2024.03.16.

Open-sourcing thinking

I write a lot every day, but I don’t publish a lot of it since I have this fear of being judged. But I have a lot of ideas and thoughts that can be boring for some people but maybe interesting for others.

I ramble about tools and workflows in Day One and my Zettelkasten. Those are private posts that are not necessarily useful to anyone, but I want to publish them anyway because I can see a history of my thoughts, which can give someone else an idea.

That’s what #DigitalGarden is about, but it is still different. Sometimes, I want to write a journal entry and be done with it. I don’t need a full-fledged Zettelkasten all the time.

Actually, I’m afraid of publishing these ideas, but as we have had success with open-source software in the last couple of decades, maybe open-source thinking can be a helpful thing to master, too.

What do I mean by that? Blogposts without much crafting and maybe even with a lot of grammar errors, but the idea is that I can write about something, then continue thinking about that idea in a new post, and so on. Maybe I’ll run into a conclusion and come up with something cool or ignore the whole thing at the end, but the critical point here is that I should flex my writing more, and my blog is still the best place for that.

Inspired by More people should write

2024.02.22.

2024.02.20.

2023.12.17.

2023.12.09.

2023.12.08.

2023.12.03.

2023.11.27.

2023.11.17.

The myth and reality of Mac OS X Snow Leopard

I agree with this. We would be better off with a more “natural” update cycle on the Mac. It’s a slower-moving platform these days anyway:

Regardless of the motivation, the annual updates are more of a burden than a blessing to many Apple customers, including myself. I wish that Apple would drop the artificial schedule and let the major updates come more naturally. This isn’t just the attitude of a developer and so-called “power user”. Many “normal” users”, the proverbial moms, feel the same way. Actually, my literal mom told me she doesn’t like the ceaseless annual major updates either. She’s learned from hard experience that they’re not necessarily safe to install. Major updates can be very disruptive, creating new problems and wrecking old workflows. The press is always excited by major updates, because they give the press a lot to write about, but the public is not as sanguine. We occasionally need a break of 23 months, or more, from computing disruption. That would be another Snow Leopard.

Related to this: The Mac, The Myth, The Legend: How Snow Leopard became synonymous with reliability

2023.02.18.

Bookmarked “Scarlet“:

Scarlet is a personal issue tracker that saves to a file that you can include in your project directory, or anywhere you prefer. No accounts, no cloud services, no syncing, no third-party integration. Just a simple place to file away your project’s to-dos and close them when they’re complete.

2023.02.08.

2022.12.26.

Tweaking workflows

  • I constantly tweak my workflows this time of the year. I usually provide tools for others—that’s what I do for a living—but I also have to keep my knives sharp.

  • This year I’m tweaking two things.

  • Take better notes while watching a video.

  • Moving my Zettelkasten over to Bike.

    • I like to think about my Zettelkasten being a large outline. Keeping it inside Bike could be beneficial.

      • I’m trying to mimic the analog Zettelkasten (or Antinet).

        • I won’t use an analog one since I like the digital one’s benefits better, but I also want ideas from the analog one.

        • I’m a programmer and I use my Zettelkasten to understand coding concepts. I have some code snippets stored in SnippetsLab, so it’s easier to link to those from my Zettelkasten outline than keeping them on paper.

      • I can use the classical Luhmann IDs to add an ID each note.

      • I can nest notes under each other.

        • I can easily link notes together thanks to the Bike and Hook integration.

    • Disadvantages

      • I don’t have backlinks, but I’m not sure I need that inside a Zettelkasten.

2022.03.04.

2022.01.24.

2021.02.25.

Remote work is not local work at a distance

Jason Fried wrote a post about doing remote work, with the expectations of local employment. This post resonated with me very well since I had a couple of weird interviews lately. Just a side note: yes, I quit my current job as a Ruby backend developer at TerraCycle about three weeks ago, and I’ll start working as a frontend developer/product designer at Nearcut on March 10th.

There are still companies that refuse to accept that remote work is a viable alternative. They want you to be in the office because “this is what we did before the pandemic, and everything should be back to normal soon.” No, nothing will be like before, and companies should embrace that, not deny it.

Not everyone’s like that. Even big ones consider remote work a viable alternative but don’t have the hiring process and experience to work like that, so they’re relying on old habits.

The enlightened companies coming out of this pandemic will be the ones that figured out the right way to work remotely. They’ll have stopped trying to make remote look like local. They’ll have discovered that remote work means more autonomy, more trust, more uninterrupted stretches of time, smaller teams, more independent, concurrent work (and less dependent, sequenced work).

I’m interested in what COVID-19 will do to remote work because, seriously considering remote work is one of the positive changes of the pandemic that happened in many workplaces. People were forced to work from home. Many companies figured out how to do this successfully, and they don’t want to throw out this knowledge because “everything will be back to normal.”

Jason also writes about native platforms:

Porting things between platforms is common, especially when the new thing is truly brand new (or trying to gain traction). As the Mac gained steam in the late 80s and early 90s, and Windows 3 came out in 1990, a large numbers of Windows/PC developers began to port their software to the Mac. They didn’t write Mac software, they ported Windows software. And you could tell – it was pretty shit. It was nice to have at a time when the Mac wasn’t widely developed, but, it was clearly ported.

When something’s ported, it’s obvious. Obviously not right.

Stuff that’s ported lacks the native sensibilities of the receiving platform. It doesn’t celebrate the advantages, it only meets the lowest possible bar. Everyone knows it. Sometimes we’re simply glad to have it because it’s either that or nothing, but there’s rarely a ringing endorsement of something that’s so obviously moved from A to B without consideration for what makes B, B.

Maybe Basecamp should create a Catalyst version of HEY for Mac from their iOS app, which is quite nice, instead of having a cross-platform Electron thing on the desktop called a “native Mac app.”

2021.02.23.

2020.11.04.

zsoltbenke.me

As I refresh my online presence with a new avatar and a new Dribbble profile, it occurred to me that I don’t have a page, which I can hand to somebody, and he/she can see what my work is all about. Not a portfolio, but a more superior page than a simple “About Me” in WordPress.

So I built one, featuring some of my work I did lately and, more importantly, the first web development tutorial I promised a couple of months ago. I plan to extract this article into a separate mini-site just for these tutorials, but for now, it nicely complements my “About” page.

Anyway, check out my work!

Screen Shot 2020 11 04 at 21 39 07

2020.10.31.

I’m on Dribbble (again)

It was a long time since I posted anything on Dribbble. In the last couple of years, I did so many exciting things, but I haven’t shown them anywhere; I did show some bits and blobs on Twitter.

Since I like to think about UI interactions and building tools, I should have a platform to show the results. And Dribbble is excellent for that. So from now on, I try to post new stuff I’m working on.

Checkout my Dribbble profile →

(Feedback is always welcome.)

Screen Shot 2020 10 31 at 14 11 37

2020.09.01.

How to Write a Git Commit Message

Ha fejlesztő vagy, akkor az alábbi oldalt tedd el a bookmarkjaid közé és kezdd el alkalmazni az itt tanácsolt dolgokat:

If you haven’t given much thought to what makes a great Git commit message, it may be the case that you haven’t spent much time using git log and related tools. There is a vicious cycle here: because the commit history is unstructured and inconsistent, one doesn’t spend much time using or taking care of it. And because it doesn’t get used or taken care of, it remains unstructured and inconsistent.

Madarat tolláról, fejlesztőt git history-járól.

2020.01.02.

Replying to: MuellerSimhofer:

As user I’ve seen Spotlight implementations for document based apps (usually just using NSUserActivity), but the problem is that they usually duplicate results. You get one result from Files and then another one from the app’s index.

Also keeping the index up-to-date seems hard, since I can delete files outside the app, but the app’s index still contains it: I have to start the app, to get the index updated. I’m curious how you guys can solve this for MindNode.