Posts

Compounding skills improve your life exponentially

We have an intuition about the benefit we get from learning a skill. Learning how to remember information better is more beneficial than learning how to recognise trees using leaves. What is the cause of the greater benefit? And what are some examples of more and less beneficial skills? I determine the utility of a skill as a sum of how much fun it is, how valuable it is to other people and how large is the context in which I can apply the skill.

How to describe a software issue

This article will help you become that one person who gets their technical problems solved first. Keep following these three guidelines, and you will greatly reduce the amount of suffering in the world. Imagine that you found an issue in your favourite software, here are the steps that you can take to report the issue to a software maintainer. They don’t take much effort, but they’ll make a world of difference for the person trying to understand your report.

Facebook won't let you talk about this blog

I’ve heard about social networks censoring content, but I always thought it only affects hate speech or promoting violence. I never expected that my opinions could end up in the same bucket as stirring violence. And I’m perplexed by the way Facebook decides what you can and can’t talk about with your friends. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic A few weeks back, I was messaging with my ex-colleague and a good friend.

Simpleton: privacy-aware web analytics made with Nginx and GoAccess

Hacker News is crowded with articles about blog owners making their custom web analytics1. I thought it looked like a fun weekend project. Let me show you Simpleton Analytics. TL;DR visit the project repository, and you can have your analytics set up in a few minutes. My requirements were clear. Privacy, price, time. I want to know the bare minimum about my visitors, no cookies, no session tracking, no sharing with 3rd parties.

Start working less to produce more, strange approach to prioritisation

I’m going to talk about preventing burn out and getting a better sense of control at your job. I’ll explain why I think we feel overwhelmed at work. Lastly, I suggest setting a hard limit on reactive work, solution based on my own experience. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic First, let’s have a look at what it looks like when you are overwhelmed from work. We’ll start by dividing work into two categories: Work that someone defined for you and work that you defined for yourself1.

Designing a digital pirate map

When I was little, I loved pirate tales. There was always a great deal of adventure and exotic lands. And one more thing was almost given: There is going to be a treasure, and someone is going to have the map. Without the map, you don’t get the treasure. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic Today we are going to design a digital pirate map. A service where you can hide a text secret (treasure) and only you can ever find it.

Three principles distilled from Getting Things Done

Getting Things Done (GTD) is a method of managing your work. David Allen published it 19 years ago as a result of his life’s work coaching executives. The method takes time and effort to implement, but the key concepts behind it can benefit you today. This article explains the building blocks of GTD and how they help you clear your head from all unfinished work. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic The core idea of GTD You can keep all unfinished tasks and thinking in an external note-taking system and not have them in your head.

How to create animated gif from multiple images with ImageMagick

Read this tutorial if you have several images and you would like to make them into an animated gif. This quick tutorial is going to work best for you if you are on Mac OS and you know how to run commands in the terminal. Every Unix system should work fine; you’ll just need to install the dependencies differently. Note: This article is much more technical than what I usually write, let me know if you likeđź‘Ť or dislikeđź‘Ž it.

How my article became one-hit-wonder on hacker news

Today I’m going to tell the story of fleeting success. You’ll learn how my article reached the hacker news front page. And how it stayed there for two whole days, changing my perception about what is achievable with my writing hobby. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic I started this blog as a new year’s resolution for 2020. One article per week. I didn’t have gigantic aspirations. I wanted to learn how to express myself better because remote work is all about written communication.

AdBlockers hide the majority of visitors from web analytics

I used Mixpanel analytics to tell me how many people are reading my articles. Recently I implemented my custom analytics. I was astonished when my custom analytics showed me more than twice the number of page views than the numbers from Mixpanel. AdBlock was hiding sixty per cent of my site’s visitors from Mixpanel. Illustration: Ljubica Petkovic Everyone who publishes on the internet loves analytics. It’s a big part of the writing feedback process.