/prəˈtruːd/

Pushing through is (not) a strategy

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:24:12 +0200

I never really understood the Just do it¹ mantra.² If it was so easy, it would already have been done. Just suggest it is easy, implying the person doing is the problem. Just do it can be perceived as not very motivating and even can feel a bit condesending, if said to someone who’s failing at something in the very moment.

It’s similar to the idea that success is a matter of mindset. Success is a matter of mindset, amongst other things: circumstances, privileges, like a (financial) safety net, education, etc. Mindset however is something which comes from within according to Wikipedia: “[M]indset is the cognitive process activated in response to a given task”. In other words the term mindset ignores all other factors of success. Mindset can be important, but stating you need the right mindset to be successful, also implies that not being successful means you have the wrong mindset.³ It’s essentially blaming the person rather than providing an approach to achieve a goal.

Trust

Sat, 24 Sep 2022 10:33:58 +0200

Trust is the willingness of one party (the trustor) to become vulnerable to another party (the trustee) on the presumption that the trustee will act in ways that benefit the trustor.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_(social_science)

Whether the trustee will act in a certain way or not, doesn’t not only depend on their intentions, but also their ability.

One kind of trust “is a measure of belief in the honesty, fairness, or benevolence of another party”.¹ And the other kind depends on the skills and competences they have to actually benefit the trustor – or at least not harm them.

Micromanaging up

Sun, 11 Sep 2022 14:18:49 +0200

Wikipedia defines micromanagement like this:

In business management, micromanagement is a management style whereby a manager closely observes and/or controls and/or reminds the work of their subordinates or employees.

– https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromanagement

While the term management style makes it sound micromanagement is somewhat a choice, I more think of it as rooted in insecurities, incompetence, wrong priorities, lack of trust and maybe many more things. So, less of a deliberate choice, but a consequence of something, or the lack thereof.

Hugo Footnotes

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 12:41:21 +0100

I was just scrolling though this list of Markdown features supported by Hugo and noticed that footnotes was one of them. I like footnotes a lot and had a quick look into using them before, but they didn’t work back then. But that was maybe before I looked into using Goldmark as the Markdown processor when writing my last article about code syntax highlighting with Hugo.

Enabling footnotes with Goldmark Link to heading

So it seems I enabled them like this recently when I introduced Goldmark:

Hugo Syntax Highlighting

Mon, 24 Jan 2022 18:41:51 +0100

TL;DR 🚀

As much as I like Hugo, trying to figure out syntax highlighting when writing the last post, wasn’t as straight forward as I wanted it to be. The information I was looking for was a bit all over the place.

First it seems that Hugo is able to use different Markdown handlers. Basically different processors to generate HTML from Markdown. According to Wikipedia Markdown was invented in 2004 by no other than Aaron Swartz. And it also seems Hugo not only supports Markdown handlers, but also processors, which handle other formats, like rst, pandoc or even HTML. Crazy, writing HTML like it’s the 90s 🙃 Here is a list of all content format options.

Optional Terraform Blocks

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 18:44:15 +0100

TL;DR 🚀

Since Terraform 0.12.0 there are arguments and blocks; just two ways of configuring resources. “An argument assigns a value to a particular name” and a “block is a container for other content” (source). Not a very enlightening definition, but after all “just” syntax anyway. Don’t get me wrong, syntax (and therefore UX) is one of the most important aspects of technology in my point of view.

Given some blocks may need to be repeated, Terraform has a way of making them dynamic. Great, but what if Terraform you want to make them optional?

About

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 20:27:53 +0100

Good solutions don’t protrude from the sheer amount of possibilities technology offers. And shitty workarounds, pursued for the lack of a nice solutions, don’t either.

Desired information doesn’t protrude from documentation necessarily, which seems to explain everything but the one thing we’re looking for. Sometimes because we’re looking in the wrong place. A deeper understanding of the topic hides the informational gap from the person who wrote the docs. Hence it’s somewhere else, or doesn’t even exist because of some other assumption we’ve made out of ignorance.