Articles • Hrvoje Šimić

This Christmas is special because my little daughter realizes it’s Christmas for the first time today.

I keep them in IDEAS.md file on iCloud.

I’ve deleted LinkedIn for the second time.

For the past couple of days, I’ve been waking up around 3:30 AM, excitedly jumping out of bed to make some tweaks to the website you’re reading this on1.

I’ve recently stumbled upon “Stockdale Paradox”, named after Admiral Jim Stockdale, a prisoner of war who was tortured during his eight-year imprisonment during the Vietnam War.

I like Schopenhauer’s ideas more than I like Nietzsche’s and I agree with him that one can make oneself stupid by reading too much and I’ve re-read “On Thinking for Oneself” a couple of times, but that’s about it.

Following MacIver’s Daily Writing Practice made me roam through my Roam Research highlights in search of good prompts for the daily entry.

I’ve been using Aeropress for about ten years and I still consider it one of the best purchases I’ve ever made.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer,” said Camus.

I keep thinking about Henrik Karlsson’s great (paywalled) essay on writing in a way that improves your thinking.

A list of things that I regret is not long, but there is one thing on that list that stands out: not journaling before 2018.

I’ve been writing an essay every month for almost two years now and this practice has started to feel tiring.

Twitter’s direct messages are the best aspect of Twitter, so of course the new Twitter leadership decided to make it worse by automatically opting-in everyone to the setting that only allows messages from verified users.

By Willy Eisenschitz As any writer, painter, designer or software developer worth their salt would tell you, detachment is necessary to be able to assess your own work.

I’m back.

I’ve been writing three literature notes per day for the last three months.

The main reason insurance is such a powerful industry is because people are more afraid to lose than they are eager to gain.

Not all developers like debugging.

If you have studied computer science, you have probably encountered UML diagrams and the waterfall model.

Most ideas are bad.

I.

Since I've moved this week, I didn't write as much as I would like to.

The fear of finding oneself alone - that is what they suffer from - and so they don’t find themselves at all.

What’s better — articles or books?

No writer likes to confront the dreaded blank page.

As a writer, you can fall into the trap of thinking about your readers too much.

Since some meetings not only distract me from Deep Work, but increasingly annoy me, I want to elaborate why.

There’s a beautiful lesson from Stoicism about traffic jams that applies to entrepreneurship and the frustration people feel towards bureaucracy.

René Descartes famously said that reading books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.

As a developer, I easily get carried away building new things.

I’ve published an article or a book review every week for the past six months.

I’ve had a learning journal since 2011, but only recently have I realized the main benefit from it: it makes me learn more by paying more attention to bugs.

Personal knowledge management (PKM) is the best thing I discovered in 2019.

When I first encountered this concern in the Rails app that I was working on, I was initially impressed.

All my previous side projects flopped because of this.

My bike got stolen a while back.

There’s a tension that you’ll discover if you start publishing articles.

The most common piece of advice you’ll receive if you want to learn programming is that you should do programming to learn it.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

There are so many great books to read, but so little time to do it.

When Hey came out, I wasn’t sure that I’m going to use it.

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I had a crazy idea in the morning two months ago.

I’ve stopped writing regularly.

I’ve recently quit the US company that I’ve co-founded.

Robert Heinlein, claims that “specialization is for insects” in his science fiction book “Time Enough for Love”: A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance acco…

Journaling is one of my favorite habits, and I love it.

This website is powered by Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages.

The 1% rule says that within an Internet community, such as a wiki, 90% of participants only consume content, 9% edit or modify content and only 1% of participants create content.

Update: For some reason this post ended on the 1st place of the front page of Hacker News.