Greifensee Before Breakfast

First morning in the new kayak. Maur to Uster and back if the lake agrees.

Saturday at 06:30 I am taking the new kayak to Greifensee, learning it near Maur, and crossing to Uster if conditions feel right.

  • Open Invitation
  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Life
 Join

The Problem With Calling It Artificial

Determinism, hydrothermal vents, machines, and the soup that keeps organizing itself.

Intelligence once emerged from physics, chemistry, biology, energy, and time. Machine intelligence may be another layer of the same organizing pressure, with human pride standing awkwardly in the way.

  • AI
  • Science
  • Philosophy
  • Technology
  • Future

A Free Boat, A Storm, And The Limmat

Several holes, one PVC repair kit, and an old kayaking dream resurfacing.

I went out for a walk, found a free boat beside the street, repaired it repeatedly, and rowed it to Dietikon through the rain.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Life
  • Yoga

AI Industry Outlook: US, China, And The Full Stack

Trying to look at the machine coldly: stack, energy, culture, policy, and time.

Thinking about AI through the full stack: research, chips, energy, manufacturing, universities, patents, culture, geopolitics, and industrial execution.

  • AI
  • Technology
  • Business
  • Future
  • Market

AI, Markets, And What Remains Scarce

If intelligence and labor become abundant, markets may start pricing very different things.

AI may not make investing obsolete. It may make markets faster while shifting scarcity toward attention, trust, energy, compute, and allocation.

  • AI
  • Finance
  • Business
  • Technology
  • Future

The Bonsai That Survived Me

One headbutt, four silent weeks, and a plant with excellent survival instincts.

I found a bonsai on a Zurich pavement, accidentally removed its only healthy branches, and discovered that it was remarkably difficult to kill.

  • Activities
  • Life
  • Outdoors

Developing aMUZE: A Look Back Through the Diagrams

With what I know now, I see the ambition, the rough edges, and the system thinking that helped make aMUZE work.

Development diagrams from the aMUZE build, and what they reveal about system thinking, authentication, frontend/backend structure, and hindsight.

  • Projects
  • Startups
  • Engineering
  • Architecture
  • Product

Porting My Personal Website Twice

From Next.js to SvelteKit with Codex, then from Azure to Hetzner.

In 2026 I moved my personal website from Next.js to SvelteKit with OpenAI Codex, then moved the infrastructure from Azure to Hetzner when the practical answer became obvious.

  • Engineering
  • Architecture
  • Cloud
  • AI
  • Tools

Putting Memory In Order

Socrates had the street. Dumbledore had a Pensieve. I apparently needed a blog.

Writing gives memories dates, sequence and enough structure to reveal what an unsorted archive cannot.

  • Life
  • Memoir
  • Philosophy
  • Information

The Data Model Is Everything

A product can only understand what its model is able to name, connect, and preserve.

The data model decides what a product can become, and its own UI matters for the people building it.

  • Engineering
  • Architecture
  • Product
  • Information

AI UI Development And Desire Paths

AI makes it practical for interfaces to learn from real behavior and improve beyond the first guess.

AI changes UI work from a one-time prediction into a system that can observe, adapt, and improve around real user paths.

  • AI
  • Design
  • Product
  • Engineering
  • Tools

Revisiting My Investing Scripts

Stock screens, Greek property-listing screens, watchlists, and the recurring need to make judgment visible.

By 2026 the investing work had become a broader private system: stock screens, valuation notes, Greek property-listing extraction, and clearer ways to challenge my own thinking.

  • Engineering
  • Finance
  • Tools
  • Business
  • AI

The E-Monster II: The Most Expensive Component

Used kits, threaded rods, an improvised bending jig, and the one component I could not buy.

I expanded my electronic drum kit with donor kits and improvised hardware. The engineering worked beautifully. Time remained unsolved.

  • Activities
  • Music
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • Engineering

Why My Van Has No Solar Panels

Weeks of calculations put an EcoFlow alternator charger ahead of the roof project.

I wanted solar on the Ford Custom. Cost, reliability and actual use led me to install an EcoFlow alternator charger and battery first.

  • Engineering
  • Vehicles
  • Energy
  • Hardware
  • Tools

The Power Of UI

The same weather data can be a table or a dashboard. The difference is how quickly it becomes usable.

A small weather example made the point brutally clear: UI changes how quickly structure becomes meaning.

  • Design
  • Product
  • Information
  • Engineering

The Ford Ranger With A Boat Battery

I bought my son the electric car I never had and gave it a deeply unreasonable battery.

My older son loved trucks. I found him a broken electric Ford Ranger, kept its healthy motors, and installed a wildly disproportionate boat battery.

  • Parenting
  • Life
  • Repairs
  • Vehicles
  • Engineering

From Azure Credits To Hetzner Reality

Remembering a good cloud experience while choosing the economics that fit the product.

By the time the product came back in 2026, the cloud question had changed: Azure still felt serious, but the schedule and cost profile pushed me toward Hetzner.

  • Engineering
  • Cloud
  • Technology
  • Business
  • Tools

Chickens, People, and AI

Regulation, inevitability, and the train that already left.

AI is already extraordinary. The question is whether humans can meaningfully regulate a force that may soon sit above us in the hierarchy.

  • AI
  • Technology
  • Future
  • Philosophy
  • Engineering

The iPhone 14 Kitchen Timer

A successful screen repair, a dead antenna, and the most overqualified timer in the kitchen.

I replaced the shattered screen on an old iPhone 14. The repair worked beautifully and revealed the next broken thing.

  • Engineering
  • Smartphones
  • Repairs
  • Hardware
  • Tools

A Vacuum Cleaner, Cardboard, And Natural Selection

A street-found Bosch, a dead cable reel, and the Chinese machine that replaced it.

I found a Bosch vacuum cleaner on the street, repaired it with cardboard, and somehow ended up thinking about Chinese industry.

  • Engineering
  • Hardware
  • Technology
  • Tools
  • Business

Every Hundred Kilometres Counted

An old Ford, exhausted tyres, a motorbike in the back, and a winter run to Greece.

I loaded my Honda into an old Transit Connect and drove to Greece for repairs, measuring hope in hundred-kilometre intervals.

  • Life
  • Travel
  • Vehicles
  • Repairs
  • Tools

AI As A Clean Internet Layer

Not better targeting. Not smarter persuasion. Just the content I asked for, stripped of everything trying to hijack me.

AI should give me the internet without ads, clickbait, sponsored steering, dark patterns, and all the machinery trying to handle my mind.

  • AI
  • Tools
  • Product
  • Psychology
  • Technology

Google UX Course: AI And The Language Of Intent

Prompting made design, coding, architecture, and communication feel much closer than expected.

The AI chapters made something obvious: design direction, communication, coding, and architecture are starting to overlap hard.

  • Design
  • Product
  • Education
  • AI
  • Language

A Honda Battery In A Storm

A lithium replacement, one ruined screw, and an old lesson about drilling slowly.

The Honda needed a new battery. A storm, damaged hardware and a drill turned the simple version of that sentence into an evening.

  • Engineering
  • Vehicles
  • Repairs
  • Tools
  • Technology

The Swiss Wall Switch

A dead light, strange wiring, expensive plastic, and one call I preferred not to make.

A wall switch stopped working, the wiring looked strange, and calling someone carried its own Swiss financial suspense.

  • Engineering
  • Hardware
  • Repairs
  • Tools
  • Life

Secure by Design

by Dan Bergh Johnsson, Daniel Deogun, and Daniel Sawano

A useful security architecture book about putting protection into the shape of the system instead of hoping to bolt it on later.

  • Books
  • Engineering
  • Architecture
  • Security
  • Technology

Seven Years To Hold Still

Eventually the angle made sense, the floor stayed below me, and I could do it again.

Yoga first dismantled me in Athens. Seven years later, stabilizing an elbow lever made the long accumulation visible.

  • Activities
  • Yoga
  • Life

Google UX Course: Wireframes And Product Decisions

Sketching, prototyping, testing, and letting the interface expose weak thinking early.

Wireframes are useful because they make product decisions visible before code makes them expensive.

  • Design
  • Product
  • Education
  • Tools
  • Engineering

Google UX Course: Learning To See The User

Research, empathy, and the discipline of designing beyond your own assumptions.

The first useful shift in the Google UX course was simple: design from evidence and real user paths.

  • Design
  • Product
  • Education
  • Psychology
  • Engineering

Free Will Relative To The Simulator

If A can calculate an exact future slice of B, then B has no alternative future. What happens when B becomes A?

Could one physical system calculate an exact future slice of another?

  • Philosophy
  • Science
  • Psychology
  • Information
  • AI

Investing: The Ultimate Challenge

Why I keep coming back to markets as an intellectual challenge.

Investing attracts me because it is philosophy with consequences: judgment, incentives, psychology, courage, patience, and money keeping score.

  • Finance
  • Philosophy
  • Business
  • Books

The Design of Everyday Things

by Don Norman

Norman frames good design as communication under constraints and gives useful names to everyday confusion.

  • Books
  • Design
  • Product
  • Psychology
  • Engineering

Genesis

by Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt

A serious book on AI and civilization that I respected more than I enjoyed. The frame is useful; the conviction did not always land for me.

  • Books
  • AI
  • Technology
  • Future
  • Philosophy

The Ford Custom And The Glue From Hell

The black adhesive under the cargo floor stayed in my nose for six months.

I removed the wooden cargo floor to clean and inspect the metal. The black adhesive underneath turned it into a thinner-and-paint-touch-up operation.

  • Engineering
  • Vehicles
  • Repairs
  • Tools
  • Hardware

The Honda, The Brake Pistons, And The Dremel

A stubborn front caliper and another reason to respect a 2007 machine that refuses to die.

I had never rebuilt the Honda front brake. Bad fasteners, replacement pistons and an old Dremel made the introduction.

  • Engineering
  • Vehicles
  • Repairs
  • Tools
  • Hardware

Updating The Investing Engine

A year later, the tables were useful, but the assumptions were the real work.

After a year of working with investing screens, the interesting work moved toward assumptions, owner earnings, watchlists, and making different investing lenses argue.

  • Engineering
  • Finance
  • Books
  • Tools
  • Business

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator

by Edwin Lefevre

An interesting trading classic, but also a warning label. The game is seductive, the discipline is real, and the life around it can still collapse.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Trading
  • Psychology

Hooked

by Nir Eyal

Nir Eyal gives product behavior a simple loop: trigger, action, variable reward, investment.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Product
  • Design
  • Psychology

Can We Keep Conflict And Lose The Bodies?

Competition has value. Destroying cities is an embarrassingly primitive scoring system.

Conflict drives selection and change. A mature civilization should be able to move the battlefield somewhere less stupid.

  • Philosophy
  • History
  • Social
  • Future
  • AI

The Fine Structure Of Human Potential

Small edges, compound returns, and the absurd amount of talent we throw away.

A small human edge, pointed in the right direction for long enough, can look extraordinary.

  • Philosophy
  • Science
  • Psychology
  • Education
  • AI

The Magnifying Glass Of Difference

Remarkably similar animals with expensive machinery for detecting tiny distinctions.

Human beings are overwhelmingly alike, yet perception and culture turn small differences into tribes and borders.

  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Science
  • Social
  • History

The God Everyone Already Shares

Competing heavens, one ledger, and money as a planetary belief.

Humanity argues over gods while trusting the same ledger. Money may be our most successful shared belief.

  • Philosophy
  • Finance
  • Social
  • History
  • AI

The Committee Pretending To Be Me

Contradictory beliefs and the suspiciously coherent illusion of one self.

People can hold beliefs that would destroy each other if they were ever properly introduced.

  • Philosophy
  • Psychology
  • Science
  • Life
  • AI

Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson made innovation feel ecological to me: coral reefs, dense cities, pressure, accidents, networks, and slow hunches that finally find oxygen.

  • Books
  • Science
  • Technology
  • Psychology

Three Cold Days Under The Ford

A shattered water-pump impeller, a CHF 1,200 quote, and a toolbox I got to keep.

The Ford started overheating on the way back from Germany. Ten cold days later, I had replaced its water pump myself.

  • Engineering
  • Repairs
  • Vehicles
  • Tools
  • Life

Reality Transurfing

by Vadim Zeland

I came across Zeland while looking for something good on attention, intention, psychology, and the stranger edges of self-direction.

  • Books
  • Philosophy
  • Psychology

The E-Monster Is Waiting

A twenty-year drum-kit dream, Superior Drummer 3, and almost no time to play.

I finally built the electronic drum kit I had wanted since 2005. It sounds extraordinary. Most days, it stands there waiting.

  • Activities
  • Music
  • Technology
  • Tools

Chip War

by Chris Miller

Chip War made semiconductors feel like the anti-sexy investing case study: boring-looking bottlenecks, industrial depth, and power hiding in supply chains.

  • Books
  • Technology
  • History
  • Business

The Man Who Solved the Market

by Gregory Zuckerman

The Jim Simons story is fascinating because the edge looks almost alien: mathematics, data, secrecy, patience, and a machine built to see patterns humans could not hold.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Trading
  • Science
  • Technology

Sidepit Exchange

Successfully closed pre-seed

A fair-auction exchange concept for bringing structure to fast-moving markets.

  • Projects
  • Startups
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Trading

Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

by Tren Griffin

Reading Munger was an absolute pleasure. I felt I had discovered a mentor: sharp, unsentimental, broad, and allergic to beautiful stupidity.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business
  • Psychology

Turning Investing Books Into Python Screens

When Greenblatt, Lynch, and a pile of investing books started turning into code.

The investing books became much more useful once their questions started turning into Python screens I could run, inspect, and argue with.

  • Engineering
  • Finance
  • Books
  • Tools
  • Business

Music

A retrospective through 2024 on rhythm, melody, experimentation, performance, and eventually AI-assisted composition.

  • Activities
  • Music

Learn to Earn

by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild

Lynch made business literacy feel practical: own the vocabulary, look at the world, then let screens and formulas start helping.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business
  • Education

100 Baggers

by Christopher Mayer

100 Baggers is about the uncomfortable math of patience: rare businesses, long holding periods, reinvestment, and the discipline to let compounding breathe.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

Beating the Street

by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild

Lynch opening the notebook: examples, ordinary clues, business questions, and the discipline of staying close to the actual company.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

The Airplane Had To Fly Again

My son's favourite toy stopped working. I was quietly delighted to have a reason to solder again.

My son's favourite airplane broke, so I brought out the old tools and turned the repair into a soldering refresher.

  • Parenting
  • Repairs
  • Tools
  • Hardware
  • Engineering

The Baby Tamer

A small electronics experiment built around a very practical family problem.

  • Projects
  • Hardware
  • Parenting
  • Life

A Careful Future For AI Music

The technology is too powerful to dismiss and too important to handle carelessly.

  • AI
  • Music
  • Ethics
  • Rights
  • aMUZE

The Village I Thought Would Always Be There

Koufopoulo always felt available for later. The photographs now know better.

A small village near Andritsaina, photographed across years, and the dangerous confidence that familiar places will wait.

  • Travel
  • Life
  • History
  • Memoir

What The Market Taught Us About AI Music

The reactions were mixed in exactly the ways that made the idea feel real.

  • Music
  • AI
  • Startups
  • Market
  • aMUZE

Microsoft Founders Hub Felt Serious

Azure, startup support, and the rare feeling that a platform was actually helping.

During aMUZE, Microsoft Founders Hub and Azure felt professional, useful, and genuinely helpful after a much colder experience with AWS startup support.

  • Startups
  • Engineering
  • Cloud
  • Technology
  • aMUZE

Fundraising And Sleeping In A Car

Startup romance has terrible upholstery.

A small memory from the aMUZE fundraising period: ambition, runway, pressure, and sleeping in a car while trying to keep the story alive.

  • Startups
  • Business
  • Life
  • aMUZE

When Engineering Becomes Eye Candy

Maker Faire Bay Area had money, motion and some very expensive answers to questions I was not sure anyone had asked.

Maker Faire Bay Area made American engineering ambition wonderfully visible. The practical value was sometimes harder to find.

  • Engineering
  • Technology
  • Design
  • Business
  • Travel

aMUZE - MVP 1

A production music-generation platform built from the award-winning prototype.

  • Projects
  • Startups
  • Business
  • AI
  • Music

Designing An Interface For Expression

The product should start with a human idea, not with a control panel.

  • Product
  • Design
  • Music
  • AI
  • aMUZE

Peak

by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool

Ericsson makes expertise feel less mystical: small differences, repeated over time, become huge visible outcomes.

  • Books
  • Psychology
  • Education
  • Science

Lion City

by Jeevan Vasagar

I read Lion City after travelling to Singapore, trying to understand the precision, ambition, pressure, and strangeness I felt there.

  • Books
  • History
  • Business

Rights, Royalties, And The Missing Ledger

The music industry has a transparency problem hiding inside its paperwork.

  • Music
  • Blockchain
  • Royalties
  • Rights
  • aMUZE

One Up On Wall Street

by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild

Lynch gave me permission to look at real life first, then verify brutally before an observation turns into a thesis.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

Songs As Living Assets

A song can be culture, memory, expression, and also an object with rights attached.

  • Music
  • Blockchain
  • Rights
  • Ownership
  • aMUZE

The Greatest Salesman in the World

by Og Mandino

Og Mandino wraps discipline in a parable so simple that I almost distrusted it at first. Then the book keeps tapping you on the shoulder, annoyingly calm and annoyingly right.

  • Books
  • Business

Fans Should Not Only Listen

The distance between artist and audience is a design problem.

  • Music
  • Fans
  • Artists
  • Social
  • aMUZE

Machine Learning

by Ethem Alpaydin

Alpaydin's Machine Learning gave me a clean way into models, data, training, testing, and generalization without turning the entrance into a ritual sacrifice to notation.

  • Books
  • Science
  • AI

The $100 Startup

by Chris Guillebeau

A fun-to-read book that takes you on a journey around the world with inspiring stories of ingenious entrepreneurs.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Startups

Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain

by David Gerard

Blockchain technology is often hailed as the cure-all solution to many serious problems. I'm delighted to have stumbled upon a book that reveals a layer beyond the glittering surface, and in a way that is informative and entertaining :)

  • Books
  • Finance

After Playlists Comes Personal Music

A playlist is already a confession. AI may let the song itself adapt.

  • Music
  • Personalization
  • AI
  • aMUZE
  • Future

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

Central to Ries's Lean Startup methodology is the Build-Measure-Learn loop, a continuous process of creating an MVP, measuring its success, and using that information to make informed decisions about what to build next. The goal is to quickly test ideas and receive feedback which provides with valuable insight when focusing on the correct metrics.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Startups

When Things Fall Apart

by Pema Chodron

I've had my fair share of exploring mindfulness and meditation, but meditation has always felt intangible and elusive. This book gives structure and concrete approaches to meditation, making it easier to understand.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

by Al Ries

It got me thinking about the difference between a fad and a trend in the marketing world.

  • Books
  • Business

Less Clutter Is The Product Law

Technology tends to disappear into smaller, friendlier surfaces.

  • Product
  • Technology
  • Music
  • aMUZE
  • Creative Tools

Zero to One

by Peter Thiel

Thiel offers a good overview of the startup industry and its history. He touches on the dot-com and the green bubble, discussing how the hype and speculation around internet companies and renewable energy led to market crashes.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Startups

Seven Deadly Sins

by Corey Taylor

Corey Taylor doing what Corey Taylor does best: loud honesty, sharp edges, and an almost uncomfortable appetite for calling bullshit.

  • Books
  • Music

I Am Jackie Chan

by Jackie Chan

A few days ago, I was looking for a good movie to watch and remembered my childhood admiration of Jackie Chan. I looked for any new releases and stumbled upon his autobiography, "I Am Jackie Chan". Once I cracked it open I couldn't put it down.

  • Books
  • Memoir

I Am Ozzy

by Ozzy Osbourne

Just finished reading Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography. A great window into the tortuous life of a rock star. Ozzy grew up in very poor conditions. He couldn't find his place as a student and was a social misfit. But he went on to define the sound of heavy metal and become the Prince of Darkness and eventually a comical but very successful TV personality. A very honest and revealing memoir that doesn't stick to drug abuse and bragging.

  • Books
  • Music
  • Memoir

The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl

He sets an example of how being a rockstar doesn't have to come with excess and substance abuse - considering that his only known vice is drinking too much coffee.

  • Books
  • Music
  • Memoir

As a Man Thinketh

by James Allen

A tiny book with a heavy claim: guard the inner machinery, because sooner or later it leaks into everything else.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

The Book on Investing in Real Estate

by Brandon Turner

Practical real-estate machinery: numbers, leverage, risk, and the unglamorous operational side people usually skip when they fantasize about wealth.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance

Acres of Diamonds

by Russell Conwell

An old-school reminder that opportunity is often less exotic than we imagine. Look harder at the ground under your feet before chasing treasure elsewhere.

  • Books
  • Business

AI Music And The Anxious Musician

The fear is real. The conclusion does not have to be lazy.

  • AI
  • Music
  • Artists
  • Creative Tools
  • aMUZE

The Dhandho Investor

by Mohnish Pabrai

Pabrai was another investing mentor discovery for me: calm, concentrated, asymmetric, and refreshingly allergic to unnecessary complexity.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

Uncle Bob's Clean Code Videos

Some lessons land harder when the teacher has decades of scars and still loves the craft.

Robert C. Martin made software design feel like a serious craft: names, boundaries, discipline, tests, and responsibility toward the next human reading the code.

  • Engineering
  • Architecture
  • Education

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

by Susan Jeffers

A direct book about moving with fear instead of waiting for it to disappear. Useful precisely because it refuses the fantasy of perfect confidence.

  • Books
  • Psychology

1984

by George Orwell

I had been putting off reading this book for quite some time.

  • Books
  • Literature

The Three Ingredients Of Composition

Access, education, and active experimentation decide who gets to turn sound into form.

  • Music
  • Composition
  • Education
  • Creative Tools
  • aMUZE

aMUZE - Prototype

Award: $150,000

Award-winning iOS prototype that turns a whistle or hum into original music.

  • Projects
  • Startups
  • Business
  • AI
  • Music

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

Harari is useful when he slows down the panic and gives the century a table of contents. The problems are still enormous, but at least they stop arriving as one shapeless cloud.

  • Books

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

by Robert Pirsig

As an AI and music enthusiast, I've been wondering if generative AI will help us understand what quality is when it comes to music composition, and whether it will help improve it or lead to an increase in the musical equivalent of junk food.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

AI As The Final Frontier Of Composition

The curve does not ask whether everyone studied music. It asks what tool finally closes the distance.

  • AI
  • Music
  • Technology
  • aMUZE
  • Future

The Little Book That Beats the Market

by Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt gave me a useful machine, but also made me wary of machines that sound too deterministic for something as messy as investing.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

The Smartphone Is A Musical Instrument

A pocket device can now behave like a studio, a notebook, and a strange little orchestra.

  • Music
  • Smartphones
  • Creative Tools
  • aMUZE
  • AI

Electricity Made Music A Mass Medium

The microphone did not create the magic. It amplified it.

  • Music
  • Technology
  • History
  • Media
  • aMUZE

The Little Book of Common Sense Investing

by John C. Bogle

Bogle is probably right in many ways, but emotionally I found indexing too unadventurous. I would rather investigate than surrender curiosity completely.

  • Books
  • Finance
  • Business

Music As Information Technology

Writing changed music because it changed memory.

  • Music
  • Information
  • Technology
  • aMUZE
  • History

The First Music Was Language

Before music was entertainment, it was communication.

  • Music
  • AI
  • aMUZE
  • History
  • Language

Clean Code

by Robert C. Martin

Clean Code made programming feel like a craft of names, boundaries, and small decisions that either help the next human or quietly punish them.

  • Books
  • Engineering
  • Architecture

The Power of No

by James Altucher and Claudia Azula Altucher

A useful book about boundaries, attention and the increasingly expensive habit of letting everything into your head.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

The Physics Was The Easy Part

I set out to make a standing wave visible in fire. The materials had several lessons ready.

I understood the standing-wave experiment. Building a reliable Rubens tube taught me how much work lives between theory and reality.

  • Engineering
  • Science
  • Education
  • Hardware
  • Tools

Physics Graduation: Learning To Think In Equations

A physics degree is not a personality, but it changes how abstraction feels.

Looking back at physics, mathematics, and the quiet confidence that comes from staying with abstract problems for long enough.

  • Science
  • Education
  • Life
  • Engineering

Man's Search for Meaning

by Viktor Frankl

A brutal and necessary meditation on suffering, dignity, and the human capacity to choose an inner posture when almost everything else is taken.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

Vim - IDE

A focused terminal workflow shaped into a fast, personal development environment.

  • Projects
  • Engineering
  • Tools

The Alchemist

by Paulo Coelho

A fable about following signs without becoming allergic to reality. Dreamy, simple, and somehow still hard to dismiss.

  • Books
  • Literature

The Year It Took Me To Start Yoga

Evergreen Studios showed me how badly I needed yoga. Naturally, I waited a year before beginning.

Three sessions at Evergreen Yoga Studios exposed how poor my condition was. It still took me another year to begin.

  • Activities
  • Yoga
  • Life

On the Decay of the Art of Lying

by Mark Twain

Mark Twain being dangerous in a small format: funny, surgical, and annoyingly correct about the social machinery of truth.

  • Books
  • Literature

Tzoumerka In November

Waterfalls, fir trees and a mountain that kept disappearing into cloud.

A late-November journey through Tzoumerka, from deep gorges and waterfalls to fir forest and a cloud-covered ridge.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Autumn In Pelion

Beech forest, cloud below the ridge, and a path almost entirely made of leaves.

A November 2017 walk across Pelion through copper forest, cloud, stone paths and views down to the sea.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Vikos Makes Scale Personal

A gorge large enough to correct the proportions of whatever was occupying my head.

An autumn walk through Vikos Gorge in 2017, among cloud, stone bridges, forest and a highly corrective sense of scale.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Pools, Waterfalls And A Fire After Dark

Polilimnio supplied the cold water. The beach supplied the rest of the evening.

A day among the pools and waterfalls of Polilimnio, followed by the sea, a swimming dog and a fire after dark.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Following The Water Through Antroni

Shade, moss, stone and a dog that understood the plan immediately.

A walk through Antroni Gorge in July 2017, following cool water beneath the trees with a very capable trail companion.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Standing Under Nemouta

The waterfall did most of the talking. I volunteered for the practical demonstration.

A same-day continuation from Antroni into the waterfalls of Nemouta, ending directly beneath the cold water.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

A Tent, A Dog And The Sea

Saint Ilias was a wonderfully uncomplicated arrangement.

A small summer camp beside the sea in July 2017, organized around a yellow tent, a black dog and very few decisions.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Walking The Vouraikos Railway

Tracks, tunnels, July heat and a river waiting at the end.

A July 2017 walk along the rack railway through Vouraikos Gorge, from shaded track to cold river.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Moonwalking With Einstein

by Joshua Foer

A strange and practical tour through memory, attention, and deliberate practice. It makes remembering feel less mystical and more like engineering.

  • Books
  • Psychology

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

by Mark Manson

Years after the success books, Mark Manson brought the argument back to limited attention and chosen responsibility.

  • Books
  • Psychology

Weather Is Part Of The Course

Spray over the deck, soup from metal bowls, and a much calmer head by the time we reached the harbour.

The rougher end of my second sailing course, when bad weather became material, lunch became important and the harbour felt earned.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Back On The Water

The second sailing course began with enough wind to remove any doubt that I had missed this.

Returning to sailing in February 2017, this time with rougher water and enough experience to enjoy what the boat was doing.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Politeia

by Plato

A dense confrontation with justice, order, education, and power. The kind of book that argues with you long after you close it.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

Faidon: Peri Psixis

by Plato

A philosophical farewell staged around death, the soul, and what it means to live as if your ideas matter until the end.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

Learning The Ropes, Literally

By December the ropes, sails and leaning deck had stopped feeling like somebody else's machinery.

The later part of my first sailing course, when instructions began turning into instinct and the boat started making sense.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

The Sea Required My Attention

In late 2015 I joined a sailing class while trying to get out of depression. The boat gave my head something immediate to do.

My first sailing lessons on the Gulf of Patras, and the useful concentration demanded by wind, rope and water.

  • Activities
  • Outdoors
  • Travel
  • Life

Regenesis

by George Church

This book changed how I see the world! It is full of incredible inventions and breakthroughs in bioengineering.

  • Books
  • Science

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

Evolution explained with ruthless elegance. It changes the scale of the conversation from individual intention to machinery much older than us.

  • Books
  • Science

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard Feynman

Feynman was an exceptional physicist. He made significant contributions to the field of Quantum Electrodynamics - a theory that explores the behavior of light and matter at the subatomic scale.

  • Books
  • Science
  • Philosophy

Dog Training

A story about patience, learning, companionship, and the discipline of helping a very smart dog grow with care.

  • Activities
  • Dog Training

The Four Agreements

by Don Miguel Ruiz

The Four Agreements is built from simple rules, but not easy ones. It feels lightweight until you notice how much everyday noise they would remove if actually practiced.

  • Books
  • Philosophy

Awaken the Giant Within

by Anthony Robbins

Tony Robbins was the loud end of my success-reading period: standards, conditioning, decisions and enough voltage to disturb inertia.

  • Books
  • Psychology

The Long Hard Road Out of Hell

by Marilyn Manson

A messy rock memoir with spectacle, damage, and myth-making everywhere. Not exactly clean living; definitely not boring.

  • Books
  • Music
  • Memoir

When Improvement Changes A Place

Concrete is very good at solving one problem and becoming the next one.

A 2012 camera roll from Koufopoulo about water, roads, concrete and the decisions that permanently alter a small place.

  • Design
  • Travel
  • Life
  • History

Seventeen Trees On A Chapel

A small stone church near Vasta, Arcadia, carrying seventeen mature trees on its roof.

Agia Theodora is tiny, surrounded by water and shade, and carrying an amount of life that looks structurally unreasonable.

  • Travel
  • History
  • Outdoors
  • Life

The Patras Bicycle Years

Two bicycles, a stack of audiobooks, and a lot of road spent trying to understand money, business and where I was going.

Most of this reading happened on wheels, somewhere between Patras, physical exhaustion and a stubborn attempt to reason my way forward.

  • Life
  • Books
  • Education
  • Memoir

Richard Branson: Losing My Virginity

Two books about moving early, learning in public and making the adventure part of the business.

Branson brought action, nerve and storytelling into a reading period that had become increasingly occupied with money and systems.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Memoir

The Richest Man in Babylon

by George Clason

Ancient parables reduced personal finance to a handful of habits I could carry through the rest of the reading.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance

Scar Tissue

by Anthony Kiedis

Last book for 2022 - Scar Tissue by RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis.

  • Books
  • Music
  • Memoir

The Society of Mind

by Marvin Minsky

It was very insightful to see his divide and conquer approach. He breaks down mental processes into a hierarchy of k-lines, nemes, polynemes, isonomes, and other agents that, as a whole, make up human intelligence.

  • Books
  • Science
  • AI
  • Psychology

The Millionaire Next Door

by Thomas J. Stanley

The research was a useful correction: financial strength often hides behind an ordinary car and a complete lack of theater.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind

by T. Harv Eker

The seminar-stage language was loud; the question about inherited money scripts was worth keeping.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Psychology

Rich Dad Poor Dad

by Robert Kiyosaki

This was a gateway into assets, liabilities, cash flow and the realization that finance has a language of its own.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie made the inconvenient point that almost every system still contains people.

Business kept leading back to attention, respect, memory and the human machinery behind every apparently rational decision.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Psychology

Think and Grow Rich

Napoleon Hill's famous promise, heard during long bicycle rides through Patras.

The title makes an enormous promise. The book gave me a few useful mechanisms and an origin story worth examining carefully.

  • Books
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Psychology

Pickup Culture, Confidence, and the Industry of Desire

A dated, uncomfortable, and revealing self-development detour.

A look back at a controversial reading detour: confidence, insecurity, social courage, manipulation, and the strange industry built around desire.

  • Books
  • Psychology
  • Social

Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Industry, capital, scale and the uncomfortable responsibility that follows a fortune.

Carnegie moved my reading from individual invention into industrial systems, accumulated capital and what happens after success arrives.

  • Books
  • History
  • Business
  • Finance
  • Memoir

Thomas Edison

The laboratory, the team, the patents and the money were part of the invention.

Edison helped me see invention as a complete operating system made of research, people, capital, manufacturing and demand.

  • Books
  • Science
  • History
  • Business

My Inventions

by Nikola Tesla

Tesla made me think seriously about the distance between scientific brilliance, financial control and a life that holds together.

  • Books
  • Science
  • History
  • Business

The Mysterious Island

by Jules Verne

During a recent business coaching program, we were challenged to compete with pitch decks on solutions for a city ravaged by a hurricane. The event was intense. People came up with cutting-edge ideas involving robots, IoT smart infrastructures, drones etc.

  • Books
  • Literature

The Book That Finally Made Me Sit Still

My parents started me with Harry Potter book four. It worked rather too well.

My parents gave me Harry Potter book four to keep me still for a while. They got considerably more silence than expected.

  • Books
  • Literature
  • Life

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

by Mark Twain

Adventure, mischief, and the American boyhood myth machine in full motion. Funny, alive, and more complicated than its nostalgic surface.

  • Books
  • Literature

Paramithi Xoris Onoma

by Pinelopi Delta

A Greek childhood fable-world entry from Pinelopi Delta: simple surface, old emotional weather, and the kind of story that carries memory more than plot.

  • Books
  • Literature

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