hanneseichblatt.de

Moved to Github Pages

Wed, 16 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Just a quick note: I switched from GitLab to GitHub Pages. Still using Hugo.

Find the repo at heichblatt/heichblatt.github.io.

Essential Productivity Resources

Sun, 09 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I keep recommending the same list of productivity essentials and finally took the time to write down the resources that inspired me the most.

Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a book that focuses on the disciplined pursuit of less, emphasizing the importance of focusing on what truly matters. It teaches how to eliminate non-essential tasks and make intentional choices to improve effectiveness and well-being. The approach encourages simplifying life by saying “no” to distractions and prioritizing what aligns with your core values and goals. I read this every 4-5 years.
Atomic Habits by James Clear explores how small, consistent changes lead to remarkable long-term results. It emphasizes the power of identity-based habits, showing how behavior change starts with who you believe you are. The book provides a practical framework using the four laws of habit formation: cue, craving, response, and reward.
Deep Work by Cal Newport argues that focused, undistracted work is essential for mastering complex tasks and achieving high-value results. It contrasts deep work with shallow work and provides strategies to cultivate deep focus in a distracted world. Newport emphasizes routines, time-blocking, and reducing digital noise to enhance productivity and cognitive performance.
- Lifestyle-centric career planning is one of the many concepts Newport introduces. It prioritizes personal values, interests, and well-being over traditional career milestones. It focuses on designing a career that aligns with one’s desired lifestyle, ensuring work-life balance and fulfillment. Imagine how you want to live, then work backwards from that.
Deep Questions by Cal Newport is a podcast where he explores productivity, focus, and the impact of technology on work and life. He answers listener questions and discusses strategies for cultivating deep work, meaningful careers, and digital minimalism. The show blends research, practical advice, and philosophical insights to help listeners navigate modern challenges. An easy first step into Newport’s frameworks and concepts. I listen to each and every episode.
Huberman Labs popular podcast hosted by Dr. Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University. He discusses topics related to brain science, health, productivity, and well-being, offering evidence-based advice. The show combines scientific research with practical tips to help listeners optimize their lives and mental performance.
The Extended Mind by Annie Murphy Paul explores the idea that our thinking extends beyond the brain, incorporating our bodies, environment, and tools. The book discusses how we can harness external resources like physical movement, social connections, and technology to enhance cognition and creativity. It challenges the traditional view of the mind as something confined to the brain, offering practical strategies for optimizing mental performance.
The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford is a novel that illustrates the challenges of IT and business operations through a fictional story. It follows an overwhelmed IT manager tasked with saving a failing project, using DevOps principles to transform the company’s workflow. The book provides insights into improving collaboration, efficiency, and problem-solving within organizations, emphasizing the importance of streamlined processes and continuous improvement. If you ever had a lead position in tech, this is mandatory reading.
Mindset by Carol Dweck explores the concept of “fixed” vs. “growth” mindsets and their impact on success. People with a growth mindset believe abilities can be developed through effort and learning, while those with a fixed mindset view traits as static. The book shows how adopting a growth mindset can lead to greater achievement, resilience, and personal development.
Basic Forms of Anxiety (Grundformen der Angst) by Fritz Riemann explores the different types of anxiety that shape human life. He identifies four fundamental fears: fear of intimacy, fear of freedom, fear of change, and fear of commitment. The book explains how these anxieties influence behavior and personality development. Absolute classic of psychological literature.
Focused is a podcast by Danny Hatcher that explores the science of attention and strategies to improve focus in daily life. It covers topics like deep work, productivity, and the impact of technology on mental clarity. The show provides practical advice and insights to help listeners cultivate sustained concentration and reduce distractions. More about tools than principles.
Staff Engineer by Will Larson is a book that provides guidance for engineers looking to advance to senior technical roles. It explores the skills, mindset, and strategies needed to transition from individual contributor to a leadership role without moving into management. The book emphasizes technical excellence, mentorship, and the importance of creating impactful solutions while navigating the challenges of career growth.
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey presents a framework for personal and professional effectiveness through seven core principles. It emphasizes proactive behavior, goal-setting, and prioritizing what truly matters in life. The book provides actionable advice on how to cultivate positive habits, improve relationships, and achieve long-term success.
Ness Labs is a blog focused on mental well-being and productivity, offering articles, tools, and courses to help people optimize their cognitive performance. It covers topics such as mindfulness, neuroscience, creativity, and work habits. The content is designed to provide actionable insights for improving mental clarity, focus, and personal growth. The posts about Digital Gardening were especially helpful, start with You and your mind garden.
Forte Labs is a blog that focuses on personal knowledge management and productivity strategies. It explores techniques like progressive summarization, effective note-taking, and organizing information to boost learning and creativity. The blog provides actionable insights for optimizing cognitive performance and improving how we process and retain knowledge.
- Especially interesting was the PARA method, a productivity and organization system developed by Tiago Forte, designed to help individuals manage information more effectively. It stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archives, which are the four categories used to organize digital and physical materials. The method emphasizes clarity and accessibility, helping users focus on what’s important and streamline their workflows.

Thank you, Thomas, for finally motivating me to write down this list.

Selected Readings 2025-W05

Mon, 27 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Finally got around to this classic. Impressed by both its far-reaching scope and comprehensive perspective, as well as its incredibly profound depth of insight. This truly has earned its status as a classic.
Le Cunff: Self-education: how to leverage the end of credentialism Interesting ideas. I’m often surprised how little people in the ops space think about their own education. Don’t ignore the gap between non-directed fiddling with tech and work-mandated training. Go about educating yourself in a structured manner. You are probably overestimating the effort necessary.

Selected Readings 2024-W48

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Forte Labs: The Throughput of Learning Thoughtful essay on learning and for which aspects to optimize the systems we use to do it.

Our design problem, at least, is clear: we have to design our mental environment to maximize the throughput of invalidated assumptions, accelerating it to the point that the rules of our learning process break, thereby surfacing even more assumptions, which we can exploit to further improve this process.

Selected Readings 2024-W47

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Will Larson: Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track Currently re-reading this to broaden my perspective for the next year.
After finishing the Progressive Summarization series, I took some time to rediscover Forte’s writing.
Forte Labs: From Multitasking to Multiplexing: 5 Steps to Building a Personal Productivity Network This was the most fruitful idea this week for me. Forte uses IT networking as a metaphor to think about throughput of intellectual work and how classic tech concepts like encapsulation, splitting content and composability can apply to personal productivity.

Selected Readings 2024-W46

Sat, 16 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Tiago Forte: Progressive Summarization Favorite of the week. Distilling insights from notes by returning to them periodically to summarize them. See also parts 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
Shawn Wang: Big L Notation A model of mapping learning styles to outcomes, similar to Big O Notation. Simplified but useful.
Shawn Wang: Learn in Public A short but pointed appeal to push yourself to ignore your procrastination disguised as misdirected stagefright to learn in public, really the most efficient way to do it anyway.
Shawn Wang: Eponymous Laws I love such lists.
Huberman Lab: Dr. Allan Schore: How Relationships Shape Your Brain Fascinating interview, touching on psychology, neurology, attachment theory and relationships.

but I don’t think that most people know that. They assume somehow that there’s circuitry in our brain and body for adult romantic attachment that is distinct from our attachment circuitry that we had with our parent. (..) your work speaks very loudly that they are, in fact, the exact same circuitry.

Selected Readings 2024-W45

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Jim Nielsen: Easy changes Besides being run by machines, the other main function of code is communication between humans. Code will have to be changed by humans at some point. Avoid unnecessary costs.
Textlint A “linter for natural language”: a tool that reviews and corrects text according to a large library of customizable, plug-in rules, designed to enforce machine-readable linguistic precision.
Daniel Miessler: Know your life metrics If you really want to apply the notion of metrics to something like your life, this is a good text to start.

Don't fall in love with your tools

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite mental models:

Simplified, much of human endeavour follows this path: feel hunger, see mammoth, gather people, plan, create tools, kill the mammoth, enjoy dinner. Or, in even simpler terms: recognize challenge, collaborate on a plan, create tools, solve.

Over time, as challenges repeat, humans specialize, deepening expertise in specific tasks. With this specialization comes a narrowing focus. The arrow maker masters their craft but, with limited bandwidth, pays less attention to the bigger picture. Thus, experts become craftsmen, proud of their tools but primarily focused on refining their part of the solution. Repetition rewards optimization, which in turn rewards specialization – a depth-first pursuit, often at the expense of breadth.

Selected Readings 2024-W44

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Kottke: Walt Disney’s Corporate Strategy Chart Think what you want about the company, I doubt many companies could express their strategy and vision as clearly as this, even if their life depended on it. And it always does.
Satya Nadella AI Tour Keynote: London

Microsoft has one of the clearest strategies when it comes to enabling actually productive everyday use of LLMs in the modern workplace. I’m not using their products much, but I enjoy them expressing and implementing a clear story and a lot of correct strategic thinking behind it.

Lenses

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Problem

Modern IT systems have historically increased their internal complexity over time. Since the early days, engineers have built larger and increasingly bespoke systems, layering abstractions on top of each other through intricate trade-offs to achieve properties such as high availability or simply to fulfill business needs. Complexity is neither inevitable nor an end in itself; it is a necessary byproduct of how the IT industry implements solutions.

This trend has compelled engineers—those who directly interact with machines—to develop increasingly complex mental models to reason about, operate, and further develop the systems for which they are responsible. During incidents, a mismatch between an engineer’s mental model and some part of the actual system’s state or structure consumes most of the incident’s duration. In some cases, this mismatch may even cause an incident or security vulnerability. Understanding a system often involves parsing information and forming a mental model of the relevant details, which is only preliminary work.¹

Selected Readings 2024-W43

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This is the first installment in what I hope will be a series of weekly lists of links that interested me.

Jabra: Great ExpectAItions, Work in the age of AI Interesting data about the current state of AI adoption in the workplace, some interesting findings when looking at different age groups.
Against /tmp A well-written list of arguments against a centralized /tmp that includes a historic perspective on the situation. I wish more technical essays would include the historical context and reasoning for the described shortcomings.
2024 Self-Host User Survey Results
Drew Breunig: The 3 AI Use Cases: Gods, Interns, and Cogs

Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously. Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work. Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.

Writing in Public

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Daniel Miessler’s Unsupervised Learning newsletter No. 363 was the final kick I needed to restart this blog.

Buy a domain and start a blog. Not just a blog, but a website. A digital presence.

If you already have one, make sure it’s on your own domain, and get everything you do digitally to emanate from your own site.

Commit to writing more. You don’t have to take selfies with your food and become an “influencer”. Just be yourself, in public, to whatever degree makes you comfortable.

This is the year people need to break their reliance on companies for their identity. You are not an employee; you’re a human. And I want to hear from you.

About

Sun, 01 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Bio

See my LinkedIn profile for details.

Contact

To contact me, send me an e-mail to jobs (at) this domain. Please use my GPG key.

Solaris Is Dead

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Most of you probably have heard by now that Oracle has silently EOLed Solaris, one of the older commercial Unices.

The first definitive sign was a tweet by Simon Phipps on September 2:

For those unaware, Oracle laid off ~ all Solaris tech staff yesterday in a classic silent EOL of the product.

Soon after, TheLayoff.com, a portal for recently or soon to be laid off employees, started noticing an influx of now ex-Oraclers. Some of them reported having been notified by UPS of impending packages while others reported receiving the first actual termination notices. The packages’ arrival seem to have been planned for Labor Day which I find particulary egregious.

Underappreciated Systemd Features: systemd-nspawnd

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

systemd(1) does contain something that looks very similar to a minimal container solution. It is not meant to be a full blown container solution but merely meant to

cover testing, debugging, building, installing, recovering. That’s what you should use it for and what it is really good at, and where it is a much much nicer alternative to chroot(1).

You can think of systemd-nspawn(1) more like LXC, less than Docker. Changes to your filesystem are persistent across container boots and there is no clearly defined repository for operating system images for example. Nevertheless it provides a built-in (since most Linux distributions use systemd(1) nowadays) way to start a Linux system without sprinkling your filesystem with the remnants of your experiments.

Underappreciated Systemd Features: Builtin Watchdog

Fri, 11 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my opinion, you massively underestimate systemd(1) when you think of it as just another init(1) daemon. It actually provides some features that one would expect to be used quite widely by now but aren’t. I want to try to present some of these in a couple of blog posts. These will only provide simple introductory examples to get you started. In this specific case, Lennart Poettering himself provided a comprehensive tutorial on the topic.

Build AUR Packages in a Docker Container

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I switched back to Arch Linux, partly because of the amazing Arch User Repository (AUR). I use yaourt as my AUR helper. We will use my Arch Linux Docker image with yaourt included to sandbox the whole process of building a package from a PKGBUILD. We mount a directory pkgs under our current working directory at /var/cache/pacman/pkg in the container to store the built packages and all necessary dependencies. yaourt will keep a copy of all downloaded packages in said directory. We also tell yaourt to export the built packages there. Since yaourt will let us edit the PKGBUILD and *.install files, we need to specify an $EDITOR. The last argument is the name of the package to be built, in this example the simply wonderful Lumina desktop environment.

Access a Remote LibVirt Network via OpenVPN

Tue, 24 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This is very loosely based on a how-to by the Koofr team. We assume the following:

You have a remote box with libvirtd running on a RHEL 7-compatible OS.
You have created a network 192.168.100.0/24 in said libvirtd.
You want to access the VMs in said network from your local box.
The bridge interface is called virbr1.

We start on the remote server. First, we install the necessary software packages.

yum install openvpn easy-rsa 
mkdir -p /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa
cp -rf /usr/share/easy-rsa/2.0/* /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/
cd /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/
vim vars # set your vars
cp /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/openssl-1.0.0.cnf /etc/openvpn/easy-rsa/openssl.cnf

Now we create some keys and certificates.

Various Thoughts on Docker

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Misconceptions we could have avoided equal time wasted

Driven by the current hype surrounding Docker, there have been a couple of articles comparing Docker to KVM or more generally hypervisors and containers. It’s a shame for so many intelligent people to waste their precious capacities on what I consider a lame comparison. They compare concepts that aren’t even in the same larger category. It is possible to compare those categories or compare members of them, but to me this seems futile as well.

You Need Ops

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled across the short blog post Who needs ops anyway, which is a sarcastic comment on another companies failure to acknowledge their need for ops. Besides my distaste to relabel administrators as ops, he absolutely has a point. It’s been more times than is healthy that executives decided they could do away with dedicated admins and just have developers run their infrastructure “on the side” or, even worse, do it themselves. In my experience, something like that happening is a sure sign of that company’s decay. It’s not so much that employees would need great amounts of training, it’s experience that counts (just like in development or any. other. field.) or wouldn’t be able to do administration, but they simply aren’t as effective at that. The point of having specialized people for maintenance and incident response is to manage recurring or emergency tasks in the most efficient way without interrupting normal business operations. When your business critical service goes down at noon, do you really want to send one of your developers into the wonderful land of learning-critical-infrastructure-as-you-go or do you want someone who does nothing else all day besides knowing your systems and keeping them running?

Productivity 2013

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I wanted to jot down a few quick points about productivity, which has been one of my interests for quite some time.

People I learned from

I am a long time follower of Cal Newport’s blog (medium-length introductory talk to his main points here) and his motto (taken from Steve Martin): Be so good they can’t ignore you.

Also, like nearly everyone who has ever come near the topic of productivity in IT, I have been using my own kind of GTD-like workflow and I would recommend Allen’s approach when looking for a good place to start.

My Computing Rules 2013

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Convention over configuration

Sure, you can use zsh and enjoy all the little nifty features but you could also just get used to the defaults of bash and be sure that wherever you login, you already know the environment. You can customize your tiling window manager until it looks like the Matrix just coredumped, but if you get accustomed to XFCE’s defaults, you can get to work minutes after installation. Customization leads to fiddling.

I want no local storage anywhere near me

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I have been pondering the The Setup post about Rob Pike. He developed Plan 9 which I was briefly interested in. He has a very interesting and very radical point of view where his data belong:

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else’s problem, one I’m happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. (..) The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the “pretty much” qualification from that. (..) As laptops came in, people started carrying computers around with them everywhere. The reason was to have the state stored on the computer, not the computer itself. You carry around a computer so you can access its disk. (..) The world should provide me my computing environment and maintain it for me and make it available everywhere. If this were done right, my life would become much simpler and so could yours.

Bandwidth Efficiency nowadays

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I stumbled across Page Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias where he briefly describes how he got a YouTube page down to 100 KB and the pain that caused him. He seems surprised to find that reducing the fluff on such a widely known site as YT would actually bring more people to the service, mostly those with slow internet connections or from very remote places, people the average interwebz citizen could maybe think about a little more often. If that’s too lofty for you, see it as an exercise in minimalism.