Week in Review 2023-02-27

Back to writing. Last week I was out on holidays, so the newsletter/writing was taking a break too. So this week is actually a two weeks in review 😉.

The past two weeks were quite fun. On the personal side I went to ski in Andorra, it was 16 years since the last time I have skied, fortunately, as with riding a bike, it all came back after a couple of runs. On the other hand, it was great to be back in a mountain, and feel the size of nature in between the mountains peaks. Living in The Netherlands I do miss mountains.

As with the rest of Europe, this winter hasn’t come with too much snow. It wasn’t that bad as in other places in Europe, but it was quite noticeable that it hasn’t snowed in some time, with some slopes already showing grass and dirt, and some other slopes closed. The big issue with the lack of snow is not about skiing, it is about climate change and the ripple effect. No snow, means no water running down the mountains in spring, that will impact drought on farming, drinking water supplies and energy generation. It was a good reminder to keep working on climate tech.

For my inner urbanite, the trip was also a good opportunity to get to know Andorra, a micro state (sixth-smallest in Europe), with multiple towns connected by a main road, and linked through a public transport running all the country. The public transportation can use some improvement, specially on the information side. One of the key aspects to encourage people to use public transport is to make it accesible and convenient, in this case it wasn’t. There is a lack of information online, and on the bus stops, that makes it a little bit unpredictable. Although the buses are supposed to run every 30 minutes, the real frequency was more a random number between 20 to 50 minutes.

Back to work. After the break, I came back to keep working on the Django based web app. Last week was mostly to get some nitty gritty stuff done, making sure that specific urls behave in certain way, and a little bit of JavaScript. Last week was my last week back at 5 days per week, I’m getting back to work 4 days per week. I’ll make sure to write a reflection on working 4-days weeks.

As all the weeks, here are some interesting links and content I found around. Hope you enjoy:

Mastodon

• It’s amazing how business want to run on data, but when presented with the successfulness of a 4-day work week, that’s not the data they want
• New version of Textual
• ChatGPT recommend us for a service we don’t provide // Another take on how AI is not really there yet.
• Open Street Map based airport maps
• til i there is an option in macOS finder called … Stationary Pad (?!?!???) — hit Cmd-I on a file, check it, and it will turn the file into a template; if you double-click it, a copy will be made and opened instead of the original file itself
• Mastodon as a network instead of a feed

Twitter

• Europe’s sleeper trains mapped
• Web interface guidelines
• Technical Program Manager role

Web

• Study: Mexican jumping beans use random walk strategy to find shade // As a kid I got to play with this jumping beans. Reading this was a trip on memory lane, and an interesting read on how the jumping beans optimize to find shadow.

Youtube

• High speed X-ray video: jumping beans, wind-up toys and more! // In the topic of jumping beans 😉