Adam Tornhill and while they give ideas (and latter is more tuned towards improving software) I am still looking for more ”business-like” book on the topic with hard numbers. Search continues on…

What is a thing that you know you would be very good at if you had the time to practice?

Idea for iOS — conditional screen time: the system only let’s you procrastinate after you have completed your todo list of the day. No social media before laundry and no games before Duolingo

Anyone use Airtable to automate memos and press releases, I have a document that is 95% same and the changing parts are easy to parameterize. Can I somehow go from data in Airtable to PDF document (roughly 2 pages) easily? Or should I use something else?

Finally saw Megalopolis. This was an awesome mess, perfect movie for me. I wish there was movies like this