Author: Bram Esposito
Starry winternight
Starry winternight On post length
Social media got me spoiled. I’m used to reading short bursts of less than 200 characters.
When finding longer pieces that I want to read, I fall into the trap that most people will likely recognise: file it away for later, which means “never read it”. Browser bookmarks, del.icio.us, pinboard1 and now Notion haven’t saved me from this behaviour2.
For me, the sweet spot in post length seems to be somewhere around a hundred words or less, see for example Manton Reece‘s posts, that I find comfortable to read.
Writing something in under a hundred words is less easy than it looks though.
- Sadly, Maciej Cegłowski appears to be a dreadful person ↩︎
- There is something that I want to try with this blog related to bookmarking though. ↩︎
Little friends
They cheer for you! a new theme for 2025: the year of writing
I’m sitting down to reflect and wrap up my thoughts about the year that has passed and the year that comes up.
Theme system
In the last years, I have started to adopt the theme system that CGP Grey and Mike Hurley came up with. It’s a system that focuses on your intentions and motivations rather than hard goals like new year resolutions. They discuss it frequently on their Cortex podcast.
2024: the year of balance
Last yearI focused on finding balance in both my personal life as professionally. The work-life balance is maybe most famous and impactful, and that was no different for me in 2024. I had a startup becoming a scale-up on the one side, and a lovely family with kids reaching puberty on the other hand. Finding time for friendship on top of that has always been a challenge for me.
While work is often about hard results, I’m happy to be able to look back and see how I was able to connect with the people I work with as well. I’m very grateful to be surrounded by people that value that maybe even more than I do. I sure hope this is something I can keep for the future.
Although I often felt too tired, friends kept coming back and we had lots of fun, concerts, camping, travelling, running together, it was wonderful. I’m planning to show up more and in better shape. I owe you.
A new start in 2025
Since 2024 gave me a lot of balls to juggle, I plan to bring some direction to my activities now. And I believe the best way to do that is by starting to write my thoughts down on a regular basis. Just like starting to run regularly has brought me more than I could have imagined, I expect that writing will do the same.
First of all I, hope to get better at it. Finding the right words, ironing out complex sentence structures and cloudy thoughts. I’m sorry I subjecting you to the current quality of my writing, and I plan to get better at it. I’m looking at chatgpt1 and native speaking friends to help me learn here.
I believe writing also helps to sort out your thoughts. And I hope sorted thoughts will make it easier for me to reach results and find focus in the things I’m getting into.
So I plan to practice writing in 2025. I’m curious where it will lead me.
- this post is written without using AI ↩︎
Januari morning sky
Januari morning sky: a beautiful sky on my run this morning. 2024 was a good year for running
I ran 2235,0 km in 2024. I’m pretty proud about that.
I mostly run alone and take the time to reflect and structure my thoughts. I also find it the ideal moment to listen to podcasts. Early in the year, my friend David convinced me to run with a small group, and I learned to appreciate having a conversation while running.
2024 also had me running my first race: the Antwerp Half Marathon on October 20th. It was an experience. Running a race with 14000 other people is more like running on a music festival. More attention goes to avoiding other people and maintaining your own pace. I believe I did a good job.
Right now, I’m still recovering from a painful foot and leg. It’s getting better but these has been a few difficult weeks at the end of the year. I’m wearing arch supports now during the day, but not yet while running to avoid blisters.
Let’s see if I can go over 2500 km in 2025. And who knows, maybe I even get to run a full Marathon?
Self-review your code
Something really resonated with me in the latest episode of the Under the Radar podcast: the concept of switching context and reviewing your own code before committing.
I’m really happy to hear @marcoarment and @_Davidsmith discuss how they review every commit to validate all code that goes into version control.
I often have a hard time selling this habits to junior devs (and even senior devs!). As a consequence I’ve often been rewriting git repository histories to remove passwords, PII1, zip files of several hundreds of megabytes (“git is so slow”) and even malware.
I like to rethink my code architecture while reviewing and often go back to refactor, to take more edge-cases into account or for simplicity.
I love using Fork for this, a great git UI with a good diff viewer, all in one app.
- Personally Identifiable Information, you want to be careful with that ↩︎
Picture: Rice harvest on Louisiana farm by Karl Wiggers
NetNewsWire was not updating my RSS feed
NetNewsWire is having trouble refreshing my RSS feed, both on Mac desktop (6.1.8) and iOS (6.1.5 Build 6135).
- I tested with an alternative RSS reader: Unread, which updates the feed fine.
- I double checked my caching and expiration headers, which also appear ok.
- I went through the log files and saw many entries for Unread and some for Google bot (hello 👋)
- I removed the feed from NNW and re-added it, but no success…
I’m tempted to try and build the desktop app from source, since the source is available on Github, but that will require some extra free time.
UPDATE 2025.01.02: I installed the TestFlight build (6.1.6 6141) and the issue persists.
UPDATE 2025.01.03: TestFlight build 6.1.6 6142 installed overnight and the issue is fixed 🎉! Now waiting for the next desktop release.
A word counter for Gutenberg blocks
One of the main goals of – albeit slowly – setting up this blog, is writing more. And I also want to keep track of the length of the posts I make (I’d love to be able to call them articles one time 😉).
That’s why I implemented a word counter today, that displays the words you’ve written, in the editor, as you type. I based the functionality on the code found here. It didn’t work anymore, but after some research I managed to make it work again.
Turns out the Gutenberg editor (aka Block editor) is often running in an iframe. Which makes it a tiny bit harder to access the blocks in the editor with javascript.
Screenshot of the Block editor with the counter in the top right displaying: 34 words. Download the WordPress plugin
You can find the WordPress plugin here on Github.
What’s next?
I want to improve this functionality with a post-wide counter that displays the total amount of words over every block in the post.
L’amour toujours by The Brussels Jazz Orchestra
I was listening to the “Jazz” episode of the “Koken met classics” Podcast (Belgian radio, Dutch spoken) that has a very entertaining format: Senne Guns and Korneel De Clercq dissect a song or music genre by preparing it as a recipe.
The finale to the episode was a Big Band rendition of L’ Amour Toujours by Gigi D’Agostini, played live by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra.
Recommended.
L’Amour Toujours by the Brussels Jazz Orchestra I really enjoy when artists bring modern (dance) music to Big Band. Listen to the Matthew Herbert Big Band or Meute for more of this.