The Changelog – May 2023
In the previous issue of the Changelog, I mentioned that May is my apathy month: a time when my motivation plummets, my mood darkens, and I become more introverted than usual. Unfortunately, I was right. Over the past 30 days, I have felt myself slowly sliding to the bottom of my emotional pit. Moreover, my “preventive care trip” to Ferrara got canceled due to the extensive and destructive floods in the region, so I had no other option but to accept the sliding.
Polymorphic Class Serialization in Spring and MongoDB
I was recently faced with the perplexing problem of making Spring and MongoDB serialize/deserialize a polymorphic class. Initially, it seemed like a simple task, but it proved to be more complicated than anticipated. Allow me to share my solution.
In Memory of Lotus Organizer
I stumbled upon an old screenshot of my favorite piece of software as a kid: Lotus Organizer. Therefore, I decided to share some old memories.
The Changelog – April 2023
They say that to err is human, but to persist is diabolical. If that’s the case, then I must be the devil himself. April has been grossly underwhelming; I had little motivation, energy, and found myself in a persistent state of low-level anxiety. Unfortunately, this has dramatically impacted my ability to mentally organize my things. For example, I usually follow a seasonal schedule where I reevaluate the previous three months at the end of each quarter to see what worked and what didn’t, and plan for the next quarter.
The Changelog – March 2023
This damn month. It went fast. It went weird. It went backward but also kinda forward. So it went technically sideways, in the Cambridge Dictionary sense of “something went wrong or didn’t go as planned,” but also in the more precise feeling that I don’t know if I made any progress on anything or not. With a quick statistical exploration of my diary, “kitchen” was the third most used word, followed only by “things” and “do.
The Changelog – February 2023
There is a little trick I find helpful to get unstuck. Take the one thing you would like to do. Take the smallest related activity that you would consider a goal. Divide that effort by ten. I wanted to actively come back to fiction writing for a long time, but I never managed to get myself to do anything in that regard. So this month, I followed my own advice and asked myself to write for 30 minutes three days a week.
Mastodon Revisited
A couple of years ago, I wrote critically about Mastodon. Now, with Twitter pluging into a disgusting shittification, I was exiled on Mastodon. Let’s see where and how my opinion on the Don changed in the last month.
The Changelog – January 2023
The first month of the year is always a month of change. However, the mistake is to make it a month of drastic change. First, for once, the months start with the New Year’s Eve celebrations hangover, so we are already set up for failure. Second, drastic changes are doomed to failure anyway, so we should not put all our hopes on the line with bold new years resolutions. Is this a good reason to give up?
The books I read in 2022
I believe nothing describes a person better than looking at the books they read. If that list is empty, you already know that you should reconsider that human interaction (unless, of course, there are good, valid reasons). But if that list is not empty, we can also know what kind of person they are. So what this list tells about me? For one, it says that I am a bit disappointed.
The Changelog – December 2022
Oh, December. You beautiful cozy lazy month. It is the month in which I delude that I can make 10000 different things, but, instead, I spend all my time reading and being with my family. Not a bad thing to do, don’t you agree? December is also when winter begins. People see winter as a gloomy season, but I see it as the season of rest. If you look around, winter is when Nature goes to rest.