Category: English
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What’s in my eclipse bag? (2026)
Following tradition, we’ve prepared some devices for scientific joy and discovery. We’ll bring these with us along with food and water. Stay hydrated and sunshadowed, it’s hot (until it’s not).
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If it’s reversible, decide fast
The first time I consciously used the rule, we lived in Lugo. I vividly recall the two of us standing in the MediaMarkt sound aisle, agonizing over which of two portable speakers we should buy. With the form factor and price decided, the sound quality was the missing piece. And what a piece. Unlike with…
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Find me similar problems
One of things I do with LLMs is to ask them for problems similar to the one I’m solving. This is something I’ve picked from reading Claude Shannon’s Creative Thinking: reasoning by analogy. This is how and why it works in its own words: A very similar device is seeking similar known problems. I think…
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Kasparov’s law
A weak human player combined with a machine and a better process is superior, not only against a very powerful machine, but, most notably, against a strong human combined with a machine and an inferior process. — Garry Kasparov, Don’t fear intelligent machines. Work with them.
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Get motivation from LLMs
One of the common conversations with friends lately is: how do you use LLMs? In the latest round, I mentioned that I use LLMs to motivate myself — and people were surprised. In turn, I was surprised they were surprised, because when comparing notes with other peers at work, many shared LLMs were useful for getting…
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Sheets that spread
During my 1st Automattic Grand Meetup I gave a flashtalk (under 4 minutes) about spreadsheets.
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Air at Cúpula Atlántica
I attended a private concert by Air inside the Cúpula Atlántica, a ~200-person dome at Monte de San Pedro. The park is one of my favorite places in A Coruña. Even though I’ve been there multiple times, I had never been inside the dome. As far as I remember, it was abandoned and not in…
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Remembering is healing, and forgetting valuable
In Eulogy, the final episode of Black Mirror’s seventh season, a man receives a device that allows him to virtually enter a photograph and explore its location. He is asked to use it to recall stories about a woman who has passed away — someone who had been his girlfriend decades earlier. After their breakup,…
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You can’t hide on bad days
Here’s a lesson I learned from my mom: you’ll have bad days, and kids need you anyway. It’s one of those things that parenting teaches, and I believe it’s transferable to product development. A product isn’t built on one big idea, it’s built from thousands. It takes daily steering. If you hide on bad days,…
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Make your pull requests answer a single question
There are some pull requests that are more daunting to review than others. Some struggle to find reviewers and to be merged while others don’t. How to tell them apart? And, more importantly, how do you make sure yours land faster and with fewer bugs? One aspect you could look at is size. In many…
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A year of spaced repetition
I am naturally drawn to new topics and often spend weeks diving into them. But I’d forget most of it just a few weeks later. I wondered if spaced repetition would help me retain what I’d learned. So, over the past 365 days, I’ve kept a daily routine to study flashcards using Anki. The topics…
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The paper menagerie, by Ken Liu
Thoughts on a short story that won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards.
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The bottom of the harbor, by Joseph Mitchell
A book that collects six articles published by Mitchell in TheNewYorker in the 40s and 50s.
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Review this for me
Follow-up to “refactor this for me”. Can a LLM provide expert-level code reviews?
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Chip War, by Chris Miller
This book tells the story of the semiconductor industry from the 1940s to the early 2020s.
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My first side quest in Gutenberg
How docgen, the tool used in Gutenberg for auto-generating JavaScript API docs, came to be.