THIS THIS THIS: https://emilkowal.ski/ui/developing-taste
AND THIS THIS THIS: ![[CleanShot 2026-04-08 at 23.35.28@2x.png]]
Just wrote down some notes about Thoughts on UI Animations. Will definitely want to learn this more which is why I enrolled in the course.
Maybe add the following to my working/coding principles:
- The ability to accurately answer questions about large software systems is extremely valuable. → Striving to be able to do that
Documenting healthy diet habits
This is only a quote that got me thinking about it:
Eat lots of fruits and vegetables. Avoid processed food. Especially avoid processed meats. Eat food with low caloric density. Avoid added sugar. Avoid alcohol. Avoid processed food.
But I really want to summarize all my gained knowledge about a healthy diet somewhere (maybe on recipes.marc-julian.com or in a note here). Just to have everything in one place.
Blog Post Titles Checklist
- Do the potential readers understand it?
- Does it NOT rely on a well established personal brand?
- Do I want to be a bit informal? Show it in the title.
- Don’t have the conclusion in your title
- Don’t have a title be just a “label” like “The XYZ Effect”
- Make the title be a short sentence
- Start to create your thing, then you choose a title, then structure your thing to deliver on the title
On Independence
Want to form this into some actionable points: https://collabfund.com/blog/pure-independence/
Social Media and other free dopamine as a local minima
Read the following comment on a Hackernews discussion some time ago and I resonate with this description of “free dopamine hits” like social media being a local minimum. It is really easy to end up in this place of a social media addiction but it requires significant effort to overcome the slope out of this minimum to get over the edge down into a more global or better minimum.
Now the question is, how do you find the slope, how do you start climbing it and how do you avoid falling back down while climbing it.
Fundamentally, I think having a source of “free dopamine” on tap is not going to do any good. If I can get distracted from my real world tasks anytime, anywhere, the immediate incentives to work on real things disappear. Effectively, one can get stuck in a local minimum. I don’t know how to solve it, but personally I’ve chosen to block as many feeds/algorithms as I can, so I have to make a conscious decision to search for something (making it just as hard as making the conscious decision that I’m likely putting off). The only feeds I have right now are the FT and Hacker News. Everything else is just a blank home screen with a search bar.
One more related quote from hackernews about social media being designed to be this way because overcoming social media and getting into a better local minima would turn you away from ad-driven platforms.
Today social media is more like a drug, to keep the user engaged and to push content to them. The content must either be addictive/engaging or paid advertisements. Quality of the content doesn’t matter at all. Connecting people to do stuff outside of the virtual world would actually hurt their business model. People turn off their devices and go outside, instead of watching ads.
Effort
Something I want to try to do is doing things with less effort, like explained in this post. This does not mean being lazy but just doing things a bit more laid back. This reminds me a lot of this concept I always encountered while doing Cardistry, Speedcubing, Speedstacking and Poiball:
Do it slow. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Maybe this is even relevant in the context of AI Assisted coding (Thoughts on AI assisted coding) where people (including me) tend to crank out feature by feature without stepping back and taking the time to fully grasp the problem first. Something to think about for sure.
UX Design
- document flows from apps I really like. Thinking of journeys not of screens
- generally try to understand flows, structured steps in a user journey
- write down design decision. Why did I design it like this?
- show to small user base (5 users or so)
- don’t but icons in menus everywhere, use them where they make sense
- Explore well-known components from different websites: https://component.gallery/components/
AI Features
Don’t make them boring like a chat or search feature. Make them fit right in and automatically do stuff without the user even noticing that it is AI.
Anticipatory shipping
No idea why but I found out about this patent from Amazon that kind of blows my mind. If you display strong intent to buy a certain product, Amazon will already load the item on a truck and move it to a logistics center near you. On a large scale this will more often than not actually be the right decision.
3D Printing
Want to get into 3D printing again. And I found a cool thing that I would like to print. This espresso single shot glass holder:
![[CleanShot 2026-01-19 at 17.02.55@2x.png]]
You can attach this to a wall and always have the perfect amount of coffee (fresh beans or preground) ready to go. See the-brew-code.de for my coffee obsession.
Product Marketing
Build things and then talk about them in a way that people remember and share it with friends. I guess some call it clever product marketing.
Reading
I want to get into the habit of reading books aloud. This helps a lot in being attentive and actually understanding the written words. And it will let you come up with tons of questions about the text and your understanding of it.