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A friend asked me for some study/productivity tips, and I figured the most productive thing I can do is write a post about it. That way, it might help more people too. So here we go. Before we start, there are two things you need before any productivity advice will work: Be introspective. Be honest with yourself. My productivity rules Plan your day the night before Don’t leave decisions for your foggy, maybe lazy, morning self. Here’s the loop: wake up → review study plan → study → write down the plan for tomorrow → sleep → repeat. Check your energy during the day If you just ate and feel sleepy, don’t force deep study. Take a 30–60 minute break - nap, walk, exercise, or scroll your phone a bit, then come back refreshed. You can also take micro-breaks: finish a chapter, grab water or a piece of chocolate, and get back to it within five minutes. Don’t lie to yourself about effort Setting goals is great, but be honest about how hard you actually worked. You can check all the boxes, feel proud, and still know deep down that you took it easy. That’s fine sometimes, we all need rest days - but don’t confuse that with an intense study session. Review your day When you plan tomorrow’s tasks, reflect on today. Did you actually do what you set out to do? If not, why? Maybe your goal was too ambitious, or maybe you just spent too much time gaming. Either way, learn from it. There’s always room to improve, if the goal really matters to you. Limit distractions Put your phone on silent and out of reach. If you study on your computer, close anything that might tempt you, and even hide shortcuts to distracting apps. When I was in uni, I played a ton of League of Legends. The desktop icon was staring at me every time I opened my laptop — so I buried it under three folders. Sounds dumb, but it worked. A few more things Get good at breaking big goals into small tasks. If your goal is to pass an exam, start by mapping out all the smaller steps that’ll get you there. Spread them out over time, with a bit of buffer. Plans will change — that’s fine — but you should always know where you stand and adjust as you go. And one more time, because it’s that important: don’t lie to yourself. If you spent four hours on TikTok, felt bad, then studied a little to compensate — that’s not a “productive” day. Call it what it is. It’s okay to have those days, you’re human — just plan for them instead of pretending they didn’t happen. I believe that much of the productivity advice online includes some stupid ceremonies and whatnot, just do what you feel works for you. I think the ability to introspect, being honest with yourself and improving over time is all that matters. Take whatever breaks you need, in whatever order you want. You don’t need a fancy journal to write your tasks, open a txt file. You don’t need a perfect system, just something simple that works for you.
Most people solve their subscription fatigue by canceling Netflix. I solved it by vibe-coding my own workout app instead of paying another SaaS. Two weeks ago, I decided to get serious about my workouts again and start logging them. I looked for an existing solution that has the following: create workouts log sets, reps, and weights a calendar to track consistency simple enough. Free apps were crammed with ads. Paid apps had bloated features I didn’t want. Both annoyed me. Before vibe-coding, I’d either tolerate ads or pay. Now there’s a third option - build my own. Of course, you could always build your own, but pre-vibe-coding it would take much more time to be worth it. How did I choose the vibe coding platform? I logged into loveable, base44, bolt, and wrote the following (imperfect) prompt 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I want to create a personal webapp for managing my own workout routines (kind of a workout logger) I want to be able to define "workouts" - collection of exercises including sets and reps I want to be able to track which workout i did on which day - calendar view I want to be able to log the weights I did for every exercise in every set. I want my workout templates to be a simple collection of exercises that are plaintext - don't create some kind of an exercise library.. i just want to type the exercise name myself make it stateful, including a db connection to store all the relevant data. Whichever tool gave me the best first shot, I ran with. This time it was Loveable. Iterating With that one-shot starting point from loveable, I published it, and went to my first workout at the gym, all excited and ready to use what I built. First workout: I needed notes for exercises. Another: supersets. Each time I wrote it down, went home, and 15 minutes later I published a new version with loveable. After two weeks of using this app at the gym and doing tweaks, the app feels solid. On my last iteration, I added a badges/achievement page, and a github-like consistency widget that looks cool I hope will help me stay on track and be consistent. Sharing Friends wanted to try it too - the problem? I didn’t make it secured by sign-in, I thought I only need it for myself, and even if someone’s going to find this weird loveable URL, they could only see my workouts - who cares… But of course for my friends I’ll write one more prompt - and so I added Supabase auth within minutes. Final Thoughts This post isn’t about showing off my little workout logger anyone could make in a few hours prompting. It’s about how easy it is today to scratch your own itch. You build the exact features you need, when you need them. No ads, no bloat, no adapting to someone else’s UX. Just something comfortable and fun to use. It’s never been easier to bring your ideas to life, small or big.
If there’s one pattern I’ve seen across multiple companies, from scrappy startups to big corps, that causes endless headaches, it’s this: a single cache cluster shared across services. I recently shortly wrote about my lessons from building and maintaining distributed systems at scale, and the first point that came to mind is exactly this - it starts with an excuse of simplicity, “we already have a cache cluster up and running, let’s just make this other service use it, no need for more infra”, and ends with a confused on-call engineer trying to debug which services were affected by the last keys eviction. So I want to double down on this idea and explain in more detail why it becomes a nightmare once your system scales. One eviction policy You got different services each throwing keys at the same redis cluster. A sudden spike/bug just caused a dramatic increase in cache writes - your cluster wasn’t ready for this, it hits maxmemory and now different keys are being removed based on your eviction policy. What’s the problem? there’s no isolation - service A caused the max memory, and now service B, C, D also pay the price - their keys are being removed as well from the cluster, and could affect the latency, and correctness of other flows of your system. Monitoring is harder Our metric fires up — we see a drop in hit rate on the cluster. Which service is causing it? Who’s affected? Instead of thinking about one service, you’re now mentally juggling everything across the entire system. More noise, less clarity. Although monitoring is harder, you could set up application monitors that you send once you write/read from the cache, based on the prefix of the key. potentially if you are organized and each service that uses the cluster has a unique prefix and you can easily identify between the hit rates of different prefixes - that’s great, but you have to work to get there. Debugging is harder This ties back to my first point about the eviction policy. You had 10m keys. something happend. now you got 5m. The effect on the services is really hard to trace. One service might have lost 100k keys, and you barely see a difference in its monitors, but it doesn’t mean your users are not feeling something is off, maybe today the are waiting a bit more for the page to load, but it’s not too long to hit your monitors thresholds. In that case, if you didn’t have a monitor on the cache cluster for keys eviction, you might be totally blind..”oh I see a slight latency increase here, but no monitors popped - guess all is well” So, never use a shared cache cluster? No, that’s not the lesson here. In some cases it is totally fine to use a single cache cluster. For example: You don’t really have a lot of traffic read/written to the cache so most of it is free anyway You store shared static data (for example, feature flags) Also note that some of the points I was making here against using a single cache cluster, can be somewhat mitigated by having good monitoring set in place. For example, having a defined prefix for the cache key per use-case, per service, and publishing metrics in the application level so we have observability to which type of keys (by prefix) are experiecning a low hit ratio. But on the other hand, tracking keys eviction is harder to monitor, since it’s not initiated by your system. Anyway, I hope you get the point. If you are getting started, a single cache cluster is totally fine. Otherwise, spin up another cache cluster, and sleep better at night. 🚨 Become a better software engineer. practice building real systems, get code reviews, and mentorship from senior engineers. Get started with 404skill
when i was a student, everything was simpler. grind leetcode. build projects. get an offer. i knew the salaries. i knew what “winning” looked like. it was a somewhat straight line from broke student to backend engineer at a top company. and i did it, i 10x my life in the span of 4 years. five years in. and honestly? it’s… fine. it’s more than fine. but it also feels like i’m stuck on a plateau. the growth feels logarithmic. the peak that isn’t the peak things are good, but i can’t stop feeling like i want more, even though i am comfortable. i look back at the student version of me, and i see hunger. direction. i look at me now and i see someone who’s tried a bunch of things: built products that barely anyone used started a newsletter, got some nice traffic, but it didn’t stick thinking about podcasts, courses, maybe a dev agency? dreaming of 10x-ing my life again, but not sure where to invest my time. when i was younger, the path was obvious. now it’s all vague, i could do anything. do i go all-in on indie hacking? live off my rsu’s for a few years and just build? try again with another product? double down on the blog? start a podcast? well, the next level doesn’t seem to come with an instructions book. escaping means risking the fall as a cs student you learn that escaping a local maxima usually means exploring a few downs to find a higher maxima. well, applying it to life is scary. what if i lose everything i worked hard to build? i am no longer a student living off of scholarships, i have more obligations. and also, the scariest part of all is what if this is the best it gets? i prefer to be positive and believe there’s another jump out there. something worth building. something that might actually shift my trajectory again. i just haven’t found it yet. but i’m looking. 🚨 Become a better software engineer. practice building real systems, get code reviews, and mentorship from senior engineers. Get started with 404skill
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This post was previously published through my newsletter on October 19, 2026. From time to time, I will republish newsletter issues on my blog here if I think people (and search engines) might benefit from it. If you want to read everything I’ve written once it is posted, I recommend signing up for the newsletter. For the last 5-6 years or so, I’ve been talking about, teaching and helping teams implement contract testing on a regular basis. To make that more concrete: at the moment, I’m having ongoing conversations with four different potential clients about helping them in some way with their contract testing implementation, and so far, I’ve run my contract testing workshop four times this year. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to you when I say that I really like the concept of contract testing as a means of addressing integration testing challenges in distributed software systems. However, no matter if I’m speaking, teaching or implementing contract testing, certain challenges almost always come up at some point, and I want to highlight some of those today. Understanding the concept of contract testing First of all, it often takes people a while to understand the concept of contract testing, especially when they’re used to what I call the ‘traditional’ approach to integration testing: deploying the systems and services in scope to a shared testing environment and then testing them ‘as a whole’. Of course, the more distributed your system and your development process is, and the higher the deployment frequency, the more complex and the slower this integration testing approach is going to be. The premise behind contract testing is to break that integration testing puzzle down into small chunks of individual consumer-provider pairs, and then test the integration between those two in an asynchronous manner. By asynchronous, I mean that there is no need to deploy consumer and provider into a shared environment; both parties perform their part of the process in their own, local development environment. This means you can detect potential integration issues before you deploy, instead of stumbling onto them after you do so. This makes contract testing (or contract-based integration testing, to use its proper name) a significantly different approach to integration testing compared to the more ‘traditional’ approach. In my experience, it usually takes people time to wrap their head around how the process actually works, which steps you should take and in which order, and what you (do not yet) know after each step. It often takes going through several contract testing cycles before people start to ‘get it’. That’s not their fault, that is to be expected, since the contract-based approach to integration testing is, again, quite different from what they’ve been doing for so long. To better cater to this, I redesigned my contract testing workshop a year and a half or so ago. It is now a full-day workshop (half a day is simply too short), and I take much smaller steps and repeat them more often. From what I see, this has led to a better understanding of the concepts with my audience, and that’s the whole point. Contract testing === Pact I’ve talked to quite a few teams that had heard of contract testing somewhere, decided that that was the way out of their integration testing problems, and then immediately started writing contract tests with Pact. Understandable, because Pact is a very useful, very powerful and very popular tool, plus, it’s open source, which makes it easy for teams to get started. Often, they skipped a step in the process. Pact is very much a consumer-driven contract testing tool by nature, and while consumer-driven contract testing is the richest and most powerful of the different approaches to contract testing, it is not necessarily the best fit for every team and every context. It’s a classic example of using the wrong tool for the problem at hand, because they didn’t take enough time looking at the problem and the available solutions. That’s not the problem of Pact, even though it is often framed that way (‘Pact didn’t solve my problems, therefore Pact is not a good tool’). That’s a ‘we didn’t fully understand the problem and the context’ problem. Contract testing removes the need for communication Another challenge that I often see when I talk about or help teams with contract testing is the fact that teams don’t talk to each other. This then leads to integration issues, because team A expects something from team B that team B doesn’t supply. Contract testing is not the solution to these problems. It can’t be - tools alone do not solve problems, let alone communication problems. What contract testing does do is make potential integration issues visible early on in the development process, often earlier than (again) more ‘traditional’ approaches to integration testing. That’s where the value of contract testing can be found. It is not a means to replace communication between teams. In fact, and this is especially true for consumer-driven contract testing, contract testing cannot succeed without good communication between consumer and provider teams. Contract testing replaces all other types of integration testing This one comes up less often than it used to, but sometimes, I still hear people saying that when they will have contract-based integration tests in place, they don’t need other types of integration tests anymore - including E2E tests. That’s simply not true. While contract testing is a great way to find out earlier about the impact of a change in a specific consumer or provider further downstream, in many cases, I wouldn’t rely on these tests alone before moving to production. Because of its asynchronous nature, contract-based integration testing only verifies whether a consumer and a provider speak the same language - can a consumer understand the message returned by a provider in a specific situation? It does not verify that the request or the response message reaches the other party in the first place, for example. In other words, it doesn’t test connectivity between a consumer and a provider. And because integration testing is broken down into individual consumer-provider pairs, you don’t see the entire system working ‘as a whole’. This means you might want to keep a few end-to-end tests in place, even when you’ve got good contract testing coverage across the board. The above is not a complete list of challenges with contract testing, but the ones I mentioned here are those that come up most often.
Have you seen this? If you haven't, you should. I think everyone needs to. Wealth inequality on a scale this extreme is almost impossible to explain. You have to experience it to understand. Go ahead. Try it out. Where is the top of this graph? Good question. Keep
Slop is without a doubt everywhere. Be it in restaurant’s menus, music playlists, or online game storefronts, it is now impossible to escape it. Yet, I’ve never met anyone who was actually looking forward to consuming that. No matter how hard it’s shoved down our throats, the human longing to connect with other people through art still remains. Raymond Kotewicz They will not let you filter A simple solution would be to have slop filters. Automatically label AI-generated trash, and let users hide it if they don’t want to see it. So far, I don’t think any of the major internet platforms has implemented this. The common excuse for why they don’t let you easily filter out slop is that it would be technically too difficult. Let me be clear with everyone here: this is complete bullshit. We’re talking about companies that can hire some of the most talented engineers in the world. I don’t think anyone seriously believes they can’t come up with a way to guess if a file has been generated by AI or not. 90% of the slop out there stands out so much everyone can see how it was made after looking at it for 5 seconds. A more plausible reason for the lack of slop filter is that they are simply testing out the waters. They are checking if users will tolerate it. The question tech executives want answered is: will people buy this garbage? And if the answer to that question is yes, here’s what they will do: they will start generating it themselves. They don’t need the useless meat proxies who think typing ten words and pressing enter makes them creative. They definitely don’t want to verse anyone royalties when they could just be making a one time purchase of tokens. If you think this is not real, just ask Tim Sweeney. I bet he will be more than happy to confirm. Roman Navarro Curation by humans for humans So now that it’s clear that tech companies will not save us from drowning in slop, it’s time to turn back to actual humans instead. The good news is they are a lot of people who are here to help you. There are thousands of people on the internet who will search through mountains of content to find the perfect piece of art they want to share with the world. We don’t explicitly call them curators. They are streamers, bloggers, journalists, DJs, overly enthusiast fans, or simply your friends. Some of those people are seriously amazing. There are DJs out there who will spend thousands of hours digging through crates to craft you the perfect ninety minutes of music. Why do you still need those machine-generated playlists? The alternative to blindly trusting the output of a recommendation algorithm isn’t always to become an expert in every field of art. Sometimes you just have to put the trust you had in a machine back into another person. Back to the real world? The real long term solution would be to stop relying only on the internet for distribution. This is already a thing in the music industry. Every city has a record shop that will sell you a carefully selected set of vinyls. For many musicians, physical sales (and concerts) are a much better source of income than streaming. The same goes for the movie. While text-to-video AI is a thing, the real money isn’t made by generating 30 second TikTok dramas. The real money comes from people paying tickets to see a full-length movie in a theater. Sadly I’m not too optimistic about my own field: video games. Somehow it seems the direction we’ve taken is the opposite. We’re all in on online distributions platforms. We have fully accepted them as our new digital overlords. Next month GTA V is coming out without a disk in the box. Sony already announced that the next Playstation will not support physical media. Physical distribution is not even mentioned in the pitch of the average indie publisher. In Breda, the small Dutch city where I live, we used to have two dedicated video games shop. Higher interests rates, expensive rents, and various policy failures have done their jobs: they are both closed. I don’t think this is a good sign for the survivability of the gaming industry.
Understanding how assigning anthropomorphic traits to agents can improve their effectiveness and interaction.
