Notes

Status updates and short notes.

  1. I just came across a job offer for a “Frontend Developer”. In it is explicitly stated that you should not apply if you’ve never touched AWS or Kubernetes. I mean: what the actual f.

  2. Hamburg marathon 2021

    In April 2021 I will run the Hamburg marathon. It will be my second marathon after the Munich marathon in October 2018, which I ran in a net time of 3 hours and 44 minutes. My goal for 2021 is a net time of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which means I will run an average pace of just under five minutes per kilometer.

    So, it’s roughly 36 weeks until the marathon. I’ve been going over my running schedule in my head. According to Herbert Steffny (his website is pretty dope, check it out, I will wait here for you) in order to run a marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes one should be able to run a distance of 10 kilometers in 45 minutes and a half-marathon in 1 hour and 40 minutes. To bridge the time until the marathon training I thought it would be a good idea to train for and run both the 10k and the 21k distance in the mentioned duration.

    This is my schedule:

    1. In order to get my body accustomed to an increased running workload I will gradually increase the weekly mileage of my current runs until the start of the 10k training (that’s in ten weeks) to about 50k per week.
    2. The 10k training starts October 26th and spans over a period of six weeks. On December 6th I will run the 10k in 45 minutes.
    3. After a break of two weeks, the half-marathon training begins on December 21st and spans over a period of six weeks. I will run the half-marathon on January 31st in 1 hour and 40 minutes.
    4. After a break of two weeks, the marathon training begins on February 15th and spans over a period of ten weeks. I will run the marathon on April 25th in 3 hours and 30 minutes (that is still to be seen, though 😀).

  3. Sleeping and snoring

    Since July 10th we have a new four-legged family member, a dog to be precise. Dingo is his name. He is a rescue dog from Romania and his favourite hobbies are: sleeping and snoring.

    We got Dingo from the Tierschutzbrücke München. It’s an association which has a close relationship to the animal shelter Casa Cainelui in the city of Timisoara in western Romania since 2001. Dogs are being rescued from local killing shelters (yep, those exist), nursed up and brought to Germany and other countries. In addition, castration campaigns are carried out regularly to get to the root of the problem of the uncontrolled growing number of stray dogs in Romania.

    Dingo sleeping in a comfortable position.

    The process of getting Dingo via the Tierschutzbrücke was serious and professional. We were assigned a nice lady who is responsible for the placement of the dogs to Munich. She looked at our living situation and asked us honestly about our motives and experiences with dogs. You can see from the association and the staff that the main concern is animal welfare.

    Dingo enjoying his new bed.

    After her “go” we went dog shopping and surrendered to the marketing and products of the dog industry. We didn’t leave anything out: tick tongs, two different lines (a short line and a drag line), three different brushes (underfur brush, normal brush and massage brush), treats and food in different variations (from veggie to meat, from organic to conventional), toys, dog bed, pharmacy bag, dog shampoo, ... After the first big shopping tour I could understand and extrapolate what a gigantic industry this must be. In fact: 4.325 billion Euro turnover, that is the house number of the German pet industry in 2019. Fun fact: there are 10.1 million dogs living in German households. And: “Dog snacks have been growing dynamically for years” is a sentence my brain has never had to process before.

    One week after the shopping tour, Dingo arrived. He’s a super nice guy, who always wants to cuddle a lot and whom we took to our hearts very quickly.

    Dingo thinking about life and the universe.

    The daily rhythm is determined by him since then. Our day is now divided as follows:

    • In the morning a long dog walk (30 to 45 minutes).
    • At noon a short dog walk (10 minutes).
    • In the late afternoon again a long dog walk (30 to 45 minutes).
    • Late in the evening, a short dog walk (10 minutes).
    • Repeat.

    What we have already noticed is that, in addition to the time and money involved, normal everyday life has also changed considerably when looking at the usual social activities. Just drive into town quickly for a visit to a restaurant? Not possible, Dingo isn’t used to a restaurant situation and public transport. Spontaneous beer garden session with friends? Dingo on a leash in combination with possibly other dogs nearby still holds too much potential for aggression and too much stress for everyone involved.

    We now simply try to approach his education in a calm and step-by-step manner: good leashing, learning the basic commands, learning new situations (driving the bus, going to a restaurant, etc.) and dog training. Along the way Dingo will learn a lot of new things, but we will certainly learn a lot more.

  4. Inspired by Hidde de Vries (who got inspired by Ethan Marcotte and Robin Rendle) I too added a “Reply via email” link at the bottom of every RSS feed item. Check it out!

    I like this kind of subtle UX improvements for “hidden” stuff like RSS feeds. Similarly, if I link to an external source I automatically add the external link at the bottom of the corresponding RSS feed.

    Thanks for the heads up, Hidde!

  5. Reading “More infos to follow soon…” in the Readme file of a repository where the last commit happened in 2012. Whispers of the past. Put me in a melancholic mood almost instantly. Maybe also triggered by the Celtic playlist I’m listening to in the background.

  6. Just stumbled upon the slides of a talk I gave at university just shy of eight years ago. The topic: jQuery. Flipping through the slides it really feels like a different time dimension. So much has changed… And the other realization that hit me right away: I’m ooold. 😄

  9. Data swap

    Next step for owning more of the content I’m producing: I swaped all of my runs (368 in total) with all relevant data from the Garmin silo to the ProcessWire instance of my website. ✌️

    The runs will be part of my content stream on my website. The process of getting new runs into the system is not yet automated, I have to play around with it still to figure things out.

  10. Shifting conversations

    On June 12 I asked @gRegorLove a question on Twitter. Today he responded, and he did so via his blog and with the help of webmentions, which pinged Bridgy to syndicate his response to Twitter. The result on Twitter is a usual conversation. After that I published my response to him. I also did this via my website, using the same mechanism that he used when he wrote his response to me.

    But I didn’t use the exact same mechanism: I forgot to use Bridgy to syndicate the response to Twitter and thus to his tweet, instead I replied directly to his website response. The result is that I accidentally shifted the conversation, which originated on Twitter, to our personal websites. Apart from having been an accident (and probably it is rather confusing for the conversation flow) I thought that this shows the underlying power of webmentions:

    • The ability to freely shift conversations between plattforms.
    • The ability to be in control of the conversation flow.
    • The ability to still being able to present the context of the conversation flow underneath the content it originated from.

    I’m still rather new to the Webmention and IndieWeb scene, but the underlying concepts and their implications speak to me 100 %.