I do write a lot recently, but not much of it gets published on this website. What I publish is still a lot compared to the beginning of the year, yet it’s only a fraction of what I produce.
Some of it is just too private to show around the internet, even with my new endeavour to write more about personal things, emotions and be more vulnerable. But even that is the minority of my writing. For the most part, I just start writing things down and then abandon them.

I’m thinking about if this writing even is writing. If nobody reads it, does it really exist? It surely gives me something. Especially with the very personal things, writing them out creates a lot of headspace and clarity. But for the rest? I get to practice writing a little, but without even the possibility of feedback from the world, what is it even worth?
It feels like cheating. Writing isn’t easy, but for me the hardest part is not the act of writing, but putting it out in the world. While it’s just lying around on my computer, I’m comfortable. It cannot be labelled bad because no one in the world is able to read it. But it also cannot be good for the same reason. And if it’s neither good nor bad, is it anything at all?

Up until now, I thought that I wrote a lot. But my metric was off. I can only count what I published, and judging from that, I did not write that much.

Time to get more comfortable with putting stuff out in the world. Also time to get comfortable putting half-baked thoughts out there that I will be embarrassed of in 3 months or be corrected on after a few hours. Time to work with the garage door open.

My head and I, we have a complicated relationship.

Sometimes, good things come out of it. It can produce decent code, decent enough at least that someone is willing to pay me enough money for it so I can make a living out of it. Sometimes texts and ideas come out of it that I like. Those are the times where we walk hand and hand an have a great time.
Other times, though, it feels like the dickhead wants to fuck me over. Those are the times when I’m trapped inside it, pondering over things, questioning everything. In these times, it feels like my head is my enemy.

I have a lot of thoughts over the course of the day. Everything I do is accompanied by a thought. This might be what is called “inner monologue”. People that also have it might be able to relate.
In case you don’t have it: If you watched the show “Scrubs”, it’s a lot like J.D. narrating everything that happens.
This inner monologue is not a problem per se. But it becomes one once it goes into repeat.

Having it go on repeat is exhausting. Often times, it leads to pondering over things, which is even more exhausting. It causes me not to be in the present, but either in the (or a theoretical) future or the past. Those are not good places to spend the majority of your thoughts on. Ultimately, it tends to drag me down.
So, there’s a new rule in my life: No recurring thoughts allowed.

That’s easy to say, but how do I make them go away? It sounds a lot like telling someone not to think of a pink elephant or telling people suffering from depression to “just be happy and smile more”.
Luckily, I found a rather simple solution for my problem: Writing the thoughts down. This works for a couple of reasons:
First, I don’t have to keep the thought in my head anymore because I know it’s written down somewhere and won’t get lost. If I can’t remember it later on, I know I have written it down in one of the places I write things down. It’s safe to let it go now.
Second, building more complex chains of thought is easier if some parts of it are written down and I don’t have to keep the whole thing in my head. Exploring different solutions to a problem is easier as well, as I can write one solution down and don’t have to keep it in my head, allowing me to fully focus on the next.

The length of what I have to write down depends on the type of thought.
Simple “tasks”, things I must not forget to do, just require a bullet point in my notebook. They’re the easiest to deal with.
Ideas might require a few more bullet points so I can make sense of them later an, when I come back to them and lost the mental context. Sometimes, I also draw something.
And then there’s the heavy, deep stuff. That’s usually also the stuff that is hard to spot in the first place, as it gets pushed far back into my mind and suppressed by a lot of escape mechanisms. They usually require long form text, some time and pain.
Knowing exactly how much to write is hard beforehand. Luckily, the feeling when I did enough is pretty obvious. So I keep writing until it’s there.

I hope this look into my head made sense to you. Learning how other peoples’ brains work is one of the most interesting things to me. So let me know if you struggle with similar things or if it is completely different for you.

It’s been over a month now since I tested positive for covid and almost 4 weeks since I tested negative. My energy levels are still not back to normal. They’re well under where they normally are: On a regular day without exercise, just doing my daily business (which comes down to 10-12km of walking), I am done at about 6 pm. I then feel like I felt after a really intense workout before covid, probably even worse. It has gotten to the point where I could barely stay awake a few times.

This text is not for me to complain about my situation. I know it could have hit me worse. Much, much worse. But this is the first time in my life that my body is hit hard by something and taking longer than a week or so to recover.
I guess the invincibility I seemed to have in my 20s is gone now. Likely a normal part of getting older. But it sucks nonetheless.
I’m not sure if what I experience qualifies as post-covid or long-covid, but given the research I did, it seems to be quite common. For the most people, it seems to last between 5 weeks and 4 months. I hope I’m on the shorter end of the timespan.

I’m uncertain on how to tackle this situation. Some people have had good experiences with just resting. Other people think that you have to rebuild your fitness from scratch and you have to take baby steps (and being exhausted is part of training).
Today was the first day in a week or so where I still have energy at 10 pm. I ate a lot today, probably 4000 calories (and most of them healthy). Not sure if this is the cause of having more energy or just a correlation. Or pure chance.

Again, I don’t want this text to be me complaining about my situation. I just wanted to have this written down for my future self somewhere. However long this goes on, I’m optimistic that I will cope with it and come out on the other end with some new learnings.

For some reason, I felt like writing a monthly summary for the month of January 2023. I‘m a little late for this, I hope the international monthly review committee will forgive me.

The month, overall

This month was a rough start to the year. A lot of exhausting stuff happened, most of which I do not want to write about in public. It‘s not so important what exactly happened though, but how I reacted to it. While I got stressed out by those things, I also worked on changing my attitude.
I noticed that these are rougher times, which was a good first step. Then I could take it as a chance to learn. This will not be the last time in my life I will be struggling. There certainly will be even tougher times in the future. So the least I can do is learn from it. To be more concrete, I hope to learn to be more relaxed and think clearer in such situations, as well as not to fight it but accept it for what it is and deal with it.
Additionally, nothing is „only bad“. For example, I learned that my workplace is very supportive in those times, so this takes away a big burden for the next time things go horribly wrong: At least I know I‘m trusted to do my best and can take some time to deal with things.

The good stuff

While the month wasn‘t great overall, I still did some things I‘m proud of:

• I launched my new Website (this one)
• Went out to the city to do street photography for a few times and started an Instagram account to publish my pictures
• I made good progress on a new side project for using the Notion API as a CMS for a next.js page
• I read almost every day
• I did Journal every day this month (mostly just a few bullet points and some checkboxes checked, but I did it)
• I published 4 posts on this site if you count this one (I do)

Reading

I feel like for the time I put into reading, I did not finish much. However, I wanted to focus on reading more in terms of time and understanding than just quantity of books finished.
My RSS feed grew as well and I spent a lot of time reading blogs again. Feels nice that people go back more to writing on their own sites again.

Books

Finished The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
More or less a collection of tweets, excerpts from his blog posts and quotes from interviews with a little moderation in between. Very compact, not a lot of fluff. I read some reviews of people not liking this, but I prefer this style of writing to endless stories that have barely any information to it.

Started Letters from a Stoic & The rational optimist

Around the web

• How Stoicism Cures Anger
• The Cab Ride I'll Never Forget
• I Am the Ghost Here

I guess that‘s it 🤷‍♂️.

When the AirPods Pro were announced, I did not really bat an eye. They looked weird and were a lot more expensive than their Bose or Sony counterparts. I was a happy Bose user back then and did not see any reason to even think about these headphones. My Bose since broke and I now am using a pair of AirPods Pro Max. Let’s explore why anyone would ever want to pay that much money for a pair of rosetooth headphones.

I am convinced that starting at a certain price point, it does not matter which rosetooth headphones with active noise cancellation you buy, they will all make you happy. I think there will be no impactful difference in your happiness with the product if you go with the Sony over the Bose. Sure, one might have a feature the other does not have and you want that, but if what you want is “Good headphones with ANC” you can’t really go wrong here.

This is also true for the AirPods Pro Max. I think would I have bought the Bose QC 45 (or whatever Sony calls theirs currently, their naming is hard) over them, I would not miss anything or be less content with my headphones. Nonetheless, if you lay them all out on a table, the AirPods really stick out as different. And if you pick them and go to pay them, the AirPods also stick out, as they cost about 300 Euros more at the time of writing this.

What is it you pay for?

Given that they all sound good (I’m no audiophile, but I listen to a lot of music and the experience is good, to give you a rough idea how I ended up with this rating) and the noise cancelling is also good in all of them, what do you actually get for 300 bucks more in comparison to the Bose or Sony?

First of all, it’s Apple, and that means it’s expensive. They have this "luxury designer item" feel to it: More metal is used, they're heavy, they come in fancy colors and feel more sturdy (to be fair, I must have dropped my Bose about 20 times without any damage; then again, in the end a small plastic part broke what made me replace them) and they just look… different overall.
Depending on whom you ask, they look nice (me) or totally stupid to the point where people start laughing out loud (my wife).
So, that’s the first thing you might pay for: They look good. I like that, I try to have visually pleasing objects in my home. But while I think they look better than their counterparts, the Bose or Sonys don’t look teriible.

The other think you get is connectivity and integration in the Apple ecosystem, which is awesome.
If you just ask any random person on the street what they like most about their AirPods, I'd assume 8 out of 10 times you will hear something about the connectivity. It’s just so nice. You get them out of the case and they immediately connect. No fiddling in settings. If your phone rings, you're able to get them out of the case, in your ear and connected before the caller hangs up. You pull one out of your ear and the music stops. You put it back in and it continues. It’s so effortless and I would not want to miss that about my AirPods I use on my phone. You get the same thing with the AirPods Pro Max. Switching between devices is easy, you pull them out of their purse (that damned purse) and they are connected, it feels like they work with you instead of against you. They never really stand in the way.

I’m willing to pay extra for a feature like that on an item that I use daily. But am I willing to pay 300 bucks extra and should you be?

Should you buy them?

I have not been honest with you. You might have been under the impression that I actually bought the AirPods Pro Max. I haven’t. I own them, but my work paid for them (they have a home office budget and I spent it all on headphones because I did not need anything else). I’m sorry for lying.

But while this kind of changes the dynamic of the article, it also allows me to take a more neutral position here. Because I own them and I can now answer with confidence if I had paid the extra money for those features, would it have been my own money. I would not.
As much as I love them, I don’t think I could justify the extra expense. My Bose were just fine, they also connected fine (a little slower and less reliable, though) and ANC and sound were great. As I said earlier, in this price range, you can probably pick one blind and be happy no matter which one you choose.

Sent from my AirPods Pro Max

It’s almost comical writing about this now, since so much time has passed since the last bit about me updating this site. But if you’re reading this now, you’re reading this on a new domain using a different tech stack and a new design. Both the tech stack and the design are different from what I outlined in the last post of this series. I want to talk about why it took so long and why it all changed so much.

The “why it took so long” part

There is two reasons for this: Life and me. Let’s talk about life first.

A lot of things happened in the past few month that demanded a lot of mental attention. First of all, I got married (hence the new domain, because the old one no longer fitted my last name). And while we did not have a big party, it still required a lot of administration work. Second, I started a new jobs at gigs in November (we’re hiring) and the interviewing process as well as getting settled into to role took some time. I did not have to work evenings, but with my family also requiring some time I was just to tired a lot of the evenings.

The second reason is me. Because to be honest, I had this redesign almost finished two times but then changed it all up again because it did not feel right to me. This, by the way, is why they say to never change your website design once you have it if you want to keep writing: It takes away all your time from the writing. The changes were in design and technological.

The design changes

I started this series out with a design I did in Figma and then went ahead to do the technical groundwork. By the time I finished that, I no longer liked the design. Objectively, it was fine, but it did not really feel like me. So I ditched it. I went for something new, a lot flashier. A lot of blurry, translucent backgrounds, a lot of colourful gradients. And again, objectively, that was a good design. But it did not feel like me. It felt like I forced it to be there. So I threw it out again and started with the bare minimum: A font combination I liked and a color I liked. I only added to that what I needed and that’s what you are currently seeing. A very minimalistic approach that might not scream “I do frontend development in react” in you face, but one I like.

What also changed is the design process. It‘s now designed in code. I always wanted to design in code in the past, but never felt productive with it. I think with React, Next.ja and Tailwind, I now have a system in place that allows me to iterate quickly and with a decent experience for myself.

Wait, Next.js? Haven’t I written about how I wanted to use Gatsby for the redesign in the past?

The technical changes

I built blogs and personal pages in Gatsby before, and I like it. Hence the initial choice. But I worked a lot with Next.js lately (especially since I had to learn it for my new job) and it feels like a better fit for what I want to achieve here.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think Gatsby is a great tool for building static sites, but I felt it was a bit limiting in that. This site has grown a lot in the past, from just a blog to other pages. I want to keep that going. And I don’t want to be limited by the underlying technology in terms of what I can build here. I may never need that flexibility, but I want to have that option. Also, I don’t like writing GraphQL queries for everything.

It’s more of an addition instead of a change, but I also use Tailwind now for styling. It allows me to move fast and try out different things in the design. I feel like Tailwind is a controversial topic right now, but I like it. Yes, the class strings of elements get long. I can live with that.

The current state

The site currently is a little rough about the edges. It does not have all the features I initially wanted to add. It is even missing some of the pages from the old site. But I wanted to finally get it out of the door. You know, we’re all agile and lean over here. I still have a lot of stuff I want to do, but I also want to continue writing and not feel the shame of publishing under my false name. Posts and notes are here as well as all pages that (hopefully) will make sure I don’t get sued. Everything else will come with time.

As one does, I recently planned what I wanted to do this year. I realized how much my approach to this changed over the years, especially regarding goals I want to achieve. I wanted to write about that a little. Why, you ask? Because I set out to write a certain amount of blog posts this year. And hence, we now have to work through this post about goals so I can achieve my goal. Hooray.

Okay, goals. If you look around the internet, you will read over and over again that goals are important. I think this is true: If you don‘t know in which direction to run, you may end up somewhere but chances are your just running in circles. But I also don‘t think that you have to have a 10 year plan you follow in order to come by things you enjoy. I think goals are allowed to and definitely should change.

You constantly learn new things. You learn about directions you can possibly go in your journey that you did not even know existed when you started. It would be foolish to not at least evaluate the new directions and change course if they interest you.

For example, when I finished school there were a few broader directions I was interested in: Writing, photography and designing things on the web. I played around in all directions a little and decided that I will mainly focus on the web thing. I studied in the informatics field (because I was to lazy for the art school assignments you have to do to get accepted) and had in mind that I wanted to be a designer in an agency. So during and after my time in university, I did just that. I enjoyed it until I didn‘t. I then noticed that I also like programming and it turns out a decent programmer with an eye for design is really valuable in small teams. So I did this for a while. Then I realized that there are people working on products and they don‘t have to start a new project every 3 months and I decided I wanted to do that. This is where I am now.

All of this happened over a span of roughly ten years . I could not have planned to be where I am today 10 years ago, because I did not know that place existed. Likewise, I cannot plan where I will be in 5 years or 10 because many of the places I could end up I either don‘t know about or they don‘t exist yet. I think making concrete plans for the long term is really limiting. I have a rough feeling of which directions feel good to go and which not. I will try to go where it feels good. And if something interesting comes by on the way, I will take a turn and see how that feels.

I recently did my annual review and wrote down some things I learned this year.

Here they are, in no particular order.

• Taking risks and leaving your comfort zone is always worth it. You will make new experiences and no matter how they turn out will you always learn something valuable as long as you keep your eyes and mind open
• Tools don’t matter that much. Settle for something that works and only start min-maxing if it gets in your way. The note taking tool or the keyboard you use make only a marginal difference. Focus on the hard things instead.
• Don’t be afraid to look stupid. Usually, if you have a stupid question, at least one other person in the room has the same question and is afraid to ask. Also, this is how you learn.
• Do not care about what other people think of you. Because when you do, you live your life to their expectations and this is the road to unhappiness. Get comfortable with being judged.
• If you have the chance to help someone, do it. You will feel a lot better afterwards and you almost always learn something on the way.
• No matter the kind of relationship, if it drains you you are allowed to cut it. Successful people say goodbye.
• Contact people from your past you felt a spark in at the time meeting them. Most of the time, there now is a fire where that spark used to be.
• Write. Whatever it is, once you have written it down, it will become a lot clearer. It forces you to order your thoughts and take a differentiated point of view.
• Speak slower. People will understand you a lot better. The optimal pace is right at the edge where you feel people must think you are stupid. They really won’t notice a difference other than your improved pronunciation and fewer “ehm”s
• Don’t read the news. The only impact it will have on your life is the negative influence on you mental health.
• If you are going places, some people might not be ready for it and leave. That’s okay. Some people are only meant to be there for a season.
• If you wander off the beaten path of society, people will start talking about you. If you are sure this is the right way to go, the amount of shit people talk about you behind your back is a good indicator on how you are doing.
• If you know your escape mechanisms, they can serve as a tool to indicate if there is something in you life you need to deal with.

I decided to go to the office today, which meant I had a commute. I hated every minute of it. It takes me about 50 minutes from door to door with public transport. I’ll consider this a lengthy commute.

Here’s a list of annoyances from my rides:

• Dude Smoking heroin at the station at 9 a.m.
• People not caring at all about masks being required on public transport
• Random dude screaming at a woman because she was standing in the door area (there was no other place where she could have gone)
• Woman refusing to pick up a toy for her toddler because „You dropped it“, toddler screaming in protest (and rightfully so).

All in all, this took a lot of energy and time and was a great reminder of why I love working from home.

It’s also a great reminder why companies should let their employees choose from where to work. My energy might get drained from encounters with a lot of people. Yours might not. You may even like it.
Neither of us should be forced into a situation that’s subpar for us.

Louis Antonopoulos (thoughtbot):

I immediately realized the trap I had fallen in. I made an assumption (no key in backpack) and I held onto that assumption for days like it was the truest thing in the world. And that simple action, repeated over and over, led me down a trail of wasting time, feeling frustration and worry, and taking all these extra steps.

This is something I fall for as well, and fairly often. I make it a conscious effort to remember to ask myself if what I think is happening is actually happening. But it’s hard to break your thought process and think about it when you are happy about being oh so smart that you know what’s happening right away. It will take time.

To Louis' list, I’d like to add

• I fixed the bug in one place, so it is gone for good
• If something important was broken and it somehow passed the tests, exception tracking will catch it for sure