Bram Esposito

Tag: write2025

  • 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.

    1. Sadly, Maciej Cegłowski appears to be a dreadful person ↩︎
    2. There is something that I want to try with this blog related to bookmarking though. ↩︎

  • 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.

    1. this post is written without using AI ↩︎

  • 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 editor with the counter in the top right displaying: 34 words.
    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.

  • new features I want to add to this blog

    While I’m slowly setting up this blog, I’m keeping track of the features that I want to add to it.

    Check the list

  • Avoid sudo if you can

    I ran npm update on a project today, which returned this error:

    npm error code EACCES
npm error syscall open
npm error path /Users/-username-/.npm/_cacache/index-v5/ab/83/-long-hash-
npm error errno EACCES
npm error
npm error Your cache folder contains root-owned files, due to a bug in
npm error previous versions of npm which has since been addressed.
npm error
npm error To permanently fix this problem, please run:
npm error   sudo chown -R 501:20 "/Users/-username-/.npm"
npm error A complete log of this run can be found in: /Users/-username-/.npm/_logs/2024-12-11T10_37_38_225Z-debug-0.log

    I avoid running sudo commands, especially when it’s node or npm suggesting this.

    My solution: 

    rm  -r /Users/-username-/.npm

    And running npm update again.

    Always think twice before running a root command, especially when it’s coming from an online tool.