Posts

Recently, myself and the rest of NYC went through a cold spell and news outlets reported2 the 13 day stretch of sub-zero weather, ending Feb 6th, was not longer than a 16 stretch in 1881. And this was shorter than a 1963 stretch, but tying a 2018-01-13 streak. But this recent winter sure felt extreme. I know there is a recency bias, but I figured, why not also compare the area under the curve too. So I ranked the coldest 14-day stretches, using available data of the past decade. And then tried to visualize the spans of the coldest years too. ...

Email forwarding mystery solved Feeling several facepalms now that my michal@piekarczyk.xyz email finally forwards to my hey.com email inbox. After several sessions of tweaking, the answer was low tech! Registrar forwarding Originally, I setup mail forwarding on my domain registrar. Only $5 a year, okay why not. After proving to my registrar I owned my hey email, I was all set, but tests yielded silence. I spent several chat sessions with a support engineer at my registrar. He pointed out I was missing SPF and DKIM records for my custom domain and so he added those. Those have nothing to do with delivering mail to my address and only help to authenticate mail sent from my domain, but I figured what the heck let’s try something. That did not work. ...

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. ...

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. It would have been ideal if I was able to sleep during the red eye though not doing so was also perhaps fine since by the time I crashed on Monday at around 19:00, I had about 16 + 16 + 12 = 44 hours of sleep pressure in the tank. And then when I slept for basically 12 hours, waking at 7 am on Tuesday, and getting the morning sun, I was basically back in my rhythm. And so far, sleep on Tuesday night and Wednesday night was pretty okay. ...

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. (Side note, I know that “intra-day” variability can be high, because I have personally seen a reset of 5 pounds , within a day’s worth of eating, answering the call of nature and exercising, and so on, but “inter-day” variability, should be lower, when you weigh-in at a consistent time of day). ...

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. Steve Jobs has been quoted for saying, I’m paraphrasing, that “A’s hire A’s and B’s hire Cs and D’s” . I choose to think this quote speaks to multiple dimensions including creativity. My brief time on this earth tells me that most people are not that creative/innovative. And I suspect this Forbes article is on point that the reason why most people are not innovative, is it was beaten out of them at an early age. But an essay3 by Sam Altman, clarifies that risk taking on its own is not the winning answer, that you instead have to smell out the thing to do which makes sense, after lots of trial and error, despite the people comfort-zoning around you, discouraging you, and dive deep whenever you strike gold. ...

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”. He says you need some predictability to be serious about business. Overall he characterized PI Planning as how to “assume viability, while preserving options”. ...

DRAFTING I have for a while now learned about how the mainstream deals with knowledge work glut. I was a big fan of David Allen’s Getting Sh*t Done–just kidding ;D it was Getting Things Done1. And I forget where, but I also came across the notion that all the pre-digital-era ideas to getting your sh*t together don’t apply since paper cuts are nothing compared to a digital sh*t storm. Ok enough of that bullsh*t. ...

Who has two thumbnail learnings about hugo blog post images? 😀👍👍 Note that I finally learned how to make hugo blog links sent by imessage have thumbnails and I re-learned how to make hugo blog posts thumbnails show up. So as far as text message thumbnails go, apparently, since my images live on s3, I needed to make sure their content type was image/jpeg because in my case they were binary/octet-stream. ...

I had a random idea recently, hey can hugo display charts from data in a google sheet? I wanted to perhaps use public accountability to help encourage me to start night fasting earlier. The result is here. And since my goal was public accountability, this made the task easier since I was able to just use a public google sheet, so security and authentication was mostly a non issue.