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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

This November has been weird. If I had to describe it, my first instinct would be to say that it felt like slipped time. After all, my emotional status has been all over the place, with moments of genuine excitement and moments of dread. November is usually a bad month. It is always full of bad memories and events. Even this year, November hit again early in the month: once again, I had to attend a November funeral.