The best ways to organize pointless meetings

Posted on Sat 25 March 2023 in IT, meta

All good meetings are similar, but each bad meeting is shitty in its own way. I could also say that it's hard to formalize elements that make meetings ineffective, but that's not true: I have a neat list. All summarized to one point is: being lazy. Organizing a good meeting …

Dissecting explanations of Javascript Promises

Posted on Thu 09 February 2023 in IT, meta

What is a Javascript Promise? When I was documenting the Neo4j Javascript driver, I did not know. So let's find out, and in so doing tear to pieces explanations I found online. My favorite past time.

W3Docs

In JavaScript, a promise is a unique object linking the "producing code" and …

How to implement the 6-hour workday in a company

Posted on Sun 02 May 2021 in IT, meta

It is difficult to argue that the current, wide popular 8-hour workday in cognitive-demanding jobs is in any way efficient. It is bad both for employees and employers. Quoting the Harvard Business Review,

Many of today’s organizations sabotage flow by setting counter-productive expectations on availability, responsiveness, and meeting attendance …

The need of teaching and learning more languages

Posted on Thu 07 November 2019 in languages, meta, teaching

For a second, stop to think about how many languages you know. With languages, I do not mean verbal languages: rather, any means of expressing thoughts and feelings, or of expressing a dialogue. I am here do advocate for the learning and teaching of more than just one.

Our western …

The reasons why mathematics teaching is failing

Posted on Fri 01 November 2019 in mathematics, teaching, meta

As a mathematics PhD student, I have seen a lot of mathematics teaching. I have been lucky enough to witness some (very) good teaching, but I have also been inflicted with so much bad teaching. Sometimes, I just wondered whether the people do even realize that their teaching is horrible …

Tasks un-owned are task that go forgotten

Posted on Sat 11 August 2018 in meta, IT

If you are a tech company, and your people commit code, then you probably have some code review policy. And if you do not, you definitely should: you want to have an extra pair of eyes on the code that goes live. You certainly do not want a mistake to …

A tale in topology - The large clovers meadow

Posted on Wed 18 April 2018 in meta, mathematics

A small tale with a topological soul, with the aim of providing a very high level intuition for the notion of density and dense set in topology.


Smally Open was a cheeky youngster of the Open family who lived in a large meadow. It was a very nice and green …

Have I told you we should abolish Facebook?

Posted on Thu 22 March 2012 in facebook, meta, IT

Yesterday it was my birthday.

My family phoned me or just met me. Then there has been a handful of people who texted me on my mobile, mostly in the morning. I do not care how they remembered my birthday's date, what I care about is that they took the …

How Windows 8 is the clear proof that Microsoft can't lead

Posted on Mon 19 September 2011 in microsoft, meta, windows

I've just had a quick look at the Windows 8 developer preview. Not screenshots, rumors or reviews around, I've actually installed it on VirtualBox and tried it myself. Yeah, it's still early beta, developer preview, whatever you want... but what a crappy thing!! It's not really up to bugs, instability …