There are some really good and well produced concerts on arte Concert. In the past weeks, I'm totally obsessed with this live session from Kid Francescoli. It's not only chill music, but also visually very appealing. The setting on a boat makes for some really cool camera shots. Due to the lack of an audience, it has kind of a lonely undertone to it.

Still frame from the video, a scene on the deck of a boat with multiple keyboards with Kid Francescoli standing between them, and singer Andréa Durand in the front

There's a version on YouTube which cannot be embedded. 🙃 Or alternatively on the Arte Mediathek

I only realized a few years ago that arte is actually kind of an interesting channel. When I was a teen and still watched a lot of TV, I thought that arte is just an artsy experimental TV station for snobs. It always felt odd when they were airing something appealing and interesting, because aren't they supposed to be weird? Maybe arte is still just an artsy channel for snobs, and I'm the one who became a snob?

Anyways, there are also sessions from Jungle, French 79, Loyle Carner and the Grandbrothers which I can recommend if you're interested in more.

I also watched this Live Show from the Parcels a few times in the past weeks. It's not from arte, but I thought I just mention it. I watched a lot of those live sessions while I'm coding in the past weeks. Don't know where that's coming from.

I felt like posting random stuff sometimes. Not only babble about software development tips. So I added this new Offtopic section. Although I called it Stream in the Sidebar because Offtopic is a long word?

Anyways, what started with a new category ended in a switch from Markdown to MDX and a dark mode, mainly because I'm often looking at my blog at night and it hurt me poor eyes. I'm not completely done, there are a few things I'd like to add and improve, but shipping is good.

I imagined some cool aurora borealis vibes going on, but didn't yet spent too much time in Figma to make it a bit more like I imagined. I need to change some pictures of previous posts to fit into the dark theme. And some old posts were moved into the Offtopic section because it made more sense. In summary: things happened.

Last week I got a new sofa, and it's one of the most stressful changes I had in the past.

Big changes are not an issue for me. 10 years ago, when I moved into my very first apartment and lived alone for the first time: no worries at all. It was exciting!

But I struggled so hard with buying a new sofa. It took me a year to get myself to buy a new one. It's big and comfortable, looks nice, it's exactly what I wanted. But all the consequences of that change:

  • I had to move all the furniture in my office, so my old sofa fits in there. Now I'm sitting in a different direction. It just feels wrong. The room looks nice and cozy, but it's so different. My mic boom arm now doesn't fold away easily because it bangs against the wall. Do I also need to move that thing? So many changes!
  • I always folded my laundry on top of the backrest of my old sofa. It was nice. I could watch TV while folding up my tees. But I cannot do that anymore with my new sofa.

Changing everything? Not an issue.

Changing a small minor detail? Oof.

Footnotes

In his blog post Take Care of Your Blog, Robin Rendle wrote some career advice:

Blog your heart! Blog about something you’ve learned, blog about something you’re interested in. Blog about cameras or HTML or that one browser bug you’ve noticed this morning [...]

Ignore the analytics and the retweets though. There will be lonely, barren years of no one looking at your work. There will be blog posts that you adore that no one reads and there’ll be blog posts you spit out in ten minutes that take the internet by storm.

That's exactly the philosophy I want to follow here. And that's also the reason why I focused on building a blog which allows me to publish content as frictionless as possible.

Chris' blog inspired me to finally start blogging again. His blog is a mixture of smaller and larger development topics, mixed with other thoughts and stories from his life. Sometimes I messaged him with some small development thoughts or things I learned that day, and he often responded with "that would be a nice little blog post".

And he's right! You just need to overcome the thoughts "that's not worthy of publishing" and "nobody cares". At least I had to overcome them.

Footnotes

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Timo