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It's still work in progress but new posts will be published on  https://kula.blog/ Thanks to 11ty base blog RSS is working from the start so it should be easy to add to your reader if you still use any :) If now then I hope you can sign up to the newsletter where I'll be publishing new posts and interesting articles to it from time to time. Please use  kula.blog  from now on.

I will be moving this blog to a new domain and may lose some of the subscribers if you're using RSS for example. I hope that the email list can help with the migration (modal + sidebar). In the future, I also think about sending interesting articles and news about tech and books, but all the things that interest me :) Maybe that's something that you would find worth your effort to subscribe. >>>  Signup page  <<<

Recently I'm reading a lot less about tech and more about culture and have a bunch of things I can recommend: 21 Lessons for the 21st Century Falling into Faith SHAME STORM SJWJS On my todo list: The Coddling of the American Mind As you probably can guess my view changed in the last couple of years on a bunch of topics. I still consciously try to remain in the middle in the discussions on the topics like `women in tech` as I don't want to be associated with actions of the most devoted believers. For example,  GitHub's ElectronConf postponed because all the talks (selected through an unbiased, blind review process) were to be given by men.  is far from  How blind auditions help orchestras to eliminate gender bias .

 I was listening to a podcast episode:  Command Your Focus and Attention on What Really Matters with Chris Bailey  and noticed a really good analogy. " What allows traffic to move forward at a solid space is how much space exists between the cars on the highway" What struck me about it is that I can use it to explain team productivity in different organizations I was a part of. Some of them tried to pack the sprint with tasks to the full, but in some, it was ok for the team to pick a 'safe' amount of tasks so that they could be sure to accomplish them. Before I was thinking about the benefits of slack time that allows the team to work on important things (not only urgent) and to have space for urgent things if they show up. The great feeling of accomplishment when you finish last scheduled task day before the end of the sprint and can tackle additional bug or two or the confidence to spend additional hour making code more maintainable before fin...

Today I've watched a presentation by Marcin Stożek called  How to train your BASH  and wanted to remember the most interesting points for later. 1. It's best if you follow a style guide There seems to be only one though  Google Shell Style Guide . 2. You can set Bash to  "strict mode"   It sets more human-friendly defaults and makes sure you won't miss any errors in your scripts. #!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail IFS=$'\n\t' 3. Shellcheck Turns out there is a tool called  shellcheck  that can help you write scripts that you intended to write. Best thing is that it explains what's wrong and gives you suggestions on how you can fix it. 4. You can enable 'debug mode' when running your script Just pass " -x " to the script eg.  >  bash -x ./my_script.sh 5. Use Pure Bash No one wants to see weird errors when running the script on a new server so it's best if you avoid using external programs in yo...

This tweet made me remember my own pondering of the exact same question and how hard it is to guess what is going to be relevant in the future. A lot of people answer that by saying that you have to always learn but the question is not "Should I learn?" but "What I should learn?". Unfortunately, no one can predict the future. I would even say that the question itself is flawed. I'm reading Farnam Street blog for some time already and one of the last posts goes deeper into this problem: What’s Staying the Same ? If you start looking for things that are likely to stay the same you will find a lot of things that are worth learning and they should be relevant a lot longer than the newest fad. More to read: Lindy effect Algorithms to Live By

I liked the idea of the book form the first time I've seen the title and fortunately, it lives up to my expectations. It's not perfect, but it rekindled my curiosity towards math and algorithms. Bringing them to everyday problems makes them much more interesting. The only thing that I'm missing in the book is the application of algorithms in business settings. For example, when I mentioned this book Mateusz K he has sent me a  blog post of  Pieter Hintjens: Amdahl to Zipf: Ten Laws of the Physics of People . For example,  Amdahl's Law  mathematically proves the argument from  The Mythical Man-Month  that you can't just add new people to the project to deliver it faster because of the cost of synchronization. I want this post to be a reminder for myself of the most interesting ideas in the book so if you want to savor it yourself just remember that it's worth buying. Rating: 9/10 Contents: 1. Optimal Stopping Probably the most ...

The book that I wanted to read for a long time. How was it? I have to say that it's really good. I learned a lot about Id and both John Carmack and John Romero - how their lives looked up before and during the creation of the most know Id Games like Doom or Quake. What was depressing but also making it so much more real is how much politics and infighting happened between all those people working in the industry at that time. The only downside for me is that there's not much about the technology side of things. There is a paragraph here and there but most of the book is about two John's allowing you to take a look inside their heads. Maybe another downside as not native speaker would be the font - that made it harder than necessary to read. All in all, I highly recommend it. 8/10

Photo by Tim Gouw from Pexels Yesterday we were working on a new subpage with a form. Let's use the new `fetch` API to make POST requests seemed like a good idea but we started getting errors from the server: ` HTTP 403: Forbidden (XSRF cookie does not match POST argument)` Header `X-XSRFToken ` was set, we tried passing value in the body, setting token in the template, setting it in the backend only in certain cases but nothing helped. Finally my coworker found out that we're not sending `_xsrf` cookie with the request at all so it generates a new one every time... Turns out fetch doesn't send cookies by default. It's by design:  https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Fetch_API/Using_Fetch The fix is incredibly simple: tell fetch to include credentials in the options: ``` fetch("/someURL/", {     method: "post",     headers: {        "X-CSRFToken": token     },     credentials: "include" }); ...

I'm a a listener of The Art of Manliness  podcast for over a year now and just before my last vacation I decided to buy the book. Partly as a support for the podcast and partly to get my own opinion about it (reviews are really all over the place from 1 to 5 starts on Goodreads). If you read most critical reviews you will find that Bret McKay draws a lot of inspiration from 19th century gentleman. You can think about your grandfather more than your father kind of man being the inspiration for this book. There is a bunch of practical advice on all kinds of topics from shaving, dressing to raising kids but also a lot of trivia and random facts you won't really need so you have to pick yourself. There is one annoying quirk of this book though, it tries to explain things with words that should be explained with images. I have skipped most of tying knots and ties for that reason. I've noticed that there's a new book called  The Illustrated Art of Manliness: The Essent...

That's my first review in a pretty long time, but I decided to only review good books - the kind I'm recommending and giving to my friends. I heard about "Sapiens" a couple of times but I bought the book after learning more about the author and seeing that Cal Newport recommends the book as well. You can read about the author at  Yuval Harari Works Less Than You  maybe you will get interested the same way I did. Sapiens starts when humans were hunter-gatherers and brings us to modern times. Most important is his perspective and high level view on agriculture, religions, ideologies and nations. Most striking was how much modern culture we live in is just another kind of ideology and how important it is for people to believe in the same things. Rating: 10/10. Must read. I was reading it in english but I liked the books so much that I bought Polish paper edition as well. Polish readers can find shops at:  lubimyczytac.pl

Recently I started feeling stressed and less productive which forced me to be more conscious of my work, habits and everything around it. Thanks to that I noticed: I got a lot of notifications from Slack, Messenger and Email. I felt anxious before starting new tasks. My focus wasn't predictable, especially on harder tasks. Don't get me wrong, I felt great most of the time, especially when I sat for hour or two at a time coding. The troubling thing was that it wasn't every day and I felt it was getting worse. Most of those problems should be fixed by Pomodoro techinique I was writing about before, did it stop working? The thing is, I stopped using it. A couple of months ago I noticed that staring new tasks, and taking breaks is actually a hindrance. I could easily focus for an hour or more on a task and basically forget about Pomodoro, and feel guild about not following it or not keeping proper count. I've decided that it wasn't necessary anymore. ...

I published a new review on Medium.com:  https://medium.com/@krzychukula/book-review-influence-by-robert-b-cialdini-f4575b6786a4#.55i8vpylc

I was reading a really good series of articles on 'the morning paper' that I found myself going back to almost every week. Take a look if you don't know them but this list is mostly for me to make it easier to reference them :) https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/07/the-emperors-old-clothes/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/08/computer-programming-as-an-art/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/09/reflections-on-trusting-trust/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/14/why-functional-programming-matters/ https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/09/15/the-rise-of-worse-is-better/

There is a new post on my medium account about new experiment I'm starting and how to setup it for yourself: https://medium.com/@krzychukula/customizing-keyboard-layout-on-mac-572327b031dd#.w6hcwik6z TLDR: Remapping Caps-Lock to Backspace and disabling standard Backspace Switching Right Command and Option(Alt) for writing in Polish

I've posted the review on Medium - mostly because the editor is much better and some people have problems reading on Blogger. https://medium.com/@krzychukula/book-review-deep-work-by-cal-newport-97b15ef26265

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes. Not long ago while watching one of the presentations of Andrew Sorensen (I recommend The Concert Programmer  as well by the way) that he is using a really funny looking keyboard. I started googling it and found out the strange and marvelous world of keyboards that I had no idea existed. I want to note here some most notable things that I had learned and maybe you can learn something in the process. At first I was exploring Keyboards, then started exploring keyboard layouts and ended up back in the hardware land at the end. So let's start with the keyboard that inspired this whole quest: Kinesis Advantage I found this video review to be most useful to get an idea how it looks and works. Mini review: + It's ergonomic with mechanical keys (that's a good thing) + Your thumbs can do something useful instead of just hitting on 'space' - 'Esc' and Function keys are really small and cheap. - No arrow keys -...

From time to time I go back to the problem of switching Node.js versions. Sometimes it's enough to just go to the node.js website and install a new version but if you have to switch versions between different projects all the time then you soon realize you need a tool for that. I know of two such tools: https://github.com/tj/n https://github.com/creationix/nvm N has really nice UX and it's really intuitive to work with it. The problem arises if your different projects use different versions of global packages - you have to deal with it yourself. The biggest advantage of NVM is that it switches global packages with the node version so you really get a clean slate with every version. The biggest problem I have with NVM is that it's UX is really bad and I found myself explaining the same things over and over again to my colleagues. Because of the global packages, I found myself advising NVM to people last couple of years... At the same time, I ha...

Video of my Meet.js Summit talk is finally online, so if you missed please let me know what you think about it. I have learned a lot from feedback at the conference and I have heard some great comments that I feel  add a lot of value to my talk. Important message from @krzychukula : Learn the language well and don't expect frameworks be solution for your laziness #meetjs16 — Mariusz Nowak (@medikoo) March 19, 2016 First, I really like the tweet by Mariusz Nowak. That's something that I haven't mention in the talk because I have assumed that people would do that before going for frameworks. Only when I've seen this tweet I've realized that it's not always the case and I should have emphasized that before moving to new tools and frameworks. I have advised people to use Editors instead of IDEs but many people told me later that they don't want to miss on refactorings and all the ease of use they provide. To me that was the exact reason why I wan...

Last week I have attended Craft Conference for the first time and I've decided to share my experience. My favourite presentations: Dan North - "Embracing uncertainty" Jez Humble - "You Can Have It All: Software Development at Ludicrous Speed" Some other worth mentioning: Adrian Cockcroft - "The Evolution of Microservices" Marty Cagan - "Great Product Team, Successful Product" Doc Norton - "The Technical Debt Trap" Yao Yue - "Toward Better Design and Code" Most important takeaway : Most important lesson for me was to be reminded about happiness and job satisfaction. The best way to make sure that something will be done is to let people have fun doing it. For example: if a developer can use this new language or framework she is enthusiastic about it's more likely she will do it just because it will be fun for her. No one likes to do chores, and getting money for that is not going to h...