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Casual
→ Tuesday January 9, 2024📓 After a week of temperatures closer to -20C, walking the dogs at -5C feels like spring is coming. 😅 Snapshot from the wintery city landscape in Helsinki from last weekend. 📷 Alt text courtesy of Bing chat 🤷🏻♂️
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Management
→ Sunday January 7, 2024💻 Flow Metrics for Scrum Teams (PDF)
The dirty little secret of MCS [Monte Carlo Simulation] is that we are assuming that the future we are modeling roughly looks like the past we have data for. The beauty of using professional Scrum is that in most contexts this is a safe assumption.
You call it a “dirty little secret”, I call it a major stink 🤷🏻♂️ Anyway, still keeping an open mind, this book is a very good resource if you find yourself in the midst of an agile transformation (especially one that puts emphasis on estimates). Like we all do every few years. Ha. ha. ha. 🥁
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Casual
→ Sunday January 7, 2024📓 Home-made chai latte, incense stick, headphones on - it’s going to be a particularly zen weekly review. 🧘♂️
- → Thursday December 28, 2023
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Technology
→ Thursday December 28, 2023💾 Micro.bloggers (Cc: @help), what is your workflow for testing Micro.blog theme changes with a test blog and a Github repo? I thought of playing with the test blog on a branch and using main for “production”. But I don’t think I can point the test blog to a repo branch via the Micro.blog UI 🤔
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Casual
,Management
2023: an assorted list of personal takeaways
→ Wednesday December 27, 2023📓 Reviewed my weekly takeaways in 2023. Unsurprizingly to me, the themes that emerged are wellbeing, work and career, and productivity. It is also clearly apparent how intertwined they all are. There is enough here to repeat and work on for many years ahead. Here goes.
🪴 Wellbeing
- Burnout symptoms - exhaustion, cynicism, ineffectiveness
- Hobbies and pursuing interests are effective recovery mechanisms
- Messy flat - messy mind
- Never too late in the day or week to write a journal entry
- Take care of yourself so you can take care of others
- At your limits, it is OK to say no and focus on recovery
- Poor short-term memory is a symptom of too much stress
- Ominous meetings and days are often better than anticipated
- Resilience is showing up every day
👨💻 Work and career
- Managing enthusiasm is essential to keeping things simple
- Career growth requires crossing the boundaries of your role description
- Challenging situations are an opportunity to build skill and improve the status quo
- No one is going to remember your work achievements in a year
- Know your “chase the fun” and “a place to call home” activities at work for effective recovery
- There is no place for guilt in have to take a sick leave
- Do not exhaust your “complaint budget”, i.e. pick your battles
- Trust the fundamentals especially when feeling overwhelmed
- The role of leadership is to maintain the necessary tensions and the constructive interaction stemming from them
🤹 Productivity
- Scrying your list is useful - “needs to be done today” or ”makes tomorrow easier”
- Even a single daily journal entry makes it easier to reflect during the weekly review
- Returning from vacation in the middle of the work week is a neat recovery trick
- Book time for focused work, delegate, work on unique leverage, be kind to yourself
- Preparation pays off, think and write, write and think
📚 Misc
- Making bread requires experimentation - try, learn, improve
- I think I have a harder skin then I actually do
- “Jos kukaan ei suutu, mikään ei muutu”
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Casual
→ Monday December 25, 2023📓 Iterating over my annual retrospective. Work seems to have a too big effect on how I feel about life. There is a lot to love about 2023, but it’s muted by work at each step. I am proud of how I’ve coped and grown. Still, I could appreciate the good things in life more and in full color. 🙇🏻
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Management
→ Friday December 22, 2023💻 It’s hard to get company’s year-end messages right this year. Especially when many people lost their jobs and colleagues to layoffs. My LinkedIn feed is a mixture of #opentowork posts and “profound” reflections of great achievements… coming from the same companies. It stings. While life goes on and we should celebrate another trip around the Sun, I think we can benefit from more humility.
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Gaming
→ Monday December 18, 2023🎮 I am on a trip for 10 days which means I left my PC behind. Figured I’d try GeForce Now on a Samsung TV. It’s running Alan Wake II better than my home setup. 😐 Sure, the underlying cloud rig is better than what I have, 4080 vs 4070, but the quality still leaves me stunned.
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Casual
→ Saturday December 16, 2023📓 One of the nine hells is perpetual flight travel with connecting flights 🛫 And most importantly - filled with people flying for the first time.
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Management
→ Wednesday December 13, 2023💻 Esko Kilpi: Why Should I Work with You
A creative organization thrives on the tension that arises from widely different but complementary abilities and views working with one another in enriching interaction.
I’ve been thinking about the concept of having a healthy tension between conflicting ideas. And remembered Esko Kilpi wrote about something very similar.
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Management
→ Tuesday December 12, 2023💻 RTO vs WFH: my default recommendations for remote vs colocated teams
Because this difference is contextual, any large organization that tries to impose a one-size-fits-all policy is going to fail. The only broad policy that can possibly succeed is one that is flexible based on the needs of the teams and the individuals on that team.
This is a thoughtful article. Made me think even if I have different opinions on some of the default recommendations. My bias is towards the remote-first camp. Yet it’s clear as day there isn’t one-size-fits-all correct solution.
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Gaming
→ Saturday December 2, 2023🎮 Finished Alan Wake II last night 🔦 This is not a game, it’s a work of art. Last month my partner had to do a photo assignment for uni and I got an Alan Wake inspired portrait 📷 on the side. I’ve been waiting to celebrate beating the game by publishing it on the blog. ❤️🖤
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Technology
→ Friday December 1, 2023💾 Groundbreaking - customers not buying kills companies.
“What this advertising boycott is going to do is it’s going to kill the company, and the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company and we will document it in great detail,” Musk said.
Source: Ars Technica
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Gaming
→ Monday November 27, 2023🎮 Bought Hogwarts Legacy on sale. Only after that read reviews and remembered the controversy around the game. On one side people (and media) boycotting it due to J. K. Rowling’s bigoted views, on the other - criticisms of the game being too woke. I’m left… just deeply sad thinking about it all. 😞
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→ Sunday November 19, 2023
💬 Discussed some of my feelings of anger at work with my mentor. Immediately felt at ease. She also told me an apt (Finnish?) saying for the situation. Keep the fire alive 🔥
“Jos kukaan ei suutu, mikään ei muutu.”
“If no one gets angry, nothing will change.”
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Technology
→ Sunday November 19, 2023💾 Sometimes I’d like to engage with online communities on specific topics. Discord feels too overwhelming and noisy (inherent to chat tools, I guess). Reddit, in theory, should be a sweet spot - but again so many distractions. Matrix, IRC, email - feel too clunky. 🤷🏻♂️ Digital introvert problems.
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Gaming
→ Sunday November 5, 2023🎮 BG3 patch notes read like Federal Bureau of Control documents. You wouldn’t like to know that ◼️happened to ◼️ as an unexpected spoiler. In other news progressing with Alan Wake II 🔦
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Casual
→ Sunday October 29, 2023📓 Changed back to standard time today. The oven clock is right again and it’s dark by 17.
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Gaming
→ Friday October 27, 2023🎮 Good morning, 2023-10-27! Alan Wake II downloading…
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Management
💻 2023 Groupthink in Tech
→ Tuesday October 10, 2023It may be early but somehow started thinking about 2023 in review already.
So a bit tongue-in-cheek 2023 technology executives’ groupthink list:
- Efficiency = Layoffs + ? = Profit
- Transformation, i.e. reorg
- AI in strategy
- Return to office
Photo: ”Let that sink in” (Oct 2022, source The Economist).
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Casual
→ Friday September 29, 2023📓📷 This is the best sourdough loaf 🍞 I’ve baked so far! All this time I think I’ve been adding too much water. I’ve been underestimating the water content in my starter is my guess.
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Gaming
→ Monday September 25, 2023🎮 The plot lines in Baldur’s Gate 3 are so good! I’m genuinely curious what is going to happen and how it could have played out had I chosen differently. It’s so hard to discuss anything without risking spoilers - this says a lot!
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Gaming
→ Sunday September 10, 2023🎮 I’ve been wondering if I could let go of my Xbox Series S in favor of my PC. It’s a tough call. PCs just tend to not just work. Currently, it seems I have an unstable bluetooth connection. ”Mostly works” is the worst! The Xbox is seamless.
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Casual
→ Friday September 8, 2023📝 Finally created some evergreen notes à la Zettelkasten. Lesson learned - I should have just started without overthinking it. Here’s something that has helped me through hectic times recently:
Scrying your TODO list
Scrying is a mechanic from Magic the Gathering tabletop card came. It allows for a player to:
- look at their stack of cards
- decide to put cards at the bottom of the stack
- decide to keep cards on the top and re-order them
Scrying your TODO list could be a useful metaphor for prioritizing tasks. The order of tasks, especially the next 2-5 tasks, is more important than completing the whole list.
A useful heuristic for scrying a TODO list is deciding which tasks need doing today and which tasks will make tomorrow easier.
Source: Cortex - #142 Scrying Your List
