What is the most badass instrument on earth? No, not the guitar, not the drums: the organ. Just listen to this and tell me this does not reach your soul. Which instrument is a good second? The synthesizer. Just like the organ, it can go extremely hard and loud. So loud, it tickles something in…
My new superpower at work
I’ll talk about what I do first and about the tool I use last, because y’all start salivating as soon as a specific tool is mentioned. I found that out when I wrote a short post on LinkedIn about my newfound superpower at work. People in the comments latched onto the tool first, and not…
Pissing the night away
I’m used to visiting the toilet quite a lot every day because I seem to have the smallest bladder of all mankind. “Maaike, I really don’t want to learn about your urination habits”, I hear you think. I understand, but I just wanted to write down this story, and it involves me pissing. The pissing…
Starting a new IT assignment is like solving a jigsaw puzzle…
It’s just that: – you don’t know how many pieces the puzzle has – whether you need all the pieces – which part of the jigsaw puzzle is relevant for your role
Why don’t you hear what I say? (LLEWT 2024)
LLEWT 2024 was a peer conference with the theme “communication” that happened a few weekends ago in North-Wales. Dear reader, it was quite the trip to get there! A boat, an extremely shitty English hotel and a long car ride later we finally arrived in Wales. It took us about 28 hours to get there…
“Good vibes only”. How about you learn how to cope?!
I was at LLEWT last week, a peer conference on Anglesey, north Wales, where the theme was: communication. My report, “Why don’t you listen to what I say” was chosen by the content moderator. I’ll write about that topic on a separate occasion, because right now I feel like ranting about something that came up…
Stop trying to make refactoring happen, it’s not going to happen.
I went to Joy of Coding yesterday, a one-day conference in Rotterdam. Two of the talks were about refactoring. One talk called it “mending code”, and zoomed in on this rather strange phenomenon in IT: we’d rather demolish some code and write it new and fresh, than fix the existing code to make it better.…
About that time I was “blessed” by the algorithm.
Imagine trying to say things that contain nuance on social media in the year of the lord, 2024. Yeah, that shit doesn’t fly well with the algorithms. The algorithms decide if you will win the popularity contest on the internet, by pushing out your content to more people to get that sweet, sweet engagement. I…