It’s been a while since my last weeknote. This is a good sign that not only I have better control of my tasks again, but also that there’s been events and insights worth writing about in the first place.

Discovering my early works – In the back of a cupboard, I found the printed specification and software code of one of my first professional works. It’s a maintenance scheduling application that I developed in Clipper 5.01, a database language for MS-DOS, as a summer intern at the nuclear power plant near my home town. It has a text-based windowed user interface, as was common in the time before Windows gained ground. The printout is dated 1992-03-09. 30 years ago.

More fun with Linux – By now, I’m doing almost all my computing on my Linux desktop, gaming and music being the lone exceptions. With only my very dated experience from before I switched to the Mac in the early 2000s to draw from, I had a lot of pleasant surprises in recent months, for example when my HP WiFi Laser Printer was automatically set up, when I was able to cleanly import documents from Word into Libre Office, or when configuring my Logitech devices only required installing a little app, if at all. In the coming weeks, I’m going to try if Bandlab or Bitwig can reduce my dependency on Windows even more.

Starting work on online courses – I miss teaching, so I’ve started setting up a learning products and community website over on opsitive.com. Sadly, I haven’t made much progress on creating actual course materials so far. In part, that’s because of time constraints, but I feel that it’s more because I’ve been aiming too high too early. That’s why I’ve decided this week to start with small, free course offerings that don’t require a huge time commitment, neither from me nor from the course participants. The big Ruby and Linux Shell courses will come later when I’ve hit my stride.

Interesting reads – Here’s a few links to articles I’ve enjoyed recently:

• Why I love Ruby – A series of articles by Ary Borenszweig, one of the authors of the Crystal language. I resonate with many of his points, and a few of the features he mentions I didn’t even know about.
• I don’t trust my team to work remotely – Bullshit, of course Derek Power trusts his team. His blog post is about what he does as a manager to have not only trust but even confidence that his team is doing the right things without him having to micro-manage.
• Leaders – Too much to do? Here’s how to get it all done – I’m pretty sure you’ve heard all of the tips in this article already. Looking at myself, I’m also pretty sure that we can use a reminder once in a while.
• Two-way writeups: Coda’s secret to shipping fast – This article describes a great practice for asynchronous collaboration in which not only the original proposal or statement gets distributed in well-structured written form but also the feedback of the recipients.

Thanks for reading, have a great weekend!