michal.piekarczyk.xyz

Longer-form posts about whatever I'm exploring.

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  Gardening time Dec 28, 2025

  Life’s a garden, can you dig it? That is what a colleague of mine had said very often when we worked together, about how you need to put time and effort into stuff. You know, get your hands dirty ! Picking up my shovel Today I finally took a first step to trying out this digital gardening concept on Maggie Appleton’s blog0. I came across back on haha I don’t know why but on 2025-07-04 , I guess it was a kind of independence day in my brain, from the march of chronology.

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  Skip the Jetlag Dec 11, 2025

  Came back from a flight from New Delhi , Monday morning, that left New Delhi just after midnight and 16 hours later arriving in New York around 5:30 am. And so far today, Thursday morning, I feel kind of fine, not really jet lagged, in the sense of wanting to wake or sleep at odd hours. The specific strategy I did in attempting to align meal time and sleep time with the destination time zone was to fast the day of the flight until lunch time arrival at my destination.

• Something is not Tracking Dec 10, 2025

  Recently I went on a trip to India where so much was going on I stopped using my meal tracking. And on this trip the other thing that happened was that half the time, I was in a plane, waiting for a plane, or on a bus –or on the back of a Maruti Suzuki offroad Jimny– or otherwise sedentary. And yet, after the brief 10 day trip, I carved off an inch and a half off my waist and dropped over 6 pounds on the scale.

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  Safety first Nov 8, 2025

  I was recently reading this Forbes article1 on a colleague’s recommendation, asking the question, “Why So Many Leaders Say They Want Innovation But Reward Compliance”. The author’s answer is essentially that it is easy to talk about innovation, but because it is less predictable, then safe bets are rewarded by default and a vicious cycle ensues. Innovation is an optical illusion and idea seeds do not get planted. I think there is another answer worth exploring.

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  Forecast, sunshine and rainbows Nov 7, 2025

  I was going through this interesting discussion1 about PI Planning recently, because I’m in the middle of writing2 about the first PI Planning I participated in as well. I have not encountered the hosts before, but I take it that this is a discussion between someone who is represents Scrum, Ryan Ripley and SAFe, Yuval Yeret, respectively. I picked up that Yuval represents the business perspective and when he hears statements like “it’s done when it’s done”, he thinks “not mature”.

Fleeting notes and thoughts that might take shape later.

• Iteration Planning Feb 1, 2026

  Notes, reading this article. Has some zingers in here , hah! The iron cross, maybe without one leg? You can’t cheat the scope–time–quality triangle. If we try to fix time and scope, quality takes the hit. In a developer-facing product, degraded quality means support escalations, technical debt, and broken trust. Like any debt, technical debt must be paid back, and its interest compounds over time. I have heard many variations of this.

• Hook Up Cloudflare Rag Search Jan 31, 2026

  Here are some of my notes on adding Cloudflare AI search as the endpoint for my hugo site’s search. Summary The other weekend, I randomly looked into some minimal ways to set up RAG search on my hugo site. A year prior, I had tried out3 TypeSense as a hosted vector embedding store for a several million row many gigabyte dataset but a hugo text site is pretty small so I was wondering what the price might be for this.

• do you have a flag? Jan 31, 2026

  no flag no country Steve Huyhn (aka A Life Engineered ), discusses here , https://youtu.be/oLzj67H-OHo , a few career concepts he says he had to unlearn. One being about hoping if he does good work, it will surely get noticed. But he points out thats highly unlikely to happen. His alternative is to get better at self promoting, starting gently if youre not a natural braggart, highlighting the work of others and then slipping in alongside something you did too, in some email say or chat message.

• Why do anything Jan 24, 2026

  My friend asks me, in reference to a Goggins interview, what do I think about doing things you don’t want to do? Let me write out my thoughts here since I have been thinking on this topic for a long time! There are many ways of thinking about this topic and depending on which frame of reference you are wearing at any one time, you will form a totally different point of view.

• how-to-make-cake Jan 19, 2026

  Started reading, preview, AI Snake Oil. Reading retelling of what a developer Thomad Ptacek received from ChatGPT about how a biblical verse would explain removing a peanut buttee sandwich from a VCR. The below makes me think of the Russel Peters standup routine where he demonstrates how a particular man would stereotype explain how to bake a cake. “Fear not, my child, for I shall guide thy hand and show thee the way.