Protobuf or more precisely Protocol Buffers is a data serialization format developer by Google and it is designed to be language-agnostic. What’s important (and what makes it a better choice than ie. JSON) is that it automatically provides validation of data, preserves order in arrays and provides pre-generated classes that do all the hard work with set of setters and getters. Magic is done by compiling .proto files with schema into language files.

Disclaimer - I found this solution thanks to my friend Piotr who needed it for different use case, described below.

Recently I had to use multiple repositories on one server with different deploy keys. Solution suggested by github docs was not viable, because I could not alter hostname easilly, as it suggest. It turns out, that actually you can use different keys on per directory basis, when using git. It’s doable thanks to git conditional includes:

It turns out, that I’ll will do hell lot of writing in weeks to come. So this is, what I’m focusing on now

• Writing for Engineers - this is great summary about writing in tech companies. At the end you can find few recommendations, eg. “Leverage small writing tasks as exercise” - and I find it super important. Email should be well strucutres, support ticket should well describe the problem to avoid confusion and bring understanding. And Slack messages are much better when though-though - at least I have this ugly habbit of writing many short messages, that might get hard to understand.
• Technical Writing  |  Google Developers - even google teaches about writing. If they’ve prepared their own course, it means how important this actually is.
• Blogging for busy programmers - it’s worthwhile mentioning that my old friends onec wrote a decent book about blogging as a developer.
• The productivity tax you pay for context switching - I’m still struggling with that. For now I try to be very aware when I switch between tasks and I try to do timeboxing - and it helped me a lot during last week. Don’t forget to read comments on HN

Longer break, than initially anticipated and planned. Actually spent either on vacation or quite busy building… a treehouse for my kids. At some point I (probably) will share some photos and details about it.

• Emery – personal workspace for busy people - this is… interesting. Testing this this week. As they call it - Personal workspace for busy people. Normally I use sort-of bullet journal, but I was missing something that could help me put my tasks on a calendar.
• My Engineering Management Values - Luca Pette My two biggest take aways are:
  • developer book - well, we do have notion, but it’s messy. I have it in my pipeline to organize it better (first step - by creating new notion page…)
  • internal blogging - that’s something that Christof Damian suggested to me last week and I think it’s great idea we’ll try to put in place relatively soon (yes, we do have notion, but again - it’s messy)
  • lead by example - I need to learn how to schedule messages, rather that send them during weekends
• Installing thermal pads on MacBook Air M2 - It’s seems that new M2 MacBook Air is the first one, I’ve actually opened and… tuned. If you can call adding some thermoconductioning tape “tuning”. Nonetheless those machines do not have any active cooling and M2 tends to overheat and throttle. For me it was an easy win.
• Is your smartphone ruining your memory? A special report on the rise of ‘digital amnesia’ - there is this thing with taking photos - when you’re focusing on taking them, you’re actually allowing your brain to forget current situation, as it’s going to be offloaded to different source. It’s good to be aware, that there is much more to that.
• John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets | Lex Fridman Podcast #309 - Lex Fridman hosted John Carmack. So far I was only able to start listening to this, but man… this IS good. And Masters of Doom is actually my favourite book about IT industry.

I wanted to have a break from normal, day to day stuff at the company (one or the other). But as soon as I got to our destination and I found out, that there is no network coverage nor internet, I started to feel unsafe. One of todays links is about our attention span. For me is also about how addicted to tech and connectivity are we.

• Life is not short- “The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable” I’m not sure yet about how I feel about recent wave of stoicism, but this resonates with me. Life is long adventure and is up to us to take as much of it, as possible. Constant chase for money causes days and time to somehow leak, making false impression, that life is short.
• On how smartphones fragment out attention span - I’m becoming more and more aware of this problem, haven’t addressed it yet. But when driving, I only drive. When walking, I try to only walk. Phones are taking more and more of our lives and the worst part is that at expense of most beloved ones. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t have Facebook nor Instagram on my phone.
• Your body knows you’re burned out - there are few obvious points there, but I was not aware of few other. No spoilers, definitelly everyone should read it. And every manager should have this printed, framed and memorized.
• Things I wish everyone knew about Git (Part I) - as in title. Last week I’ve shared the link to a book which will get you better with shell. And you’re probably using git as well, so it’s worth knowing how it works. Nice read - be sure to also go down the rabbit hole.
• Red, white but rarely blue – the science of fireworks colors, explained - we’re moving away from fireworks, but next time you see blue explosion in the sky, be sure to appreciate anyone who created it.
• Huawei MatePad Paper - I’ve just got this. With a little bit of luch I’ll write short summary (I already have some experience using remarkable 2 and Onyx Boox Note 3)

I’m on long overdue vacation, so this weeks set of links is shorter than I’d like it to be. Same as the next one (most likely) will be, as my connectivity is limited.

• On traveling light - https://levels.io/carry-on-world-travel/ and https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/06/20/backpack.html. I’m a hoarder that would like to become minimalist. Or at least have less useless stuff. But in the end I still buy (or print) a lot of shit. Reading such posts every few weeks makes me think about making a change. And I believe, that someday such post will trigger a significant change. Not this time, but maybe soon.
• Herman Martinus wrote about his experience of keeping a journal for 6 years. 6 years. Six. God damn it, that’s a lot. And gives fantastic perspective on looking at own life and decisions (or processes leading towards some most significant decisions). The idea of journaling resonates with me, but I never kept doing it for longer than a week. From personal experience it helped me go through some most difficult decisions and I regret being consistent with it.
• Effective Shell - as console one of the core skills of a developer. It actually should be obligatory for anyone using terinal on day to day basis. Using bare bash might be of concious choice. But using up arrow to find one of previously run commands is not.

I forgot it’s not that easy to keep up with some periodic commitment. But given my history with running or any other type of exercises, I should already know what to expect. Nonetheless, with some delay, he it is.

• If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it A long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by scientists - this video shows how sunscreen works. Worth 3 minutes of your time - https://youtu.be/o9BqrSAHbTc
• How to think clearly - because thinking (clearly) is much more difficult, that one would expect. And I got the feelting that it slowly becomes the lost art.
• dooit - A todo app for your terminal. One of many, but this one looks really great
• I love such apps, eg I use lazygit as part of mine daily workflow
• (d&d) The Night of the Rise is a nice, “different” adventure to plan as a one-shot, when you (or your players) need something different than usual dungeon crawl. I’d love to run more adventures like this one.
• Hundreds of SpaceX employees signed letter denouncing Elon Musk’s behavior it must be super difficult to work on history-changing product (which SpaceX definitelly is) under leadership of a guy, that can be… difficult to accept. Beside their non-existing work-life balance, I think this will soon lead to sound ground-braking changes that will alter company (and for sure Tesla) for ever.

So this is the humble start. I plan to write more + get some photos in here, but let’s take baby steps. Idea to start blogging and start with links got highly inspired by great weekly review Christof Damian is doing (with whom I have a pleasure to work with).

• My sister in law with her husband went off to Canada. They plan to travel across it on… bikes. Not motorbikes, as most (me?) civilized people would do - on regular, old fashioned, ecological bikes. They’re about to travel over 11,5k km in circa 4 months. They’ve started instagram and blog, you can read it in Polish or just look at photos
  • on a sidenote Lufthansa delivered only one of their bikes 48h after they’ve landed in Canada. Good job Lufthansa, we’re proud of you.
  • same Lufthansa, which is going to charge you (€25/$35) for seat selection if you’re in Economy class
• Those new MacBook Airs… god damn it, I don’t get it how Apple is doing it - I have enough laptops, but I still want this new one in midnight (blackish) color. Even though it’s crazy expensive (but there is no surprise in here)
• I’ve (re) started learning Elixir, some useful resources I’m using (and can only recommend) are:
  • Exercism - great, well aligned coding exercises.
  • Advent of Code - I really love their stories and riddles, but they tend to be quite time consuming. But in my opinion nothing teaches about language API as good as those.
  • Elixir for programmers -this one is more about Elixir and Erlang, less about the API. But it’s well designed, teaches about pattern matching, arity, OTP, basics of distributed services.
• Dwarf Fortress seem to be on its finish line - I really can’t wait to get my hands on this game -
• (d&d) An Ogre and His Cake was a nice adventure to run for my kids. I’ve also ordered few archival adventures from dndadventureclub.com (and started a subscription), we’ll see how this will go.
• European Parliament votes to ban combustion engine cars from 2035. This is a good move, but beside car makers and regular people shifting their minds, we still need infrastructure to hold it. Imagine everyone with car occupying gas distributor for ~1h - it’s not scalable. Beside more charging stations, we need better batteries / charging tech. But one question remains - where from will we get all the power in situation, where during summer we’re on the edge of hitting blackout (because of air conditioners)?