Blogs

This week we have lost 2 legends of the Science Fiction world. Walter Koenig died on Sunday and Patrick Stewart on Wednesday - only three days apart. Many articles have been written already about their lives and deaths. People have told stories and obituaries have been posted. So, I’m not gonna do any of that.

I have never met either actor in person and so I wouldn’t want to assume to have anything but a passing understanding of who they were as people, purely based on what they shared publicly, what could be seen on screen or stage and what people in their friend circles said about them. Instead I’m going to focus on what their lives, and deaths mean to me as someone who has been a lifelong fan of their work.

To make it short: I did my first solo flight yesterday afternoon and it wasn’t scary at all. It was fun!!!

After wading through bureaucratic hurdles for the last year and spending a bunch of money for lessons and other things, plus a whole lot of practicing, I felt ready. Also thanks to two really amazing instructors, Peter Olt (our Head of Training) and Günter Krenn. Both taught me the many little things you need to pay attention to when flying (and also the big things). Especially when it comes to landing an airplane, which takes some time to get right.

The Moment of Truth

So when they stepped out of the cockpit right after my phase 2 progress check on Sunday afternoon, I wasn’t even all that nervous. I knew I got this. Been doing this for months now. I also knew that I had them on the radio should anything come up. Can’t say I was totally cool 😎, but not as nervous as I had anticipated I would be.

Yes, it was weird at first: nobody next to you who you can double check your decisions with. No real safety net. Nobody you can talk to either. So I just focused on what I had learned and step by step went through my checklists and procedures. Talked to myself quite a bit too during the flight which helped 😉 Verbalizing the things you are about to do is a good practice. Also helps you think ahead.

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This review contains spoilers for episodes 1 and 2 of Star Trek Starfleet Academy.

As both a lifelong Star Trek fan and lover of young adult fiction, Star Trek Starfleet Academy seemes tailor-made for me. But while the show nails the futuristic aesthetic of the Discovery era, it stumbles badly where it matters most: the writing.

I was and still am genuinely excited about this show. For one, it’s freaking NEW STAR TREK, and I just can’t get enough. Also, it’s in the “Disco¹ future” which is my favorite show and timeframe. I’m a futurist at heart.

“Wow, you haven’t seen that?”

If you’ve ever confessed you never watched a so‑called “everyone’s seen it” series and your friends reacted like you’d admitted you’ve never tried pizza — RetroRewatch is for you. It’s my podcast with Jeff where we go back to the cultural touchstones Jeff somehow skipped (and I maybe haven’t seen in years), and we watch them — sometimes pilot to finale, sometimes a curated run — with fresh eyes, honest reactions, and a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Here’s a fun little problem I recently ran into:
Especially when your team is remote (and who isn’t these days???), how do you decide who’s going to start the daily standup meeting of your agile team?

Obviously you don’t want to always have the same order of people, but just picking someone at random could be biased towards whomever you see first.

iOS’s Shortcuts app to the rescue! It’s super simple, because the Shortcuts app already has a “Random item from list” snippet. So all you need is a list of team members and that snippet.

When it comes to writing CLI tools or simple scripts, bash is a pretty good solution. If you follow a few simple rules and make sure to check & document all your dependencies, you can create tools that work on a wide variety of systems and platforms (even Windows). However, where bash starts to fall down is when you need to create much more complex tooling. Not impossible, but it just gets harder and harder to maintain (and also lacks a few basic features of modern languages).

Some of you may remember that I switched my websites over to Hugo a while ago. Not only is Hugo much easier to set up and generates sites much faster, it’s also very easy to adapt to your needs.
One such adaption was how I publish my podcasts.

Some people use Wordpress (with a plugin like Powerpress) or Squarespace to do it, but that’s a lot of overhead for something that’s essentially super simple. So Hugo (a static site generator) to the rescue.

As some of you may have noticed, I recently changed my site layout. That, however, wasn’t the only change to the site. Behind the scenes, I moved my site from Jekyll to Hugo. Let me explain why.

The awesomeness of static site generators

Over the last few years, I’ve fallen in love with static site generators. For a tinkerer, content creator and developer like me, they offer a lot of desirable things:

A few weeks ago, I finally made the jump from a traditional combustion engine car to a fully electric one (BEV).

Here’s my review at the British Tech Network