It’s been almost 5 months since the last reflection here. Let’s do another post with assorted bits and bytes.

A year back, I had announced an experiment to move back to Windows after ~15 years of Arch Linux. I loved the stability but missed the tinkering. My terminal based Windows configurations worked well for both home and at work. I couldn’t find the minimalism that had already spoiled me. Here we are, a year later, writing this post from Arch again. I’m enjoying the i3, alacritty, tmux and zsh based setup. And yeah, I did replace dmenu with rofi finally. It feels like I am home.

It’s time to announce this year’s experiment ;) Being and understanding humans.

Amongst our friend circle we always joke about how software development is 99% people and 1% technology. I’ve probably walked half of working life on technology. And by this measure, I have not discovered the larger 99% first hand.

We’ll change that this year.

I keep calling myself an overhead now. I do sincerely hope to be an enabler, try to be a good human being and learn to amplify others. We’ll see how that goes for an introvert personality.

I am still a back bencher. No plans to change that.

Switching topics to e-readers (Kindle).

I decided to never update the software on my Kindle. It will be permanently on airplane mode. I’ve grown fond of this little piece of hardware over the years. It has replaced physical books for me. The problem: newer updates are not solving the one job I’ve hired this device to do. Too many distractions e.g. showing me the books I ought to like.

Nope. Not any more.

I used the jailbreak↗ exploit released this April and installed koreader↗. It’s a little reader software with support for open standards (epub), annotations, dark mode etc. I need to update my reading and notes collection workflow to match koreader. Look for an update to noted↗ soon!

There’s one learning from the above exercise.

A software developed by passionate readers is way more valuable than the one developed with other ulterior motives. I am not sure if it’s about reducing churn, improving engagement, and keeping me glued to the device along with providing more data for the parent company.

At least the reader is not another number on a funnel.