Deep within me, I yearn for variation. Very few things in life are truly monotonous, so when the weather actually is, it makes me sad. Most things like our heartbeats have a rhythm to it! So by that argument, I’ve been rather sad my whole life having lived in Singapore. Source: Google and NOAA The…

I’m learning German now and I wanted to find a fun way to remember words. Yesterday, a colleague of mine went to a bookstore to buy a pretty book full of drawings that illustrated German words. I thought to myself, “that looks fun”. So here is my hobbyist rendition of a drawing book - the first…

demo gif of nickang's remote sprint planing side project Getting to this point took over a month A bit over a month ago I got very excited to work on a new side project all over again, and now, I realise my progress has been slower than expected. I thought I would have v1.0 deployed and usable in…

This week I crossed the 100 day streak of meditating daily! screenshot of the Calm app showing my 100 day streak My 100 day streak on the Calm app I go into details of my journey in this article, but before you take this as your roadmap, please bear in mind that I’m very much still a novice myself…

This was a book that I originally thought was written by the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg. Turns out, it was written by someone who joined Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com) as the first experimental Team Lead in the company’s history. He believes this book is “a contribution I…

Reading, creating one film everyday during a vacation, and writing. What do these things have in common? Not much, but one thing that would make us do all these things more regularly and to do them better is to pursue them with a light touch. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by…

Today I experienced something I haven’t experienced ever before: I spoke to two people I know only from twitter. We are on a journey to write more regularly together, a part writing support group, part “let’s try this thing and talk about our blogs and life and whatever comes up” group. I hung up…

Photo by Halacious A personal knowledge management system is a powerful idea, quite possibly one of my most important personal discoveries of 2020. I even suspect that knowing about, implementing, and improving my own PKM is going to be one of the most valuable things I do in my life. Yes, it’s that…

Once in a while an idea comes along that feels right. I’ve learned to be biased towards acting on such ideas when they appear, and today I’m taking action on an idea by someone I honestly barely know from twitter. The idea is to join a word raft. Shime (shim-eh, “like Beyoncé” as he describes it…

My wife recently gave me an elaborate facial procedure to follow daily. She devised a note that consisted of one list for the morning and another for the evening, instructing the order of products to use. It looks like this: I’m actually benefitting a lot from this simple note as it’s helping me…

The perfectly round and red patties are vegan “meat” patties, sitting next to two real meat patties on our friends’ grill in Berlin. Hi, I am Nick and I am a “flexitarian”. In short, that means I am mostly a vegetarian but occasionally I bend the rules that I impose on myself and eat meat. In this…

I’m learning a bit of meeting rituals lately, and today I learned one that I know I will use a lot in the future. “What is the most valuable thing you got from this session?” is a question that creates a lot of value when asked at the end of a coaching session. To be precise, what I’m referring to…

The documentary is very well made and provides someone like me with the important specifics of the history of black people’s struggles in the US. Quote blocks below are my notes taken while watching the documentary. Words below the quotes are my thoughts on them in post-processing. After the 13th…

At work recently I noticed one of my colleagues exhibiting less than ideal behaviour during his support shift and I wanted to give him feedback. But I hesitated and almost didn’t. First, a bit of context: I’m in the team in our company that is, among other things, charged with ensuring that we…

I regularly get asked why I moved to Berlin. While I’d be glad to answer this question every time I get asked because because wow, I get to live in Berlin, I wanted to write my answer properly so I can share this article with whoever seems to really want to know my reasons. I wanted to live away…

Gatsby is an open-source static site generator library written in JavaScript. Anyone who knows JS and a bit of Node.js and React.js will be able to setup a Gatsby blog. At the moment I don’t think it is more accessible than that yet, although wider usability improvements could come quite soon with…

Marketing feels dirty. When a model poses with a perfect smile, just so happening to be holding a product in her hand… that thought makes me uneasy. I feel cheated when I think about how a photo was taken precisely for the reason of trying to get my attention. I understand the value of marketing…

I like feedback. No, let me make that clearer: I love feedback. When I receive it, I’m presented with an opportunity to grow. When I give it, I in turn offer that opportunity to someone. Feedback makes us better people. But it’s obvious to me that we live in a world where we don’t hear feedback as…

Technical understanding helps to solve problems, sometimes without involving any code at all.

A pandemic brings the global economy to its knees when you had just moved to a new city in a new continent, ready to explore? That’s bad timing, and it is happening to me now. Today I spoke to colleague who is enrolled in the coding bootcamp that I am running in-house at Smartly.io. We were on a…