bjorn.now

07 September, 2025

Create space for serendipity

Steph Ango says If you’re remote, ramble:

A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

I love this idea! I genuinely think the more we write and share the better, and I’ve noticed the effect of similar things that grew out of working remotely with people.

[… more]
crumb • • 3 min read • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture, #remote-work, #meetings

05 September, 2025

04 September, 2025

it’s so quiet staying in ruralish Sweden that I hear the hum of the fridge/freezer more than anything, pretty great when you’re using to hearing traffic all the time 😀

scrap •

03 September, 2025

I shared my swedish pizza lunch, and while I know people have strong feelings about pineapple on pizza, I’m genuinely surprised at how strong the reaction is to the creative use of ingredients we have for pizza. Swedish pizza is some of the best around and that’s a hill I’ll die on!

(one person asked “is this throw-up on pizza?” 😅)

scrap •

drove a car for the first time in a looong while today (years), and after I backed out of the driveway something felt off: I wasn’t 100% sure where I was supposed to be on the road.

I just came to Sweden yesterday, after five days in Bengaluru, India, where I sat in the front passenger seat (i.e. the Swedish driver’s seat). I was positioning the car like I had been sitting in India (fast thinking?).

So I decided to go back to the driveway, because I’m not putting someone else at risk when I haven’t driven for a while and I’m getting a weird feeling.

As I went back I reflected that I know it’s right-hand drive in Sweden (slow thinking?), but I had mostly experienced sitting in that seat as a passenger in left-hand driving countries (Singapore for more than a decade, and just days before, India). I was 95% sure it meant I put myself so I’m closer to the middle of the road.

As I looked it up online: yes, I’m supposed to be towards the middle of the road when driving. I didn’t hit anything. And the sense of the car started coming back after a couple of kilometers. Just like riding a bike 😉

scrap •
Clothes drying on a rotary washing line in a garden on a sunny day. White t-shirt, yellow and green shirts, and dark items hanging against a bright blue sky with forest trees surrounding the yard

random nice thing from visiting my mom: hanging the laundry outside to dry in the sun

scrap •
Pizza in an open delivery box showing banana slices, chicken, curry powder, and peanut toppings. A bottle of orange-colored Trocadero soda sits beside it on a table with a sunny garden in the background

in Sweden I can enjoy one of the best uses of curry: the banana, chicken, curry powder, and peanut pizza! Washed down with an apple/orange soda.

…I really think it would be slightly better with some pineapple, though 😉😇

scrap •

28 August, 2025

Does the word change the "quick fix?"

hack/jugaad vs kludge/bodge

I’m in Bengaluru to attend a friend’s wedding, and it has been fascinating walking around and seeing “the creative ways” of cable management, and my perspective from Singapore and Sweden is definitely to question the safety and longevity.

Coils of cables, some without the protective coating, all just lying around. What looks like some fiber cables for good measure.

Coils of cables, some without the protective coating, all just lying around. What looks like some fiber cables for good measure.

[… more]
crumb • • 3 min read Bengaluru, India • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture

Justin Searls asks which of your colleagues are screwed?

I’ve been writing about how AI is likely to affect white-collar (or no-collar or hoodie-wearing) computer programmers […] Think about a random colleague you don’t feel particularly strongly about as you read the following pithy and reductive bullet points. […] They’re going to be screwed if they exhibit:

  • Curiosity without skepticism
  • Strategy without experiments
  • Ability without understanding
  • Productivity without urgency
  • Creativity without taste
  • Certainty without evidence

I recently said that I think curiosity is what makes a good software engineer, and gave examples of when/how they should be curious, but never pointed out that it has to come with a balancing function.

I can’t think of anything done 100% full-throttle that isn’t detrimental without something to balance it, but it’s tacit and not something I often think about immediately. For example, if you live your life 100% in service it will be limiting, a bit of selfishness is required, see Doug Forcett from The Good Place.

link • Bengaluru, India • #genie, #engineering-culture

26 August, 2025

Kent Beck has a subscriber post called return of Multi-tasking? where he’s realizing he’s more often working on different things across a day now that he’s working with genies. Less time doing clackety-clack and more time thinking about next steps (or napping for epiphanies).

I’ve noticed the same pattern, this “productive multi-tasking” where you shift to something else when you’re stuck or “cogitating in the background.” Whether it’s waiting for feedback, getting help from the CI team (why won’t their plugin inject the AWS credentials it’s supposed to?), or just running out of brain juice and needing to let things percolate (which I want to remember Slow Productivity also recommends, especially for more nebulous work).

link • Singapore • #genie, #kent-beck, #productivity

…because someone said in a meeting to use the lemons to make lemonade and this started shouting in my mind

link • Singapore • #funny

24 August, 2025

Reasonable assumptions

…and why they're (nearly) impossible

As I was writing up angry at the genie, about getting frustrated at a bot for not having my context, I realized I’d done the same thing to a human colleague just months earlier.

A new colleague has been speed-running five years of my accumulated context, and I was getting really annoyed at all their questions. Why weren’t they making any reasonable assumptions? They’re a human after all, with decades of experience. In hindsight, I think that’s exactly why they’re not assuming and instead clarifying.

[… more]
crumb • • 6 min read Singapore • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture, #remote-work

Angry at the genie

…getting exactly what I wished for, eventually

A colleague mentioned he’d like a genie coach to practice first principles thinking, because we had talked about the cooking coach I made and have been using. So I decided to give it a try, whipped up a prompt, and gave it a spin.

I had a problem I’d been working on and wanted to see if there was another way of thinking about it. I also asked it to add behavioral economics as an angle because I’ve been interested in pulling in a more human angle to my thinking (still learning what that means).

[… more]
crumb • • 4 min read Singapore • #thinking-out-loud, #genie, #learning

21 August, 2025

What makes a good software engineer?

“this is what would change my mind”

I was in an AMA at work, and someone asked me what makes a good software engineer. I said: Someone who is curious and wants to understand why from many points of view (tech, product, customer, etc.), and someone who cares about the outcome, not that they were the ones to “get it” or “make the decision.”

The more I think about it, the more I realize that curiosity is the foundation. You need curiosity about the system you’re building, the organization’s actual goals, and especially about the people you’re working with. But curiosity alone isn’t enough, you also need to be intellectually honest about what you find.

The principle I try to live by is: I would rather be correct than right.

[… more]
blog • • 9 min read Singapore • #thinking-out-loud, #engineering-culture

20 August, 2025

15 August, 2025

DIKW pyramid when working with genies

…classification of different types of understanding

Curtis shared the DIKW pyramid, that I hadn’t heard of, and said that he feels that the genies helps him process the first two layers much more quickly than he can alone, that it can somewhat help penetrate into knowledge but not much. Which allows him to spend less time in D/I (collection) and then more to then K/W (processing?)

The pyramid of knowledge with a base of data, the next layer built of information, then knowledge and finally wisdom at the peak.

[… more]
crumb • • 4 min read Singapore • #thinking-out-loud, #genie, #learning

If you start a non-interactive bash shell it will source the content of the file defined in BASH_ENV (and ENV for a POSIX shell).

[… more]
til • • 1 min read Singapore • #shell-scripting

The YAML anchors to name a reusable section are defined by &name and then to use them to replace the value of something you do *name, if you want to “unsplat”/merge a dictionary/object then use <<: *name and then it’ll insert it at that point.

[… more]
til • • 1 min read Singapore • #yaml

13 August, 2025

Commands with commas: I came across this a couple of years ago, and I’ve been using it for my new scripts since.

Debian today supports a huge number of commands; my modest Ubuntu laptop shows several thousand available:

$ apt-file search -x ‘^/usr/bin/[^/]*$’ | wc -l
21733

The solution was obviously to adjust my command names in such a way that they were still easy to type, but would never be chosen as system command names.
[…]

There was but one character left: the simple, modest comma.

A quick experiment revealed in a flash that the comma was exactly the character that I had been looking for! Every tool and shell that lay in arm’s reach treated the comma as a perfectly normal and unobjectionable character in a filename.[…]

And, best of all, thanks to the magic of tab-completion, it became very easy to browse my entire collection of commands. […]
I simply type a comma followed by tab and my list of commands appears

link • Singapore • #shell-scripting, #productivity