I saved money by buying something I don't need. I guess I could play through those Spider-Man games?

Ended up with some weird Harry Potter fan fiction. Not great.

Running became fun again once I stopped winging it and went back to following a plan.

I actually had to go back to the popcorn person and switch mine, because they accidentally gave me salty popcorn too.

But my yearly theme, The Year of Art, makes it easy to justify buying a new sketchbook every couple of weeks, or trying out a new medium or a different kind of brush.

I love it. I can go down endless rabbit holes, figure out exactly which kind of gouache paint was used for a piece I like, and then buy it for a couple of bucks and experiment with it. The same goes for pencils, brushes, and paper.

The Year of Art is going great.

Here's an example:

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But that's not all. Here's an example of a post that contains an image:

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But I didn't stop there! I can embed dailies, too. Because why not! See here:

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And because embedding seems to be the theme of the hour, here's an embed for a tag. It shows the most recent entries with that tag and links to the tag detail page.

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Shoutout to Codex for doing most of the work on this!

The other day, Sony announced yet another price increase for all PlayStation models, and the PS5 Pro is set to cost €150 more. That’s a 20% price increase for a two-year-old console. Absurd.

Being as economical as I am, I ordered a PS5 Pro at the old price, and it’ll arrive on Tuesday. This wasn’t the plan. I don’t want to spend more time playing video games right now. But I can’t say no to a “deal.”

Amazon already increased the prices (days before Sony’s deadline), and the PS5 Pro is sold out.

Weird times.

Sophisticated Saturday

I read the whole book on release day and loved it.

Skyr is a recurring topic in my life.

Weather, am I right!?

Back home, back to business

This marks the end of our little Barcelona adventure.

Our second to last day in Barcelona.

I miss my little Boldu buddy.

Not even the very expensive tickets could lessen my amazement about Sagrada Família.

I'll never enjoy flying. It's against nature and shouldn't be possible.

Preparing the way.

What a nice guy!

I kind of messed up the background. Please don't unfollow me because I'm not good enough at art.

Who needs meteorology when my head forecasts the weather?

Can't run 10K without clothing, can I?

Coding became a lot easier once I didn’t have to do it myself anymore.

The Pokémon franchise lost me at some point. The games felt repetitive and I wasn’t interested in the grind anymore. That’s why I didn’t care about Pokopia when it was announced. Why would I want to play a knock-off Animal Crossing?

This quickly changed when the first reviews came out and were over-the-moon positive. And what can I say? I finished the main story yesterday and had a blast. I can’t remember the last time a video game had me in its grips like that.

I can’t wait to jump back in and start really working on my towns and making everything pretty.

Poopin' and cleaning up my little town.

Next I came up with a completely new take on comments in blogs. It looks like a classic comment form but it's just a quick way to fire off an e-mail to me. Do I hear you mumble "Wow, that's genius!"? You're right!

Last but not least: A few changes to the library. It now features a grid view and sorting options. I also added cute little hover tooltips for each view.

You might need to clear your cache if something looks funny.

Less pressure, more posts? We'll find out!

These two videos made me very happy recently:

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We are (roughly) in the 20th year of the iPhone. At year ten, Apple introduced the iPhone X, a real break from the past with a new design and a new way of interacting with the device.

Now it has been another ten years. (Not really, but they skipped the iPhone 9 to call it X, so they obviously don't care about precision.)

X is the Roman numeral for ten. XX is twenty. A foldable iPhone has two displays.

iPhone 2X

Twenty years (XX). Two screens (2x).

You heard it here first.

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

What this means in practical terms is daring to trust your own curiosity. In creative work, that might mean abandoning the effort to “remember everything you read”, or conducting exhaustive research so as to ensure you’ve considered all the factors other people think you ought to consider, and instead using what naturally interests you as a filter.

Whenever I ignore this and dive into something I’m not interested in, I have a miserable time. Video content is a perfect example. I’m convinced there’s a way for me to actually enjoy making it, but I haven’t found it yet, and it becomes a headache almost immediately.

Trusting my curiosity, on the other hand, always leads me to a good time and makes me feel like I’m spending my days on something that’s actually worth doing.

So I went down the rabbit hole of e-ink tablets.

My goal was to find a perfect digital notepad with:

• A good writing experience (pen feel, latency, writing tools)
• A good and easy-to-navigate interface
• Focus. No clutter, no weirdness
• Beautiful hardware, bonus points if it's pocketable
• A backlight

What I don't need is:

• A good ebook or PDF reading experience
• Android and the ability to install apps

There are currently six companies that offer relevant products in this category: Supernote, Boox, Amazon, Viwoods, Rakuten Kobo, and Remarkable.

Supernote

Their devices don't have backlights. And the hardware looks like a DIY project by some nerd.

Boox

The Note Series has the aesthetic of Lenovo's ThinkPads. Some people might like that, but I'm not a mid-level IT manager at IBM.
The Go Series devices are nicely designed, but they’re primarily e-readers, not optimized for note taking. Same for the new Palma 2 Pro.

Amazon

I'm a huge fan of my Kindle Paperwhite, and the perfect device for me would be a Paperwhite with a textured display that feels like writing on paper. Unfortunately that’s not on offer. Instead, Amazon sells the Kindle Scribe. They announced a new version in September, but it hasn't been released yet.
Amazon has the best backlight of them all, but the current Scribe is basically a big e-book reader with note-taking features. I'd prefer it the other way around.

Viwoods

An underdog on this list. I actually bought the AiPaper Mini and didn't like it. At all. Running Android with a tacked-on custom interface made everything feel bloated and confusing. The device never managed to connect to my Wi-Fi and, worst of all, the writing feel was bad. The lag between my pencil strokes and the text showing up just wasn’t good enough.

Rakuten Kobo

The Kobo Elipsa 2E has a notes feature, but it's an e-reader with note taking added to it. The device isn’t optimized for writing.

Remarkable

The Remarkable Paper Pro and Remarkable Paper Pro Move offer the fewest features. They’re hyper-focused on handwritten notes and syncing them with your other devices. You can't install apps, and there aren’t 2000 things to tweak. It’s just an e-ink notebook. You could say “It just works,” which is what people say about Apple devices — and yes, Remarkable is the Apple of the e-ink tablet world.

Their custom OS offers everything I need, has a good user experience (I have a couple of gripes, but that's nothing compared to the other devices), and doesn’t need any explanation. It’s notebooks in folders. That’s it.

It’s an opinionated system. People who like to tinker won’t be happy with it. It’s streamlined e-ink note taking and nothing else. A focused experience where the device and software quickly fade into the background and what’s left are your thoughts on digital paper.

I love it. I love it so much that I bought the Paper Pro Move and the Paper Pro to test and eventually send one back, but I decided to keep both.

This niche is still in its infancy. E-ink technology isn’t new anymore, but it only recently got good enough to do anything with it beyond displaying a book page. And I’m here for it.

So I built myself a complicated solution using Apple Shortcuts and Obsidian to prototype my vision of a short-form journaling experience. Tap an icon, a text field opens, and I can quickly jot down what I’m doing or thinking about. The result was a Markdown file with timestamps and those entries. That felt surprisingly good. It was fun to open the app and quickly note what I was doing whenever I had a few seconds of downtime. Far better than doomscrolling.

Long story short: I built a whole journaling app around this concept.

It’s called Zeitgeist, and it feels like social media but with an audience of one: yourself. All your random little posts come together to form the overarching story of your life.

Go give it a try. I’ve been using it for weeks and, even though I’m obviously a bit biased, love it. It’s just so quick and low-friction. Let me know what you think!

Download Zeitgeist now

Download Zeitgeist now!

This got old very quickly, though. It’s the same thing in every level of the game: run around, smash stuff, collect gold, run around some more, repeat.

I haven’t finished it yet, but I’d say I’m more than halfway through the game, and it hasn’t surprised me as often as I expected based on the very positive reviews floating around. It hasn’t surprised me at all, to be honest, come to think of it. I watched the Nintendo Direct presentation showing what the game is all about, and that seems to have been it.

Not even the art style impresses me much. Coming off my second playthrough of Tears of the Kingdom, Donkey Kong Bananza only looks nice. Nothing made me stop and take in the vistas. Not to mention the character design, which feels a bit like something a 13-year-old in the 90s would have liked.

The story is basic and can be understood without reading anything, and its difficulty is easy enough to just run from quest marker to quest marker without having trouble progressing.

Sorry, DK, this Bananza is just a tad too boring for my taste.

Since I don't want to start a second blog or newsletter to do so, I added a new feature to this blog that allows you to filter posts by language. It can be found in the footer and lets you switch between all posts, only posts in English, or only posts in German.

If you prefer to follow along via RSS, you can use the default feed that contains all posts, or choose to use the English or German feeds.

There are no German posts yet, but I figured I'd let you know about this in advance.

The moment you start thinking about your system, you stop being content with it.

What’s the right approach?

A carbon-based notebook that gives you all the fuzzy, tactile feelings? A digital setup that lets you search everything in seconds? Which notebook? Which app?

Every few months, I come up with a new “best system.” The result: my notes are scattered everywhere.

I’m torn. I love the idea of a romantic, analog notebook. But I also want everything searchable, connected, and in one place. Luhmann built a system that was both tactile and interconnected. But at what cost?

I tried a Zettelkasten in Obsidian, based on Bob Doto’s A System for Writing. It felt slow and convoluted. Tried index cards like Luhmann. Felt like I was losing my mind.

Maybe I’ll never find the perfect system. Maybe I need to accept: my method is just lots of notes, in lots of places.

There’s some beauty in that chaos, I guess.

I somehow missed the part where one of the quiches contained bacon. My bad. Unfortunately, I’m now able to report that I still love the taste of meat, even after not eating any for five years. I doubt that’ll change any time soon.

I'm not happy about this breaking my streak, but I decided not to dwell on it for too long. It was an honest mistake that doesn't take away from my overall vegetarian lifestyle.

Many people struggle to keep up with their read-later lists. I’ve perfected mine and—at least in that regard—I have no problems anymore.

Today, I want to share my complete read-later workflow and tools with you. It has proven itself time and again as a scalable solution that avoids the problem of an ever-growing backlog of things to read.

Here it goes: I put links to articles I want to read into my to-do list and then I read them.

That's it. That's the whole system.

Normally, perfectionism makes me quit quickly. Frustration comes fast when your artwork looks nothing like what you expected. I have been working on that, but lately, I find myself loving the imperfection itself.

Maybe that shift is connected to AI.

Sure, it is neat to generate a Studio Ghibli version of an image. But as someone who knows he could create something unique by hand, it feels hollow.

Every line of ink on paper carries more tactile character, more direct connection to the body and emotions, than anything made on a screen. That was always true. AI just made it more obvious.

I want to harvest that truth for my otherwise very digital life. I feel like it will be essential for my wellbeing going forward.

Something about a sketchbook as a daily companion for life has always fascinated me. Sitting somewhere and sketching what’s around you feels like the purest form of mindfulness.

Pages and pages full of visualized memories. What could be cooler than that?

Here’s a small sketch I did yesterday while sitting on a bench at the Alster, talking to an older woman about her allergies.

I ran 889,5 kilometers, which took me 106 hours and 49 minutes. My average pace was 7'12"/km. My current average pace for December 2024 is 6'23".

Unhinged checks in with you three times a day, asking how you’re feeling and what you’re doing. Over time, it gives you valuable insights into the factors that shape your mood.

I’ve been using Unhinged since March, and it’s fascinating to see how my mood shifted dramatically after finding a new apartment in Hamburg at the end of May. It’s also clear that the second half of the year has been one of the best ever.

There are plenty more insights hidden in the data. For example, my mood is almost always 'Very Good' in the morning block if I’ve gone for a run. I also added a feature to tag people in entries, which has helped me track how different people’s company influences my mood.

Now is the perfect time to start mood tracking. 2025 hasn’t started yet, and you could have a full year of data by the time I release the '2025 Mood in Review' feature. (No promises, though. It’s just something I’m hoping to work on.)

You can download UNHINGED for free on the App Store.

At the same time, I declared 2024 to be the Year of Friendship. Those two things combined resulted in one of the worst times of my life. I had never felt more alone than in the first six months of this year.

Fortunately, after accepting that I made an oopsie and needed to rectify the situation, I went ahead and found a new apartment in the city where I spent my most formative years. It felt like coming home.

Which brings us back to my yearly theme: Was 2024 the Year of Friendship?

Absolutely.

The second half of the year was one of my best and most social ever. It surprisingly made 2024 the best year in recent history. Spending the summer, autumn, and winter surrounded by friends compensated for my time in loneliness enough for this year to be considered a success.

This was a triumph.

HUGE SUCCESS.

These days, I try to approach popular things with an open mind. I bet meditation will be life-changing for me once I get into the habit. The masses can’t be wrong about that one. If I don’t like it, I must be doing it wrong.

The same was true for working out and practicing gratitude. They changed how I feel and see the world on a daily basis.

Who am I to say that wearing barefoot shoes or reading 50 Shades of Grey isn’t for me? If something resonates with so many people, maybe I should at least be humble enough to acknowledge the possibility that I might like it too.

And what is life about, if not discovering and maximizing the things you truly enjoy?

Being in the loop won’t solve your perceived lack of control.

Just because news is available doesn’t mean you must consume it.

Your real responsibility to you and those around you is keeping a clear head and a healthy mind. Don’t let the endless stream of information wear you down.

Society often equates news awareness with caring about issues, but you’re more capable of making an impact if you’re not drowning in despair.

Take care of yourself first.

Then, focus on what you can actually influence.

The only thing you need to grasp is the big-picture flow of events. Don't get lost in ever changing details. Don’t waste your mental health and possible impact scrolling through a relentless flood of noise.

Put your energy into what builds, strengthens, and moves things forward.

Since my whole family consisted of people unable to apologize, I could not have been farther away from being able to do so myself. I'm sure I hurt a couple of people on my way to getting better at it.

I had to be proven wrong, repeatedly, to finally accept that I’m fallible.

That I'm not only possibly wrong, but likely.

Years later, I’d look back, realizing I’d misjudged situations I once felt sure about. Each of these moments chipped away at my arrogance, leaving a simple truth: I can and will mess up.

This changed my reaction to criticism. Instead of defending myself, I started considering if it might be valid.

I had to learn to put my ego aside and to offend myself.

Learning all of that only gets us to the point of feeling like we should apologize. That's progress but not enough. Unfortunately, 'sorry' may seem like it's the hardest word, but the words that follow are even harder and arguably more important.

I believe there’s only one right way to apologize.

The apology must include a clear description of what went wrong and express genuine remorse. The goal is to show understanding and introspection. Apologizing isn’t about conveying guilt but about building a foundation for future improvement.

A few examples of good apologies:

• I’m sorry for not being there when you needed me. I know it hurt you, and I’ll work on being more present.
• I apologize for dismissing your feelings. I’ll make an effort to listen better because you deserve that.
• I’m sorry for reacting defensively last night. I want to be more patient and really hear you.

Most importantly: Intent doesn’t matter. If my actions hurt someone, I should apologize, regardless of what I meant. Apologizing isn’t about defending my intentions, it’s about owning the impact they had and showing I’m willing to learn. A real apology is about understanding and growth.

A very bad apology sounds like this: I’m sorry you feel that way. This says nothing. It’s dismissive, adds no value, and offers no insight. Saying it—and hearing it—gets us nowhere.

Good apologies are a signal of strength. Showing understanding and not being defensive is something people appreciate.

Knowing how to apologize gave me room to make mistakes, learn from them, and move forward with kindness.

Steven Pinker states that good writing is pointing out:

Pinker suggests approaching writing as if you were pointing something in the environment out to another person – something that she would notice for herself, if only she knew where to look. Imagine directing someone's gaze across a valley, to a specific house on the other side. "You should pretend," writes Pinker, "that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, and that you're directing the attention of your reader to that thing." He calls this the "joint attention" strategy.

It helps me to consider my writing as a bid for connection with the reader. I'm pointing something out, asking for joint attention.

It doesn't have to be an earth-shattering new idea or the most exciting piece of content ever. It's just a small moment that we share.

One sentence, just three words long, has stuck with me the most:

Therefore establish your own guilt as far as you can. Investigate yourself; play the part of the prosecutor, then of the judge, only then of the advocate. Offend yourself sometimes.

Offend yourself sometimes.

My upbringing didn’t involve role models who showed me how to do this, so it took me years to figure out how to achieve it more often than not.

For the longest time, I didn’t really understand what "ego" was or how it could get in my way. I’m not sure when it finally clicked, but at some point, I realized that who I want to be and what my ego tries to accomplish are often two separate things.

My ego makes me defensive. Whether it’s defending me from others or from myself, if it’s something I shouldn’t be shielded from but should confront, this defensiveness blocks my personal growth.

I have to offend myself without taking offense.

They become a perpetuum mobile of self-efficacy. The more I invest, the more control I feel over my life. This builds momentum. This flywheel can only be stopped by a lack of kindness toward myself.

To make this work, I see the things important to me as malleable, and I see myself as someone who can shape them.

Since everything, including myself, changes over time, this is a never-ending cycle of improvement. Hoping something will stay the same is a futile fight against entropy.

So I embrace entropy as a fundamental truth and consider everything important to me as a fun project I get to work on.

Making an effort is never wasted.

Instead of allowing myself a slow morning after a restless night, I go for a run.

Instead of relaxing on the couch, I'm teaching myself how to code.

Instead of avoiding a difficult conversation, I embrace it.

These things share one important truth: I know that I will feel better once they've happened. These actions are scalable because they optimize for delayed gratification. They anticipate a future that will be better because I welcomed friction.

Nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort.

Once I internalized this way of thinking, it changed how I see myself and those around me. Chasing instant gratification doesn't align with the life I want, and watching others do so isn't something I enjoy.

I want to be, and surround myself with, people who are willing to put in the effort to live a life their future selves will thank them for—people who make scalable, life-affirming choices because they know these actions grow and compound over time, leading to greater, unexpected benefits.

What’s more, when my body feels like it’s functioning as it should, the quality of my thinking improves as well.

Physical strength leads to clearer, more optimistic thoughts, and less ego-driven thinking. When I’m not using energy to build up defenses, it’s easier to be more kind, humble, friendly, empathetic, and loving.

In short, feeling physically strong makes it easier to think strong thoughts. Running is a simple, scalable and reproducable way to achieve that.

It works by layering a bunch of animated dots on top of the content you’re looking at. When the device detects changes in the vehicle’s motion, it animates the dots accordingly, tricking your brain into thinking everything is fine instead of making you feel like you need to puke because the real-life physics engine stopped working.

I’ve struggled with motion sickness and haven’t read a book in a car or bus in 29 years. I didn’t find it very convincing that showing little circles on top of everything else would help, but yesterday, I spent 24 minutes on a bus, reading a whole chapter, and I was completely fine.

That never happened before.

Vehicle Motion Cues works, and it literally changed my life.

It's not like I'm actively planning these versions. I might get a dog when I'm 50. Or when I'm 75. I could start woodworking tomorrow or 20 years from now. Maybe I'll spend my 40s learning how to play the piano. Who knows.

The fun in thinking about these possible iterations is not in knowing when exactly they're going to happen but in expecting to have a life full of achievable possibilities. A life full of things I’m going to enjoy.

No matter what happens, there’ll always be an iteration of me that’s preoccupied with his current obsession—who’s looking forward to getting out of bed to go for a walk with the dog, sanding a piece of wood, polishing a bowling ball for the big tournament, or practicing a sonata.

I love that for me.

There’s something different about hearing an instrument played in person. Every speaker will always only be a representation of what the music is supposed to sound like. But when that layer of translation is removed something changes and you’re somehow able to feel the instrument as part of the music and room.

Now I‘m wondering if I should give going to the orchestra a try. Or even start a new side quest by taking piano lessons?

As you can see, I decided to solve this issue by posting something about not posting anything. An age-old trick in blogging: blogging about blogging. That being said, I actually believe it helps to keep the sharing muscle from atrophying. These posts don’t cost me anything. I don’t have to be precious about them.

For example: I moved back to Hamburg.

The move itself went off without a hitch. My stuff was put into a truck, my cats and I were picked up by friends, and we all made it successfully to my new flat. It took far longer than expected, but it got done.

Since then, I have unpacked all the boxes, kind of arranged everything in a roughly pleasing way, and got to know my new neighborhood and even my neighbors. I have gone for lunch, dinner, and walks with friends. I continued running every other day, even together with friends. I went on a couple of dates, found a new dentist and hairdresser, and have thoroughly enjoyed where I live.

I can't stress the last point enough: my sheer existence here feels like bliss. I step out of the house and love every second of it. Life is happening all around me, and I'm taking part in it.

The last three weeks felt like reality has realigned with how it should be, and I couldn't be happier about it.

Much of what we're doing is just going through the motions until we reach the stage where the real work begins. If a tool can help me design an MVP of a form in 3 seconds that would have otherwise required 1,200 clicks, I'm greeting it with open arms.

My valuable skill is not drawing boxes in slightly different iterations but thinking about complex products that require a bird's-eye view and a vision. It will take some time until AI gets us there.

• I was convinced that life in a smaller town would be the right thing for me. Instead of trying it out for a couple of months, I moved there completely. Like an idiot. That might not have been the smartest decision, but it sure felt right at the moment.
• I was wrong. In terms of work, money, and negative emotions involved, this might have been the biggest mistake of my life. Which, all in all, speaks volumes about how good my life is going. It's a very privileged position to be in.
• At the same time, this might be the most important lesson of my life. I won’t ever have to wonder what life in a small town would be like, not to mention one of those dreamy cabin-in-the-woods situations people like me tend to fantasize about. Not for me, no thanks!
• All of this also changed my relationship with... people. Like, in general. I’m far more thankful for them. When visiting friends in Hamburg, I actually enjoyed being stuck in a completely overfilled subway. I enjoyed walking around the Alster dodging hundreds of people doing the same. It's a price I'm willing to pay for living in a proper city. It also gave me renewed motivation to work on my yearly theme.
• I was so convinced about moving here that I was fine with signing a tenancy agreement with a minimum rental period of two years. My thinking was that you'd have to at least give it a good shot for this amount of time to be able to figure out if you like it or not. Oopsie. (I can get out of it by paying a lot of money. The process is already underway.)

So, okay, whatever. Things happened, I was wrong about how I’d feel, and I went through all the necessary emotions to come to following conclusion:

I have to move.

Again.

Not great, not terrible. I learned a lot about myself and how I want to spend the rest of my life. That alone made this little, stupidly expensive intermezzo worth it. A solid 3.6 Roentgen situation.

So what's next?

I'll move back to Hamburg.

Before moving to Berlin about nine years ago, Hamburg was what I called my home, and it still feels like it. Most of my friends live there, I love the city, and I kind of can’t wait to come back.

So that’s it. I’m off trying to find a place to live in a city that is known for its horrendous housing market. Thanks for reading, and a big thanks to all of you who reached out to talk to me about this experience. I appreciate it!

Oh, by the way, if you hear something about a soon-to-be vacant apartment in Hamburg: Let me know!

I even built this little site you could share with your friends and colleagues to help me on my quest.

https://eine.wohnung.fuer.marcel.io

Thank you!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

I never made much use of what Berlin has to offer, yet I took quite a few things for granted.

Restaurants, for example. I could have sworn that I didn’t care that much about food. Unfortunately, that seems to have been the case only because I was surrounded by fantastic food and restaurants ever since moving out from home. I miss it—all the choices of different establishments, all the culinary options. The fact that 4.8 stars on Google Maps actually meant something. I’m not even complaining about the lack of vegetarian options. It’s not even possible to get good fries anywhere.

I could live with that, though, if it weren't for the fact that absolutely nothing else is going on. Of course, I expected there to be less to do, but not this little.

After scouring the internet for hours in February, I found one (ONE!) interesting thing to look forward to: a lecture about salt and its history, with a tasting of salts from all over the world at the end. I knew I'd be roughly half as old as the other participants, but I was ready to mingle when I booked it for mid-April.

The one real museum is being renovated and won't open for more than a year. Things that do happen, like cocktail nights in the sole co-working space, result in a gathering of like four people. Two of them are the owners of the place.

I'm not even kidding.

Going to the movies was always a great solution for me to get my mind off things. The one good cinema doesn't offer screenings with original language, though, and I won't watch American and British movies with German dubbing. I haven't lost all of my self-respect.

Even though I didn’t make much use of what Berlin has to offer, it was good to know that I had options. If I wanted to do something, there was more than enough, sometimes even too much. All the options felt paralyzing at times. Now I long for them. I expected a reduction in possibilities to feel freeing; instead, it’s just depressing.

By the way, that lecture about salt I mentioned earlier?

It got cancelled.

For lack of interest.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Fortunately, 16 years later, I somehow found myself in the same situation again and am now able to express what it is that bothers me.

After living in Berlin Mitte for eight years, I was completely convinced that I needed a cozy small town without the depressing anonymity and all the noise. How great it would be to walk outside and not have to dodge others left and right.

I was wrong.

I miss what I was despising just a couple of months ago.

Yes, it was a lot and I wished for quieter surroundings at times. Of course, I wasn't happy with some aspects of my situation. Yes, I've seen a surprising amount of penises from randos pissing on the street. Not great!

It was interesting, though. Things changed from day to day. People were weird. Normal. Exciting. Profane. Loud. Quiet. Something. I stepped outside and life happened.

Schwerin, with it's less than 100,000 inhabitants, most of them teenagers or pensioners, is... boring.

Not in the way I thought it would be, where I expected the quietness and solitude to magically expand my mind. Walden Pond style. On the contrary: I kind of feel alone and mentally under-challenged.

I don't want to come across as contemptuous. A different version of me could love it here. I just don't want to be that version. Even though I respect everyone who finds what they're looking for in a place like this.

I've found that I want to be surrounded by people my age, with a high likelihood of shared interests. And as cringe as it might sound, I'm afraid mine are big-city-people interests. Internet-work people. I want to see, meet, and talk to people... like me. Or at least me-adjacent.

Here's the catch, though: People like me feel like they don't belong here.

I know because — and this might come as a surprise to you — I am a person like me.

And that's just one aspect. If you had asked me about this six months ago, I would have said something completely different, but here’s the reality: It’s too empty here. I can go for a 45-minute run and only meet five people—all of them pensioners, of course. I can walk from the main station to my flat on a Saturday night and not encounter a single person. That’s just depressing.

I haven't felt like this since moving away from where I grew up.

What I expected before the move was an expansion into a new way of being. Of feeling content with smallness, of finding joy in normalcy. Instead, it feels like a regression to something I left behind for a reason.

A reason that hasn't changed since I first felt it more than 16 years ago.

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Today: Local Retail.

I wasn't expecting this, like at all, but I seem to have demands for the quality and diversity of stores around me. Every time I tried to buy something in a store in Schwerin, I wasn't able to find what I was looking for. We're not talking about heavily exotic stuff here. Pants, for example, were nowhere to be found. None of them fit me, they were all far too big. I'm not weirdly shaped, on the contrary. It won't get more default than me. I ran out of stores to try before I found something I liked. That never happened before. Another time I tried to buy brushes: Nothing. Same for sketchbooks. Same for pretty baskets to store stuff in or colorful decoration. Nothing.

This might seem like a small matter but I like walking somewhere, browsing a limited but plentiful offering of wares and going back home with whatever I needed as the result. It makes me feel connected to where I am.

It doesn't help that online shopping became a pain in the ass at some point. There's just too much to choose from, everything, even Amazon, is full of scams and I hate the whole process. Choosing, ordering, waiting, tracking, receiving, returning. I don't need that noise.

So that's an insight: I would not have guessed that a heavily limited selection of stores would influence my mood this much but it does. The more you know!

I Might Have Made an Oopsie

• Part 1: Local Retail
• Part 2: The People
• Part 3: The Possibilities
• Part 4: I'm moving back to Hamburg

Many people think that being kind means not doing what needs to be done because it's hard. That giving themselves breaks from trying is what they need.

They think it comes easily to those succeeding at what they set out to do and if they themselves struggle, it's obviously not for them. They're special in how hard it is for them. Hence, they deserve time off from trying.

That's one of the biggest misconceptions, and I believe the inherent problem is with how people talk to themselves.

Growth is the result of enough repetitions, many of them ending in some sort of failure. Your drawing doesn't look like anything you expected, your run felt terrible, your code doesn't compile.

If your inner voice gets destructive every time you mess up, you're less likely to try again. Ironically, you are getting in yet another successful repetition of talking badly about yourself.

If you learn to not succumb to negative self-talk, it gets a lot easier to get back to what you set out to do and start another repetition. You'll still fail, you'll still find it hard, but you won't be in a constant fight with yourself anymore.

I strongly believe that everybody can achieve whatever they set out to do, as long as they keep at it. It might take forever, it might require a whole lot of deliberate practice and deep work, but as long as the repetitions don't stop, progress is inevitable.

The key difference between you and those who make it seem easy is probably that they're kinder to themselves.

I wonder if it would be possible to bring that feeling of community back to a site like mine.

Alright! Now that I've dealt with the little feelings of the worst junkies among you, let me tell you about the first and only addiction I've ever had: caffeine.

I don't have an addictive personality and have never had any problems with the usual suspects. What made caffeine different is that our society somehow neglects to talk about it as a drug. Everybody is juiced up 24/7 and at best, we'll get a "don't talk to me before I've had my first coffee" joke instead of an actual warning about what are clear symptoms of withdrawal.

It took me years until I figured out that caffeine could be the reason for the ever-present headaches that plagued me for most of my 20s. I suspected having a brain tumor before even considering caffeine as the culprit.

Society doesn't want you to suspect its favorite lubricant.

The following weeks of withdrawal, going completely cold turkey and not touching anything that contained caffeine, were harder than I expected them to be. A fun fact as an aside: Many painkillers contain caffeine. That's not the information you want to learn while feeling like your head is about to explode.

Long story short: After successfully getting clean, my headaches were gone. I felt like myself for the first time in years. I wasn't tired all the time; I woke up alert and it stayed that way until the evening hours. Exactly like all the people talking about how you should quit caffeine said it would be. They're right.

Caffeine traps you in a vicious cycle of needing it to feel like you don't need it.

Since then, I've been in a constant struggle to keep clean. As soon as I drink something with caffeine for two to three days, the headaches come back. Which is a bummer, because those headaches can be cured through caffeinated beverages and the cycle starts anew.

I had a couple of relapses but always managed to go through another round of withdrawal. It's surprisingly hard to stay "sober". If I'm having a bad day, I crave a caffeine high to make me feel better. On a good day, I want something with caffeine to celebrate and enjoy my day even more.

I found an okay-ish rhythm where I allow myself one caffeinated beverage per week. As a treat. The only problem is that I have to account for the willpower needed the next day because I'll crave another one more than if I hadn't had the first one.

The other day, I was wondering what my official year of retirement would be if the German laws don't change and I don't die or get very sick before then. I'm writing this in 2024; I turn 35 in May, and the current retirement age is 67. My last year of officially having to be an active member of the working force will be 2056.

Two thousand fifty-six!

That's 32 years from now!

My entire mentally present life, once again.

At this point, there's a fork in the road of how to feel about this. "Oh shit, I still have to do this for more than 30 years?" or "Oh wow, that's so much time left!".

Fortunately, I landed on the second option.

Your mid-30s are a weird age. You meet people who seem convinced (or have to convince themselves?) that they've arrived. They worked, found success in some kind of career and are now ready to settle down. All of this makes it feel like there's nothing yet to come.

That's completely wrong, though. We're not talking about 32 years until I'm basically dead. They're productive years full of potential building, transformation and growth.

Let's say you studied and started your first real job in your early 20s: You worked for just one quarter of what is considered the norm. What's left is enough time to start three new, completely unrelated careers, if you're so inclined.

32 years!

How cool is that?!

When you share something online, people will react. Most of the time, they try to one-up you, either by pointing out something you apparently missed or by flat-out telling you that you're wrong and they know better.

That's not surprising. It's how people operate.

In my early years of blogging, I viewed this behavior as a challenge. My whole personal brand was about "being combative." "Don't feed the trolls" was still a saying back then, and I completely ignored its inherent truth.

It's not just trolls, though. My recent post about filter icons resulted in quite a few reactions, most of them telling me things I already knew. I struggle with people implying I haven't thought about what they're now kindly offering me as new information. It's likely one of those ego things where I feel undervalued if people consider me uninformed.

My first reaction—and I've started and deleted quite a few responses like this over the last couple of days—is to react with some witty "You think you've accomplished something here, but let me show you that you're actually not that smart" remark. It's an asshole move and exactly the behavior I've trained myself to stop doing over the last few years. It's not easy, but it's worth it. Letting things go always feels better than trying to win something that isn't even a competition.

All of this influences my writing. I knew that these reactions would be the result of my short and not very in-depth argued post about filter icons. I could have written a 5,000-word piece on the ins and outs of why the status quo is the way it is, offered alternative icons, and talked about their pros and cons to anticipate those reactions as well. But that wouldn't have been fun. Everything requires a disclaimer.

I would lose my voice if I tried to optimize my writing around the expected reactions. I'd dumb everything down, argue in every direction, just to be safe. That's just not an option. Just like trying to outwit the people reacting to my writing isn't one.

Am I suggesting that you should ignore your readers? Perhaps!

This icon represents a funnel. A funnel is used to help move liquid from one container to another.

A hydration highway.

If the funnel is handled by a person with adequate motor skills, no liquid will be lost. The same amount of liquid that was in the initial container will be moved to the second container.

A funnel does not filter liquid. That's what filters are for.

Since I heard this quote from Stanley Kubrick for the first time a few weeks ago, I couldn’t let go of it. It encapsulates a moment in design that makes me feel like a hack every time it happens.

I’m a stern believer that software design is a craft, not an art. There are artsy aspects to it, but for most of the time, rules can and should be followed. They’re flexible and complex, but not inexistent.

Another belief of mine is that designers have to be able to argue for their solutions. A working designer’s inner monologue should be the Socratic method that is being applied to every design decision, no matter how small.

Sometimes, truly not often, there are moments where this isn’t enough. You know what the correct solution would be, the one with the most arguments, the one that fits the rules, but it just doesn’t feel right.

There’s no way to explain this to those who don’t feel it. They just have to trust your instincts. Sometimes, designing something the wrong way creates the right solution.

The Theory

It took me a while to understand this but when I found a SwiftUI comparison it clicked for me. I'm not sure if this will help anybody else, but I'll document this to solidify this knowledge for myself.

• Nothing about this is magic. It's a list of bunch of <a> elements containing an icon and the label.
• The only special thing is an additional div in every <a> that is only rendered on hover.
• What stumped me at first: This is not one single element being moved from link to link. Every single <a> tag has its own light gray background div.

Here it is, without all the surrounding React and TypeScript nonsense:

<a
  {...props}
  className="group relative py-1 px-2 flex flex-row text-slate-500 transition-colors hover:text-slate-800 items-center gap-2 underline decoration-slate-200 underline-offset-4"
  onMouseOver={() => setHover(true)}
  onMouseOut={() => setHover(false)}
>
  <AnimatePresence>
    {hover && (
      <motion.div
        layoutId="homing-hover"
        initial={{ opacity: 0 }}
        animate={{ opacity: 1 }}
        exit={{ opacity: 0 }}
        className="absolute rounded-md inset-0 bg-slate-200 -z-10"
        transition={{
          type: "spring",
          stiffness: 200,
          damping: 20,
        }}
      />
    )}
  </AnimatePresence>
  {IconComponent && (
    <IconComponent className="text-slate-400 group-hover:text-slate-600 transition-all group-hover:scale-125" />
  )}
  {children}
</a>

As you can see, onMouseOver sets the hover state to true, onMouseOut to false. With that hover knows when this element has a cursor on top of it. Great.

<AnimatePresence> is Framer Motions solution to conditionally rendered elements being removed from the React tree. Meaning: Since we're using hover as binary indicator for if the background div should be rendered or not, it would plop in and out of existence. If we would not be using AnimatePresence, the disappearance of the div when the mouse leaves the area of the <a> would lead to it not being animated. Or in short: What isn't there can't be pretty.

Said div is not a normal div anymore. We're transforming it into a motion.div and with that it's ready to accept all sorts of Framer Motion properties. The most important one in this case: layoutId="homing-hover". We give it a Layout ID. Framer Motion uses this ID to understand where technically different elements are supposed to function as the same element in terms of transitions.

Everything else is standard Framer Motion, Tailwind and React stuff we don't care about for now.

Here's the whole component:

import { AnimatePresence, LayoutGroup, motion } from "framer-motion";
import { IconType } from "react-icons";
import {
  AnchorHTMLAttributes,
  PropsWithChildren,
  ReactNode,
  useState,
} from "react";

type Props = AnchorHTMLAttributes<HTMLAnchorElement> & {
  children: ReactNode;
  icon: IconType;
};

export const HomingHoverLink = ({
  children,
  icon: IconComponent,
  ...props
}: Props) => {
  const [hover, setHover] = useState(false);
  return (
    <a
      {...props}
      className="group relative py-1 px-2 flex flex-row text-slate-500 transition-colors hover:text-slate-800 items-center gap-2 underline decoration-slate-200 underline-offset-4"
      onMouseOver={() => setHover(true)}
      onMouseOut={() => setHover(false)}
    >
      <AnimatePresence>
        {hover && (
          <motion.div
            layoutId="homing-hover"
            initial={{ opacity: 0 }}
            animate={{ opacity: 1 }}
            exit={{ opacity: 0 }}
            className="absolute rounded-md inset-0 bg-slate-200 -z-10"
            transition={{
              type: "spring",
              stiffness: 200,
              damping: 20,
            }}
          />
        )}
      </AnimatePresence>
      {IconComponent && (
        <IconComponent className="text-slate-400 group-hover:text-slate-600 transition-all group-hover:scale-125" />
      )}
      {children}
    </a>
  );
};

export const HomingHoverGroup = (props: PropsWithChildren) => (
  <LayoutGroup>{props.children}</LayoutGroup>
);

The eagle-eyed reader discovered something at the end there. A whole other component!

export const HomingHoverGroup = (props: PropsWithChildren) => (
  <LayoutGroup>{props.children}</LayoutGroup>
);

This is very important for all of this to work. Without <LayoutGroup> we'd only have a sad little gray box, showing up and hiding again, without animating from one link to the next.

LayoutGroup is the container that does all the work to ensure that all elements with the same layoutId are being animated as if they're the same object. With each a having the same layoutId, Framer Motion understands that these are supposed to perform shared layout animations.

This component is used to group all the links into one of those LayoutGroups. Technically it doesn't require a whole new component to achieve this but this cleans this up nicely.

An unhelpful comparison to SwiftUI

For those of you that are well versed in SwiftUI, this is logically the same as defining a Namespace and using .matchedGeometryEffect() in SwiftUI. It took me quite a while to understand this, because it felt counter-intuitive to have two different elements in two different places that somehow magically animate as if they're the same but that's how it works. And I guess it makes sense, somehow. You kind of define the start and the end and some animation magic creates a transition between those two states.

Slapping it all together

This is nothing special, but for sake of completeness, here's the component that actually uses these components. The only thing worth noticing is that HomingHoverGroup obviously has to group all the instances of HomingHoverLink.

import { HomingHoverGroup, HomingHoverLink } from "./HomingHoverLink";
import {
  PiAddressBookBold,
  PiHouseBold,
  PiNotepadBold,
  PiCameraBold,
} from "react-icons/pi";

export default function Navigation() {
  return (
    <main className="h-screen flex items-center justify-center">
      <nav className="p-20 flex flex-col items-start gap-2">
        <HomingHoverGroup>
          <HomingHoverLink href="/?foo" icon={PiHouseBold}>
            Home
          </HomingHoverLink>
          <HomingHoverLink href="/?foo" icon={PiNotepadBold}>
            Posts
          </HomingHoverLink>
          <HomingHoverLink href="/?foo" icon={PiCameraBold}>
            Photography
          </HomingHoverLink>
          <HomingHoverLink href="/?foo" icon={PiAddressBookBold}>
            About
          </HomingHoverLink>
        </HomingHoverGroup>
      </nav>
    </main>
  );
}

I bet there are quite a few things I don't understand about the intricacies of this but who cares. For now I got the little rectangle to move from A to B and it looks nice.

It already began many, many years ago: Moving rectangles on a canvas started to feel like a crutch. Most of the time I already know what needs to happen and what lies between me and having done a good job is pushing stuff around in Figma until what I think should be visible is actually visible. It feels like a chore.

Even though my day job isn't a Swift/SwiftUI based project, I've started creating prototypes with SwiftUI just to scratch my itch to do something "real". The code is as throwaway as it can get but it feels better — and somehow more productive — to create an empty data state based on if an array is empty or not than to duplicate a frame, call it "FeatureName / Empty Data State" and consider my job done.

Enter: The Design Engineer

"Design Engineer" is not a new term. I've known about the concept for years but somehow only considered becoming one after reading Jim Nielsen's piece on Design Engineers the other day:

The problem of innumerable artifacts helps show why design engineers are worth their weight in gold. They can bridge the chasm of design to browser engineering, skipping the need for 60+ artifacts. How? They have an understanding of the constraints of the medium, so from sketches to wireframe to high fidelity mocks, they only have to produce one or two artifacts while simultaneously keeping a picture in their head of how the elements of those designs flex and flow and change across different sizes. They can imagine how it works, so they don’t have to articulate it for every iteration. There’s no need to explicitly design and document all possible states for whoever is downstream of the designs because they are the ones downstream of the designs.

That could be me! Most of it is me already, I only lack some of the skills (and currently also the environment) to produce code on a reliable basis.

In Jim's second post he shares an example of what a Design Engineer could bring to the table and I adore everything about this. This is the stuff I love spending hours and hours on to get right. For most of my career I was dependent on a developer who put up with me and my dEsIgN-eXcElLeNcY shenanigans. It's hard to find frontend devs with an appreciation for this kind of work and even if you find them, there's still an obvious translation layer that can be a barrier between vision and result.

Transforming Marcelf Transforming myself

So, what's next? Do I want to become a Design Engineer? Imposter Syndrome and fear of failure tell me that it's a safe bet to just stay in my lane, create my little PNG files and be happy with what I've got.

However, I doubt that this will be good enough for me in the medium term. I very much enjoy fiddling with code to get something working in a user-friendly and good looking way. I even believe that the future of computing requires designers to code. So there's really no choice, if I'm honest with Marcelf myself.

I'm on a good trajectory with Swift and SwiftUI. It's the iOS/iPad OS/VisionOS framework of the future and Apple's ecosystem is the playground of my choice.

My HTML and CSS skills aren't embarrassing but especially the latter has quite a few depths I haven't charted yet. I built one or two things in React and played around with Framer Motion. Both are fun.

I feel like this could be a solid foundation for a toolkit that helps me to morph from "just" being a designer who codes to becoming a design engineer. It's time I get the reps in, especially in terms of all things web development. I want to become very good at using Framer Motion.

All of this is of course only relevant if I can't come up with a solid project that catapults me into the indie dev league. At the same time becoming a design engineer is the best way of honing my coding skills to become an indie dev.

That's what I like to call a win-win situation.

The word and definition of "app" do the heavy lifting in that sentence.

The Quest has a plethora of amazing experiences. It's the best platform for diving into literal virtual reality and shared (mostly gaming) experiences. While these are technically applications, they're not what people commonly think about as apps.

Spatial Computing

If you go ahead and browse through Meta's Quest Store, you'll find everything from drawing in the space around you, to virtual meeting spaces, to ways to learn piano and even a handful of solutions for those who want to work out while wearing their headset, for whatever reason. What you won't find are Slack, Discord, any kind of note-taking app, a way to write down tasks, or anything else you'd expect from your computer.

That's where Spatial Computing comes into play. The term is more than Apple slapping their branding magic onto something that was already available. Spatial Computing is computing. You, using a computer, in the space around you.

Let's consider the Xbox. Yes, tEcHniCalLy the Xbox is a computer but only pedants would call it that. It's a console and does a great job at being one. Sure, you can open a web browser on it but there's really no reason to do so on a regular basis. The Quest is more like a console than a computer.

A shared design language

As far as I know, there's not even a UI framework for Quest development. Most of it happens in Unity, which is notoriously bad when it comes to creating 2D interfaces. There are a handful of other solutions to get something running on Quest but there's no chance of Quest apps actually getting to a point where the system as a whole has a unified design language.

Which is fine for games/experiences, there's no unified design language between Fortnite and Assassin's Creed either. It doesn't matter, because they're unique experiences.

This is not fine for an operating system of a computing platform.

It might feel like a small and obvious thing that Apple allows iPad apps to run on Vision Pro but it isn't. On day one of Vision Pro, there were more apps to manage your calendar than after years and years of Quest's existence. Which makes sense, since one of them is a game console and the other is a computer. One of them more or less requires you to start your development in a game engine, the other allows you to create a good-looking, albeit basic todo app with 30 lines of code.

Can Meta massage Quest into becoming an app platform?

I guess?!

It would be a long way to get there and you'll arrive at the same "quality" of apps Android can try to boast about but it's possible in theory. Can Vision Pro be used for VR experiences? Sure. It's already possible, with the only caveat being that there are no available controllers at the moment.

Quest and Vision Pro only share one similarity: People strap displays to their heads to interact with software. Everything else is fundamentally different. It can be compared but there's not really a good reason to do so.

I'm befriending crows now.

Nothing can stop me.

It's legal, it's possible, it's necessary.

This is not my first foray into bird friendship territory. After reading The Bird Way, a fantastic book by the way, I started greeting crows. Jennifer Ackerman's half-joking conclusion was that there's a non-zero chance that crows will rule the world one day, and I want to be on their good side, in case this happens faster than expected. Even if they keep their talons still and don't overthrow us, they also can remember human faces for years and are not shy to declare certain people their enemies and even tell their friends about them.

Anyway! In hopes of being recognized as a good source of snacks, I started throwing peanuts in the general direction of crows.

There are so many people with crow friends sharing their corvid adventures online, why shouldn't I be one of them?

I'm not lonely, you're lonely! Expect my pivotal role in some Home Alone remake in the future.

By the way: For more about a world ruled by corvids, I suggest Children of Memory. However, it's best to start with the first two books of the trilogy.

The app, called Zettel, reached an interesting stage I felt was worth sharing. It looks great, it is more or less feature complete and it works, I've used it for all of my recent grocery shopping trips.

There's only one catch: It doesn't feel right. Stanley Kubrick said "The truth of a thing is in the feel of it, not in the think of it." and this is one of those moments. Something about the gestures, the giant tap targets and how adding items works is not right. The vibe is off.

I still have a couple of ideas that will most likely result in a complete redesign of the whole app. Before that happens, I wanted to share the current state for archival purposes.

The onboarding

After quite a few iterations (as in: two) I came up with the idea to explain the product and the possible interactions not by slapping on a couple of screens nobody reads anyway but by adding actual products to people's shopping list. I'm using the descriptions to explain possible interactions and to indirectly explain that descriptions are a feature, even though it's not very in your face.

This has a couple of obvious downsides. The most glaring one is that I'm putting items on somebody's shopping list they probably don't want to buy. Not everybody shares my obsession with yoghurt. Except Terry.

Checking off items

This is one of the things I'm a bit proud of in this iteration. Checking off items feels great even though it looks a bit laggy in the simulator. Notice how it waits for the animation to finish until the item moves into the bottom list.

No app worth its salt doesn't have a confetti effect somewhere, so of course Zettel celebrates you finishing your shopping accordingly.

Adding items

This is one of my main issues with this iteration. Initially I thought going through a sorted list of items you buy often is a better experience than typing in the item's name every time. Turns out: I don't use this. Like... at all. I still type. It looks great though!

Typing works as well. If you tap the plus button you can enter some text that filters the list of existing products (and makes it visible if it was previously hidden) or lets you add a completely new product.

This looks amazing, doesn't it? Unfortunately it feels kind of weird, though. A part of that is that SwiftUI's TextField is very slow to become active and it takes up to a second before it shows up for the first time. Another part is—and this is just a guess for now—that this might be over-animated. It looks good but feels "blurry" for a lack of a better word. It feels like throwing jello on pudding. And that's my opinion as a professional product designer.

Removing products you didn't actually buy

One of my primary ideas was to store each purchase to be able to over time accurately predict when you might need yoghurt again. Which is a bad example because of course you buy yoghurt every time you go to the store. This brought me down a dark path of failure and problematic decisions.

The biggest problem: You can't check off items you don't want to buy anymore but didn't actually buy right now or else an inaccurate "purchase" would be stored all calculations would be completely wrong.

So I added an interaction (left swipe on item) to remove products from the list without marking them as bought and an interface to see and edit recent purchases. This is so obviously overengineered that it's not even funny. None of this should be something people have to think about. Disgusting! I'm ashamed of myself.

Again: All of this looks like it would get quite a few likes on X and Dribbble. Unfortunately it's a broken paradigm and needs to be improved.

So, what's next?

I'm not sure yet! I have a few ideas I want to play around with but there's a good chance that I won't be able to create an experience that significantly improves the already available products.

Which is fine, I'm not doing this to become the next big thing in grocery shopping land but to not stop coding.

Be that as it may, and at the risk of becoming one of those people, I spent the last couple of days building everything from scratch using Kirby and I couldn't be happier. It provides me with the wished for flexibility while at the same time offering quite a few easy affordances that I didn't even know I was missing.

I'm writing these words in my new admin panel, for example. It't not just some run-of-the-mill panel, no, it's very easy to build your own little dashboards and custom views.

But that's not everything. One reason for me to switch away from Wordpress was to use a codebase I can actually wrap my head around. Kirby uses PHP, which was new to me, but after a few "Hey ChatGPT, what does this do in PHP?" sessions, I was able to wrap my head around it. All of this is important to me, because I want this to become more of a digital garden than "just" a blog.

The library is one aspect of it. It should not only be its own thing, somewhere off to the side, I want my books to be interwoven with my thoughts. Let's say I once again start talking about stoicism and want to point you to my favorite book on the topic, here it is:

Block error: "Undefined variable $site" in block type: "book"

If you're reading this in a browser, you see a custom made element just for books from my library. If you're reading this in your RSS reader, you see a link to the book. Perfection. Here, have a couple more:

Block error: "Undefined variable $site" in block type: "book"

Block error: "Undefined variable $site" in block type: "book"

But that's not all! I also build a custom element for callouts with the ability to select any emoji my heart desires. I don't know when I'll need this but it's good to have and was a perfect practice for learning how to create blocks in Kirby.

Neat, right?

You're also now able to click on tags to see all posts about that topic. That's not very relevant for now, since the number of posts is still relatively modest, but we'll get there.

For now, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed (it contains all posts and books!) in a reader of your choice and make sure to drop by the actual site from time to time, because it's what we Germans call an Augenschmaus.

It took me a while to recognize the feeling, and I experienced quite the epiphany when I was finally able to label what was ruining my mood. I believe this was my first instance of practicing introspection.

It was also the first time I decided I didn’t want to feel a certain way and began to work on changing my perception of the situation. I wanted to be happy for my friend.

This experience was significant and continues to resonate throughout my life. I consider self-efficacy one of the most important skills a person can have. Writing about my first Mac brought these memories back, and I hope Kjell never noticed my feelings at the time. Though I doubt it, as I also wasn’t very good at being nice back then. That, however, is a topic for another time.

Mine was a Mac Mini G4. I didn’t even realize that I actually had started using Macs before the Intel transition happened until I read the Wikipedia article about it just now. The hardware specifics didn’t interest me back then. Fifteen-year-old me wanted to become a designer and knew that all the designers he looked up to used Macs, so there was really no choice.

My previous computer was a very old and very slow PC that didn’t even run the games all my friends were playing together online. Let’s not even talk about the performance of my pirated copy of Photoshop CS2.

Unboxing and placing the Mac Mini on top of my weird glass corner desk felt like receiving a ticket into a whole new world. I finally could do the things I saw designers do online. OS X felt like it was a gift from the gods. Everything was pretty, worked well, and instilled in me an appreciation for excellence that I hadn’t felt before and that is still going strong.

Looking back, that Mac Mini G4 wasn’t just a piece of tech; it was the starting point of my design journey. It turned my aspirations into real projects and set the standard for what I expect from technology. As the Mac celebrates its 40th, I realize it’s not just about the machine but about the doors it opened for me. It’s funny how a small box can play such a big part in your story.

After forcing myself to work on it for a couple more weeks, while only making incremental improvements, I couldn’t pretend anymore and took a few days off. Then it finally hit me:

It’s yet another app people don’t want to use.

They think they want to use it. They know they should use it. But in the end, it’s one of those “I guess I should try to incorporate this habit into my life” apps. Just like my others:

• Henlo: “I guess I should start reaching out to friends more.”
• Stoins: “I guess I should walk more.”
• Peat: “I guess I should work on my habits more.”

I might be a bit biased, but all of those are great apps. They actually help people achieve their goals.

It’s just that I don’t have it in me to create another app like that right now.

Improving your social life, health, and habits takes weeks of work before you notice a difference. I’d like to work on something that provides value as soon as you download the app.

I decided that my next app will provide value in seconds. I put the gratitude journal app on ice and started working on a little app that solves one of the annoyances in my life.

Yay for not succumbing to the sunk cost fallacy.

Attentive readers know that I’ve been talking about how VR and AR are going to be the future of interfaces for years. One of the main reasons for me finally getting into coding was knowing that I had to be able to manipulate real interfaces directly, especially when interface design is entering the third dimension.

Apple’s Vision Pro announcement came quite a few years after I first pronounced XR to be the future of computing. I immediately put the required money into a budget meant for Vision Pro as soon as it would become available. It was my goal to be there, on day one, playing around with the hardware, writing software, and experiencing the new frontier of interface design firsthand.

Well, that didn’t quite work out. I somehow didn’t expect Apple to only sell it in the US at first. That, combined with the fact that you need to go to an Apple Store to have your face and eyes measured for the device to be properly set up, creates a logistical hurdle that I’m not willing to jump over. I won’t fly to the US just to buy a device.

So, this is me, frustrated that I have to sit on the sidelines, watching other people discover a device I’ve been waiting for for years. This is obviously irrational because I’m not actually losing anything, except perhaps for a head start in spatial computing experience but still… it hurts a little.

At least it’s a good exercise in patience.

If I were someone who defined a Cortex style yearly theme, my theme for 2024 would be “The Year of Friendship”. Numerous studies, scientists, and - I guess - life coaches agree: Your relationships shape your life. Having a robust social life is key to happiness. The book The Good Life discusses this at length. It’s about the Grant Study that has been running for literally generations and conclusively shows that people consider their life to have been a good one when they had strong relationships.

My condolences to myself, as I don’t have a choice and somehow have to make new friends.

This shouldn’t be hard. Statistically, nearly half of the German people my age feel lonely. I just have to find those who are eager to change something about their situation.

Unfortunately, I’m not somebody who signs up for soccer practice or some kind of choir. I actually can’t come up with any group activity I’d like to do, except for joining a book club, but there doesn’t seem to be one in Schwerin. I’d start one, but… yes, I don’t know people yet. Apps like Bumble BFF are a no-go as well, I’m afraid. Nobody seems to use them here. Working remotely also removes the possibility of befriending colleagues.

Which leaves me with a couple of not very good ideas for now:

• Joining a gym. I’d do this anyway, and it’s not the most social thing ever, but it’s something where I might meet people? Maybe?
• Getting into running. That’s on my bucket list for this year as well, and - again - not a very social activity, but as soon as I become something of a runner, I can join some kind of running group…? That’s something people do, right?
• Bouldering? I guess? I did this once and it ended up with me having to ram thrombosis injections into my then-girlfriend’s leg every day for six weeks. The half hour of trying to get up a fake-mountain was kind of fun, though. But do people make friends while hanging off an indoor cliff?
• Start working in coworking spaces and cafes. This one has potential. The only problem is that I actually like to work when I’m working, and I tend to be focused and not very talkative when trying to get stuff done. I would need to not do that and instead try to talk to people. “Hello, fellow human, what are your thoughts about caffeinated beverages?” This will be great.

Why is this list so sports-heavy? Something like competitive knitting or hackathons would be much more in my wheelhouse. Unfortunately both aren’t available.

I’m optimistic that something will work, even though I haven’t found the perfect solution yet. This post isn’t supposed to sound self-pitying. It’s just the text I can link to when I tell you about all the friends I made in my review of 2024. There will be check-ins along the way. Looking at this like a project makes it easier for me to actually try new things and see what works.

If you have other ideas, or by some kind of freak accident, know somebody who lives in Schwerin and needs somebody to hang out with, let me know.

This is the first time in forever that I’m blogging on something other than WordPress. There’s no backend, no theming, no plugins, and for the first time, I actually understand how to add whatever I want.

It feels great.

There’s a slight chance that I’ll grow tired of using a static site generator as my blog framework, sure. But in the context of my ongoing effort to get better at coding, I feel like gifting myself this playground, with all its possibilities, might make the few downsides worth it.

Look at this cool library of all the books I’ve read in 2023! I wouldn’t even know where to start with something like that in Wordpress.

Not exactly the greatest start.

I noticed my mental health starting to slip. Over the years, I had developed several daily rituals that amounted to what I’d call a healthy and happy life. But being too weak to walk for more than a minute for about one and a half weeks, I couldn’t keep up with any of them.

Now, two and a half weeks later, I’m mostly back to my old self. Feeling strong, hitting 10,000 steps daily, and pushing myself to do something productive for at least an hour each day. I’m not just over the flu—I feel like myself again.

Then Gigabyte got sick. She couldn’t open her eye fully. At first, I thought it might just be a passing thing, but it got worse the next day. So there I was, new city, no trusted vet, and no idea how to navigate around here.

Turns out, this was a hidden blessing. I had to tackle this issue head-on, learned that calling a taxi the traditional way still works—kind of a throwback experience. I found a great new vet I’m really happy with, and Giga’s eye is almost back to normal. It’s just conjunctivitis, nothing that a few eye drops (3 times a day, five days in a row. She’s not amused) can’t fix.

The upside of all this was it made me feel like I’d really settled in. My apartment’s turned into a cozy space, and I’ve been making use of what’s available in my new neighborhood. It’s working out well. This gave me a sense of progress, like I’m moving in the right direction.

Growing pains!

For me, it’s gardening. Digital gardening. Because I needed to code something and my current app project (more on that later) needed a bit of time to breathe, I started playing around with a couple of web frameworks. The previous iteration of this site used good old WordPress, but I never felt like I was able to sculpt it to my liking, even after more than 15 years of using it.

These lines are now powered by Astro. My current goal is to use this not only as a blog but as a playground for whatever comes to mind. A flexible canvas for all things I’m interested in. Something I’m able to craft into whatever I need it to be. I never got there using WordPress, so this can be considered a freedom strike.

Perfectionism

Embrace the truth that wanting to ship something perfect is the same as not shipping anything. You’ll never(!) get to a point where everything is to your absolute liking. It’s impossible. It has nothing to do with how skilled you are either. You can be the very best designer and programmer ever, entropy doesn’t allow perfection. On the contrary: Entropy is perfection. Embrace the fact that “good enough” is a moving goalpost. It means that you don’t have to try to be perfect. How soothing is that!?

Imposter syndrome

You’ll never be as good as you think you should be. I feel like human existence is a binary state. Either you’re overconfident or suffer from imposter syndrome. Both are problematic but the latter is easier to manage, in my opinion. Acknowledge the fact that your being capable of shipping something in theory is good enough to do it in practice. Worst case: Nobody will care about your project. The good news: That’s already what’s happening. There’s no chance anyone will ever truly care about your unreleased project and pre-release hype is not real.

Maximalism

Ideas are cheap. You don’t want to be one of those people that are stuck in “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” land and never get around to actually confronting their ideas with reality. Or reality with their ideas. The common pitfall is to think that you only have to cram enough ideas (read: features) into your product for it to be the very best out there. The opposite is the case: You need to get rid of all the features that don’t reflect the essence of what you’re trying to do. There’s a reason why basically everything ever written by people who ship reiterates this point over and over: it’s true. Confronting your ideas with reality can’t happen fast enough.

The right goals

This might be the most important point: The product isn’t the destination. Shipping is. If you think that your current idea is the be-all and end-all, you’ll most likely make the aforementioned mistakes over and over again. Good ideas, loosely held. Shipping must be the motivation because only shipping creates the positive mental feedback-loop that is required to keep shipping. If you’re somebody who shipped something once, you can do it a second time and the third time is even easier. That’s the process. You build, you ship, you keep building. A project fails? You don’t care because you’re in it for the process of shipping and iterating.

The status quo is the worst case. Ship yourself out of the status quo, everything else will follow automatically.

I spent the last decade not wanting to believe the people who praised designers who code, but I‘m convinced now.

It‘s been about a year since I worked through 100 Days of SwiftUI. I built four iOS apps and about 4-5 web projects using React since then. I‘m obviously still a coding-baby but it‘s already very clear to me that being able to code made me a better designer.

AR interfaces are going to take this up a notch.

Three years ago, when I had an epiphany and realized that AR/VR interfaces are going to be the future of computing, I wondered how current design software would ever be able to allow me to do a good job designing AR interfaces.

I came to the conclusion that it wouldn‘t. It couldn’t.

If I would wait until the Figma of AR/VR interface design shows up, I‘d be behind the curve of what‘s going to be considered modern interfaces in the blink of an eye.

Fast forward to earlier this week, three years later.

I‘m downloading the visionOS SDK, after watching a couple of WWDC23 sessions about spatial computing and how to use SwiftUI and ARKit to create AR experiences for what has a good chance of becoming the AR platform of the future.

I was right.

You can‘t design AR experiences in Figma. Floaty 2D windows are only the baseline of what’ll be expected. The bare minimum.

True modern experiences will switch fluently between 2D windows and immersive experiences.

Designers need to be ready for it.

I spent the week playing around with visionOS, trying out interactions, building small apps and getting a literal grip on how to interact with 3D models in AR space and I‘m convinced that I‘d be utterly lost hadn‘t I spent the last couple of years working on what will be (is?) the required skillset for AR interface designers.

Designers need to understand 3D modeling, meshes, materials, textures, shaders, faces, vertices and edges. I knew nothing about any of this three years ago and it was already required knowledge in this very first week of AR interface experimentation.

Designers need to be able to code. 3D drag gestures, interactive 3D models, a blend of immersive experiences and 2D windows in real life environments can‘t be properly reproduced in some AR-Figma of the future. AR design is the climax of self-efficacy in interface design.

Designers need to adapt to be able to provide experiences that are as personal as spatial computing is going to be. They can’t be several degrees removed from what users are going to interact with anymore.

Being a designer who codes makes you a better designer in 2023.

Being a designer who doesn‘t code might make you a bad designer in 2024 and beyond.

In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual’s belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. A strong sense of self-efficacy promotes human accomplishment and personal well-being. A person with high self-efficacy views challenges as things that are supposed to be mastered rather than threats to avoid.

I believe that you can choose to be self-efficacious and things you do can make you feel self-efficacious. Most people fail to recognize when these moments occur, and even fewer make a conscious effort to intentionally create such moments for themselves.

Changing the physical world does this to humans. That’s one of the reasons so many people daydream about gardening and why pottery feels a bit like therapy. You create something that wasn’t there before. You moved something and it stayed in place. You’ve literally made a teeny-tiny dent in the universe.

You won’t be able to describe to a person who never experienced anything like it, how gardening makes you feel. Starting with nothing, spending hours of work, accepting failures and imperfections to then see a result of something you made, tickles the core of what we are. Sure, you can explain all the steps of the process and tell them you felt “good” doing so but there’s no way to describe the intensity of that feeling.

Turning a rotary dial to call someone, pressing buttons to control a SNES video game character and swiping and tapping on glass to send an email did this to us with ever increasing amounts of directness. Every evolution of digital technology helped us feel more self-efficacy.

For better or worse.

I think AR interfaces are the inevitable next step in computing because they make us feel more self-efficacious. You won’t be able to properly describe how moving digital windows in the physical space of real life made you feel. It’s counter-intuitive to even think that the way you interact with the window your bursting inbox makes a difference, yet it does.

Spatial computing can’t be described. It must be felt to be understood.

I’m not one of those people waiting for motivation to magically hit me. I know that it’s something you create by actually sitting down and doing the work. Nevertheless, something about the course constantly trying to trick me into working on something it hasn’t taught me before, made me just watch the solution videos before actually trying to solve the problems. I knew that I could not possibly know the “right” solution, so I stopped trying. That resulted in me finishing the course without applying most of the things it covered.

100 Days of SwiftUI‘s approach worked far better for me. It covered a couple of concepts, then gave me a challenge and told me that I already know everything needed to solve it properly. I knew that it’s completely my fault if I don’t manage to come up with a solution and I also knew that I only had to re-watch the previous lessons to stumble upon the answer at some point. That’s motivating! Telling me that I’m theoretically able to solve the challenges gave me enough confidence to sit down and try until something worked.

So here’s how I got over my disgruntled and unmotivated “Web dev sucks” state:

I forced myself to build something.

At first my goal was to set up a project. Hard enough with all the tooling involved. That worked more or less smoothly. Then I started playing around with a button that puts something into an array, which led to an input element that allows to customize what to put in there and so on and so forth. I didn’t plan on building a shitty to-do list app but it happened because motivation came as soon as I started experimenting.

I wandered from “Oh, I wonder if I could…” to “What if I try to…” and grew increasingly more excited. Our brains are hilariously easy to manipulate. Create a few achievable moments of success and you can string yourself along until something exists that previously didn’t.

Nobody is in need of a to-do app called “Your Plate” but it exists now. I’m a bit proud of that.

So, here’s what I did:

• Set up Visual Studio Code in a way that’s acceptable.
• Learned how to deploy something through Vercel and the Terminal. This was a huge “Wow, this is so easy and cool” moment for me.
• Played around with objects and destructuring.
• Added a few libraries for random stuff like playing sounds (and added a setting to turn sound off!), throwing confetti and animating the list.
• Figured out what TailwindCSS is and how to use it. Another “Oh wow” moment.
• Added local storage capabilities.
• None of this was very hard, I built far more complicated things in Swift and SwiftUI already. It’s something though and it managed to drag me out of my “Ugh, where to start?” rut.

Next up: Upgrading to Typescript. I want types. Type me up, baby.

Before we get started: These are my current thoughts on getting into web development as somebody who has only a basic understanding of HTML and CSS. These thoughts will be different in a year from now. Cool your jets and consider this as something like a user test for the question of “How accessible is becoming a web developer?”.

Web development is a pain in the ass. You need to understand what a terminal is, what it’s used for and how to use it to even get to the point of asking yourself “What the fuck is NPM?”. Then NPM needs to be installed which feels like hacking the Matrix, since it does something somewhere but you won’t see anything but lines of text in your little terminal window into the soul of your computer that you’re afraid to touch because what if you sudo your SSD or something.

If you managed to install NPM, you have to… boot up your project by hacking even more Avada Kedavra shit into your cOmMaNd LiNe. Something happens and suddenly there’s a terminal you can’t use for anything else anymore because it’s doing… something and is busy forever. You end up with a browser tab directly plugged into whatever terminal magic is now showing you your empty project.

Great. It took only two and a half years to understand all of this and to get it to work. Fun!

Even if you managed to do all of this, you’ll end up in Visual Studio Code which only seems to work properly if you install a dozen plugins and hope for the best. I bet there’s some kind of user experience to be found in VS Code but it sure doesn’t stack up against anything I’ve grown accustomed to while using Xcode.

My whinging doesn’t stop there, no worries!

I’m not happy with JavaScript and React either. JavaScript feels weirdly incomplete after getting used to Swift, even though (or because?) it’s old as fuck. Even simple things like capitalizing a string is a non-trivial endeavour with something like three different solutions. I found those in Stack Overflow threads from 1932, by the way.

React does have similarities to SwiftUI and I see why people can grow to like it but it lacks the fun of SwiftUI. It feels clunky and verbose. JSX, CSS, a sheer endless amount of semicolons and angle brackets… it’s a little ugly? Granted, I don’t know anything and haven’t used it for half as long as I’ve spent with SwiftUI but still… there’s a lack of grace there that’s a liiittle bit repugnant.

So, where am I at right now?

I couldn’t wait to start my first project after finishing 100 Days of SwiftUI. Xcode was fun, the iOS simulator worked great and everything felt thought-through and like a paradise of possibilities. Finishing The Joy of React on the other hand left me with a feeling of dread and a weird taste in my mouth. Everything related to web development seems to be fragile, fiddly and like a late-game Jenga situation.

I’m not giving up though. This seems to be modern web development and since I want to be able to create web apps I’m going to stick with it. It’ll get better.

Anyway, here’s my little “You did it” achievement the course gave me. I’ll slap that on my LinkedIn profile now and consider myself a junior frontend web developer.

She answered: “Sure, but I won’t pet him!”.

We chatted for something like 30 minutes and I found out that she not only doesn’t want to pet this specific dog but dogs in general. She even enjoys looking after her daughter’s dog sometimes (who likes to sleep at the end of her bed when he’s visiting) and still won’t pet him.

I didn’t ask why. It didn’t really matter. She told me her rule and I understood that this is one of the foundational truths of her life. She doesn’t pet dogs.

There’s something intriguing about people who set boundaries that you can’t understand, but you can respect.

In the end, there was no poo. We found an interesting stick that had to be gnawed on for a long time, though.

Everything requires a disclaimer now.

So, you enjoyed watching Seinfeld? Did you know that one of the actors had a weird racist breakdown live on stage? Oh, you’re looking forward to what seems to be the best Harry Potter game ever? Please keep in mind that the original author of the books is transphobic! You’re enjoying the wrong thing! Please be entertained by products made by, with and based on less flawed people!

These things are wrong and absolutely worth criticising. No doubt.

However, I wonder if the dynamic of always watching out for the next bad thing, being on edge because everything has the possibility of being tainted, never being able to enjoy something for what it is, because it has to be dissected on a socioecological level, does something to us.

There must be a cost to always having to watch your back in case you’re enjoying something a little too much that others feel should not be enjoyed anymore. I don’t think that’s helpful for anyones mental health.

Not criticising wrong behaviour is obviously not the solution. Attacking ourselves and everyone else all the time, because things are made by people and people are inherently flawed, doesn’t seem like the way to a content life either.

I don’t know.

It’s complicated.

That’s obviously not good enough. An average of 4000 steps is not only embarrassing but also a far cry from the 10,000 steps you’re supposed to walk if you trust some company’s advertisements. Or science.

I tried walking 10,000 steps a day previously and found that it’s basically impossible to do if you don’t have a commute or two hours a day to walk through the city. Since I’ve been working from home for six years now and I didn’t plan on walking through Berlin Mitte two hours each day, I needed a better solution.

My friend Luise told me about her WalkingPad. A slow treadmill you can put under your standing desk to walk while working. A worthwhile investment, as you can see by my stats for 2022.

If you want to walk more in 2023, make sure to check out Stoins. It’s a step counter I designed and programmed that lets you repair your walking streak by collecting Stoins. It’s a whole thing.

Most people are drifting. Passively cruising along a path defined by others. Not even some specified “others” with a plan, playing us like puppeteers. “Others” as in an amalgam of randos with ill-conceived opinions and products.

It’s just so delightfully easy to ditch responsibility and with it many forms of constructive friction.

True intentionality is perhaps the quality I have come to value most in others. People who thoroughly think about the what, why and how of what they spend their severely limited lifetime with.

Embracing constructive friction, not accepting what feels right but isn’t, may be one of the most essential and attractive qualities of a person.

It certainly is the quality I try to live by.

My definition of success is of such small scale that the only way for me to fail is to stop working.

Here it is:

1. The project must launch
2. One person’s life must be improved
3. One Euro must be made

Because I believe in my ability to bring my projects to a point where these three aspects are true, my motivation stays strong and I know that success (defined by myself, not by external sources) is around the corner. Stoins launched, improved the lives of a couple of friends and made a couple of Euros. I consider this a huge success. For now. I’ll update my definition of success when the context changes.

Aiming too high creates brittle motivation.

If you work long enough in software you’ll meet people who think that success is the result of brute forcing through everything. Work needs to be fast, sleep needs to be less, overtime doesn’t exist because why would you want to do anything but work.

That’s not how life works. That might very well be how certain moments in life lead to a certain form of success, but t’s not a scalable solution to a successful and happy life.

Let’s take action. I’m a big believer in having just a maniacal sense of urgency. So if you can do it after this meeting, I would do it after this meeting. Just a maniacal sense of urgency. Like, if you want to get stuff done, maniacal sense of urgency. Just go “aah!” Hardcore!

Some people succeed by being loud and hectic.They shroud themselves in an aura of ever increasing urgency and hustle because – and that’s only my interpretation – they lack the skills to do deep work. They don’t understand that this different way of working even exists. If you seem like you’re busy and confident you must be doing something right.

The unfortunate truth is that people who do the actual work have to pick up the shards of those who rumbled and bumbled through life, breaking things on their way. This brand of workaholism is not cool anymore. It’s just another symptom of toxic alpha male energy nobody needs.

I’ve been blinded by people like this in my early years working. Now I understand that toxic hustle is nothing but a mating dance between somebody and their own ego. It’s not impressive or cool. It’s just clownish behaviour. Everybody is allowed to be a clown. As long as they don’t hurt others by being one.

The most recent episode of ATP has a segment on workaholism culture that’s worth listening to. They go a little more into depth on how a culture like this is detrimental to your health and even to the quality of your work.

Everything works, don’t get me wrong. It’s just not as good as I know it could be. I think a better understanding of concurrency could solve one of the problems. Perhaps a second problem would go away with more knowledge about threads. Oh and something, something state machines? I just don’t understand any of it enough to solve my app’s bugs.

Here’s the thing though: Motivation doesn’t come and go by some magical whim of fate. Motivation is something you create. I know that my motivation is heavily influenced by progress. I tried fixing these issues for so long without getting anywhere that I’m at a point where I need to accept that those are flaws I need to live with. It’s my second self-coded app ever, of course it has problems.

I’m sure my next project will teach me some of the things I need to learn to come back to Stoins and fix it. A cycle of learning through manufactured motivation and not giving in to perfectionism.

Since my urge to start blogging again came up, I ogled tiptop.software as the venue for what I want to write about. I’ve spent most of 2022 learning programming, designed, coded and released an app to the App Store and thought it would be great to write about this under the name Tiptop Software. I installed WordPress, build this theme, wrote the first post and even released it.

However I quickly discovered that writing about cats, games and the weather will undoubtedly be something I want to do (you can look forward to that) and it wouldn’t feel right to put more personal topics into a publication hosted by my “software company”. I also don’t want to limit the frequency of posts to make the blog feel valuable. This isn’t supposed to be one of those blogs where every article has to be a work of art. I want to be able to throw out a quick thought and even end a post in the middle of a senten