Last weekend, I completed my fourth half marathon, one year after I ran my first. Like last year, the place of action was The Hague. And Scheveningen. And back to The Hague. This one wasn’t the first. It wasn’t the fastest. It was not the one where I came in best prepared. Instead, it was the one that hurt the most. For several weeks already, I knew I would not be able to finish under...
Read moreIn 2010, standing at a gas station with a tech visionary I deeply respected, he asked me a question that seemed absurd at the time: “What if everything we know about documents is about to become obsolete?” I dismissed it then. Today, I realize he might have predicted one of the biggest shifts in how we work since the invention of the printing press. Given I am now on the labor market for almost 20...
Read moreYou know that moment when you’re trying to explain something complex, and you stumble upon the perfect analogy? That happened to me during a weekend walk when I was pondering the true potential of generative AI. As someone who’s been neck-deep in the AI world since ChatGPT first dropped, I’ve been fascinated by its capabilities, limitations, and most importantly, its future potential. Let me paint you a picture that might resonate. Imagine Thomas Edison showcasing...
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What BetterRunning is BetterRunning is three things pretending to be one thing. The app: a SwiftUI and watchOS coaching tool that reads your running data, most of it captured through HealthKit, and turns it into personal, adaptive guidance. It pushes when you’re ready and tells you to back off when you’re not. The website: betterrunning.app. I never built it. Never wrote a line of it, never handed over documentation, because there wasn’t any. I pointed Read more
There was a time when Gartner’s pace-layered application model felt like one of the more practical ways to talk about enterprise software. Not because the model was perfect. No model is. But because it acknowledged something every organization eventually runs into: not all systems should move at the same speed. Some systems need to be stable. They hold the truth of the business: customers, contracts, products, financials, inventory, employees. These are the systems of record. Read more
I expected the field to fail. I typed “Facebook, Instagram” into what looked like a plain text field, without selecting anything from a predefined list. In the old world, that would have been useless text. Maybe readable to a human, but not reliable enough for a workflow. In Tana, it became structured intent. That small moment captured something much larger: even structured data is becoming liquid. By liquid, I mean an interface that accepts messy Read more
Not because shared context stops mattering, but because documents are becoming the wrong place to maintain it. I have been living in the personal knowledge management space for quite a few years now. For my personal life, I first relied on Tana Outliner, and now on Tana. It fits the way I think. It lets me connect things, structure them, and maintain a personal system that is flexible enough to evolve with me. Professionally, the Read more
Earlier this year, I found myself doing something slightly ridiculous. After a run, I would take screenshots of my workout data and copy them into ChatGPT or Anthropic. I wanted feedback. Not generic motivation, not another badge, not a leaderboard position, but a useful interpretation of what had actually happened during the run. Was my pace stable? Was my heart rate where it should be? Was I improving? Should I push harder next time, or Read more
Every question I asked had an answer. I didn’t expect that. I’ve been playing around with building my own iOS and watchOS application recently, a hobby project, nothing more. Evenings, weekends, stolen hours between dinner and bedtime. If it goes nowhere, it was a fun experiment and a really interesting learning experience. But as I worked through it, SwiftUI layouts, watchOS architecture, design patterns I’d never touched before, every single question I threw at generative Read more
I’ve been a Tana Outliner user for a while now, so when the team shipped a completely redesigned product, I had to take it for a serious spin. After two deep sessions, here’s my take: the new Tana is one of the most ambitious productivity tools I’ve seen — and it’s already delivering on several of its promises. A Quieter, Faster Interface The first thing you notice is how much calmer the interface feels. Gone Read more
The Accidental Developer: Why I Built a World Cup App for My Son It started simply enough. My son, who is almost nine, is completely swept up in World Cup excitement, talking constantly about Messi, Mbappe, and Vinicius Junior. I wanted to help him engage with that passion, so I suggested he find one of those poster rosters from a football magazine to fill in the scores and discuss them with his friends. Then I Read more
Well that turned out to be a miserable experience. Not at first though. At first, it felt great. I felt amazed. I was stunned by the power of generative AI. The development power I had access to now. And with the first results in the pocket, I started dreaming about what do do next. What to build next. How I could fit that new technology into my work. Into my private life. And then the Read more