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.
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.
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?
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 ↩︎
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.
del.icio.us, 
Rice harvest on Louisiana farm
