Simon Vandereecken's Blog, page 9

The City

The City

The city is enclosed by mountains. A large river runs through it where small boats come and go, taking people wherever they want for a slow stroll around the riverbed. The air is calm, you only hear the noises of people talking, birds singing and the occasional bicycle ringing.

The city has a round shape, no street is a perfect angle, they swirl and turn all around the city, surprising you at every turn. The city center is divided by the river, offering on one side a small forest hosting a single building where an orchestra plays almost all day long and on the other side a small port where the boats can be attached.

The houses in this city are built with big stones and wood, each house tells a story century old, of people that lived and left. Inside those house it's warm and welcoming, no door is locked because no lock is needed in this city. Each person has its house, nobody is left on the street and while there are no locks, people pay attention to each other's privacy and peace of mind.

Each house hosts its owner universe. When you open a door, you are suddenly surround by unique smells, sounds and colours. While each house hosts its music, once the doors are closed the street are calm, bursting only with the sounds of life. Each house is its own universe, each encounter a travel into someone's mystery.

If you visit this city you might find the sun shining and a small breeze touching your face, as the city seems to be stuck inside an eternal autumn. The only way to really tell the seasons is by watchings the trees and their changing colours. There might be some rain, but just light enough to leave you the time to hurry back to your house or to a coffee shop nearby.

There you would find confortable chairs, heavy cushions. The coffee shops are usually filled with wooden libraries and used books. You can spend an afternoon there without seeing the time goes by. They are places to discuss, places to read and enjoy the calm and while you might hear some conversations going on, no one feels the need to yell. The background sound of all those conversations tend to melt to a pleasing background sound that relax your mind just enough as you drift to sleep. Only to be woken up by a gentle waiter telling you it's time to go home

The night fell, the street lightens as you walk through them. Outside of the light around you, the city is just dark enough that you can see the stars and take the time to realise how small we are in this universe. You might see some lights moving around you as other people walk the streets to enjoy the night or go home. Some might go to the theater to discover movies from all around the world, others might enjoy a night at the restaurant, or spend some time with their friends or extended family.

While the night is calm, the city never feels threatening. You might encounter other dreamers, exchange some pleasant words and go your own way, you might walk in solitary around the streets while knowing you are not really alone. As you walk, some places are still open, offering warm and company for the occasional lone traveller.

Some places host small orchestras, people playing calmly without any need to overdo it. You can sit around the musicians and let your mind drift around the notes. And when time comes and you feel tired, make your way to your home and slowly fall asleep inside your cocoon.

When the morning comes, you won't be disturbed by alarm sounds as everyone wakes in their own time. People work, but on things they're passionate about and with no need for strict schedules. They are able to build beautiful projects without having to satisfy some invisible stakeholders. Work finally feels like something you do because it makes you feel good, not something you're forced to do if you just want to live.

Old people walk around the city, some of them making other people smiles as they talk to the invisible souls of the departed. Without pressure anyone can take the time to talk with them, get a piece of their history. And when it's time for one of them to go, they are never forgotten as they live on through the stories they told through the city.

You might sit on a wooden bench and encounter couples of every age, colours, gender, ... people as warm and welcoming as their house. You would hear the sound of lives lived, of people coming and going and the occasional cat sitting on your lap as if they had knew you for years.

Closing your eyes and surrounding you with the sounds and smells of this city life, you would be able to let go and finally feel calm. And when you'd open your eyes, you would find yourself in front of a colourful door. It's your house, your small universe in this vibrant community. You'll never know if it has always been there or if it just appeared, you only known that it's been waiting for you.

And as you step in, the door closes behind you letting you enjoy this time with yourself.

October 25th, 2023 ��� Future Anxiety

October 25th, 2023 ��� Future Anxiety

I'm growing quite anxious for some time now. While I've always been subject to anxiety, I find myself reducing how far I look ahead as the future looks more and more daunting to me. In fact, I wonder how our societies are still functioning that well for some time now.

Since I was born we went through final crisis over and over again, at the point where I can't really say what happens when we're not living through one neither why they are that bad. My whole brain grew up in a fight or flight environment. And on a more personal note I feel like our future was stole and we're left with a mess.

We went through:

market collapses (get ready for another one where we force you to work harder and harder with less and less means just for more profits to shareholders with short term vision)global pandemic (during which we were supposed to quietly work as usual)so many foreign wars I can't handle (and on which I'm supposed to take side every single time apparently) extreme society polarisation (where people get more and more angry to the point of breaking our democratic systems through anger)global warming that keeps getting worse and worse (on which we don't seem to act except by pushing the deadlines further and further away) tech monopolies that destroy our protection system piece by piece in search of short term profit while destroying our societies at the same pace.I won't even say AI because I don't think we'll still have anything left it comes to that, it will just have destroyed a lot of jobs in the meantime

And while I've grown up quite a techno-optimist ��� thanks to growing up reading the golden age of science fiction ��� I have real troubles imagining a bright future and finding myself more and more hoping that things just won't get too dire before I and all the people I love die. Meanwhile our generations is subject to more and more accusations as we try to be vocal about the pile of rotting mess we got left by those before.

Living in the present, with a short term vision, is the thing that keeps my sanity stable. Building things for the future on the other side is quite hard when it doesn't show you that much signs of improvements. I try my best to be kind, stay close to the people I love and create beautiful moments together, still it seems sometimes so trivial in the face of what's to come. But keeping hopes up is getting harder and harder in a world that seems to turn darker and darker.

Owning your digital garden

Owning your digital garden

It seems the web is finally slowly moving back to blogs and personal spaces, greatly due to the general enshitification of platforms like Medium in their relentless run toward monetisation.

Still I'm always surprised how many "thoughts leaders" or professional still use those platforms as their only way to reach out, discuss and exchange, alienating more and more of their users.

This craving for more and more money lead to a general destruction of any good reading experience on a lot of websites. Articles on press websites are barely visible behind the ads, pop ups for their newsletters, cookie banners and other stupid things. Medium enforces login and article limitations globally, not on a writer basis, ...

I think it's more and more important for every one to be able to rebuild their own digital garden and to go back to the roots of the Internet. RSS never left, it was always there, but most of us decided that it was dead along with Google Reader while it's still the best way to pick the exact flowers you want to surround yourself with.

Owning your digital garden is also the insurance that it won't be destroyed for shareholder's profit or sudden change of heart of a crazy new CEO in search of glorification. Owning your garden is a unique chance for you to be able to speak your mind and express yourself beyond censorship or random moderator decisions.

Perhaps you won't be able to track how many people read you. Perhaps you won't have thousands followers instantly. Perhaps you won't have feedbacks at all. But we we lived without all those before web 2.0., and it was far from terrible. In fact it was often way more interesting and rich than the current enshitification machine the web has became.

There's hope for a better Internet and slowly people are (fucking finally) leaving toxic platforms and finding safe haven elsewhere. For a lot, this looks like discovering a new world after years inside a bunker.

We became so used to have everything brought to us without questioning it, without any effort. We have to learn to rediscover unknown territories, to rebuild our garden ourselves, learn also to ignore what's brought to us. It's not that hard, but those platforms made us believe it is.

Go out, pick some digital flowers, gather some seeds in a RSS reader, discover new voices (Bearblog's Discovery is great for that), learn to be curious and adventurous again, the wild web is still there and is so much better than the hell platforms built for their stakeholders.

Tsundoku

Tsundoku

Lately I realised I had a bit of an accumulation problem, some kind of (mostly) digital bulimia. Be it podcasts (that I almost never listened), digital books that I hoard (thanks to relocating to Paris I don't have the space anymore to have them in physical form), video games I never have enough time to finish, movies, tv shows, ... I tend to accumulate things I don't have really the time to go through.

I keep finding myself bookmarking new things to watch, buy, rent, or read (even though my digital library has currently reached 5000 books, which I will never be able to read in the span of my lifetime). There's something in the accumulation process, in knowing I have the thing at hands that reassure me. Every time I add something to the pile I get a small spike of dopamine.

I try to tell myself that I also share what I find with my friends and family, but it's a white lie. While I do share them, it's not the foundation of the process. I'm now trying my best to refrain myself from bookmarking everything, refrain myself from impulsive buying and I'm slowly realising how hard it is to resist to myself and how much times per day we are blasted with ads or messages to buy new shiny things.

I don't know exactly when this craving started but I didn't realise the proportions it took over the years and how much I succumbed to every single one of my cravings and piled things on things. I feel like a dragon hoarding digital gold coins.

Learning to get older

Learning to get older

While browsing my RSS feeds, I encountered this blog post talking about why we're not prepared to getting old. Somehow I empathise a lot with the author as I'm closing my 35 year on this earth.

Some nights ago, I talked a bit on Mastodon about getting old and gay sexuality. My mind damaged by Twitter (nope not calling this X), I got old surrounded by some narrative that the gay sexuality only happens between 18 years old and 30. Thirty was kind of a "gay expiration date", after that you were branded an "old pervert" or anything similar, an expressing any thought about sexuality was deemed creepy.

Somehow on Mastodon I was able to find others 30 years old (and plus) like me and found a space much more safe, open and kind. A safe where you slowly realise that you could get old without having to sense a feeling of shame, of creepiness.

I remember when I came out, my first questions where about getting older and gay. Would it be possible for me to lead a happy life? Would it be possible to find a guy that I love and that loves me? Would I be able to build a home, a family?

All those questions were swirling in my mind in a place where I even had to discover that gay people existed. Our elders were taken massively by the AIDS epidemic, and I had to wait until I was 25 years old to finally encounter a gay couple in their sixties and to get my answers.

We're never taught how to get older, it's a path we discover a bit each day, either through happy encounters or talks or to aching knees (pick any area of your body that suddenly decided to retire way too early). It took me quite some time to be able not to fear anymore getting old. I think this fear finally went away around my 32 years old birthday, when I let go of my (roaring) twenties and accepted that I won't ever get younger.

It was also soothed by the magic of meeting other people around my age not in a judgmental mindset, to get away from the youth and its black and white mentality. The time to realise how toxic the discussions around age where inside the Twitter's gay microcosm and how much I needed an escape.

Slowly reaching the end of this 35 year on earth, I must say I'm grateful for a lot of things. While parts of my body seems to think it's already time to retire (hello knees and feet!), I'm getting married in two weeks and I'm surrounded by people that I really care about. And while I lost some along the way, I know that they would be happy about the path I'm taking now and the decisions I made.

Getting old is a lesson you have to learn alone. No books or discussion will ever teach you how to do it, as it's something your mind has to learn on its own. Surround yourself with people around your age, exchange, see older people. Realise that the fear of getting old is just that, a fear. No age will ever mark you as useless or unworthy. No-one and nothings has this power except your own mind. Don't be your worst enemy.

Respirer

Respirer

Respirer, souffler, prendre enfin un peu le temps de se poser. Je n���avais pas r��alis�� l���intensit�� et la vitesse des derniers mois. Mon corps se rappelle �� moi et je sens la fatigue accumul��e qui r��clame d�����tre expurg��e. Les exc��s compensant les trop pleins qui se calment enfin.

R��ussir aussi �� freiner, ralentir le rythme que je m���impose parfois tout seul. Ne plus laisser filer une journ��e �� travers mes doigts comme une poign��e de sable. Prendre le temps de voir le temps passer et non plus m�����chapper.

Tenter de marquer dans ma m��moire ces moments avec lui, son sourire, son rire. Profiter de retrouvailles avec ces amis perdus de vue depuis une dizaine d���ann��e. Rire, retrouver des bribes du pass��, sourire au futur.

Glaner un peu de calme dans ces vies agit��es avant d���embrayer �� nouveau pour la suite. Jusqu����� la prochaine respiration.

September 21st, 2023

September 21st, 2023

Why do I write here? It's a question I find myself often asking to myself. Writing helps me clear my mind, helps me get things out of my brain and force me to think a bit deeper on some elements. When I began to blog, so many years ago, there was of course a need for recognition. I was starting my professional life, I needed to build my presence on the Internet. Then I dwelled into Belgian politics which increased my views even more... reaching even too much at some point.

I must admit there was some joy in watching the numbers grows, seeing many interactions, ... But then I decided to leave politics altogether and to build my life. This blog went through so many phase: my beginner life, my employee life, my freelance life, disappearing for three years and finally this form, a receptacle of my thoughts in some sorts.

Sometimes it feels a bit lonely, I feel like we're not used anymore to interact on blogs, most of those switch to social networks, even I find myself commenting less on the blogs I follow as I read them through my RSS. But that's something I wanted also for this version of my website: to force myself to write for the sake of writing, not to see numbers increasing. The only thing I left to my ego was the small kudos button I built at the bottom of each article. Partly because that's something I wanted to build for some time, partly because seeing it increases sometimes makes the experience a bit less lonely.

Engineers should learn to design

Engineers should learn to design

I keep reading articles about how designers should learn to code, but for once, I'd like to take the opposite side and ask why developers should learn to "design" a bit.

At some point, designers and front-end engineers worked closely, striving for "pixel-perfect" designs (for what they were worth), and engaging in extensive discussions about their ideas and crafts. However, the era of pixel-perfect designs faded with the advent of responsive and fluid web design, where they lost relevance (and thank God for that���pixel-perfect has always been an aberration for screens).

This shift forced designers to delve deeper into web media, understanding how it functioned and how a design should adapt and flow across various screen sizes. These changes significantly influenced how we handle design nowadays.

On the engineers' side, companies started hiring more "full-stack engineers." The problem was that many hiring managers were heavily focused on the back end. A significant portion of them displayed a strange aversion toward any kind of UI (like, seriously, Vim?) and viewed design as a low priority.

This perspective was logical considering their roles and responsibilities. The bias, however, lay in their evaluation of their peers' "full-stack" competencies.

Gradually, we found ourselves working not just with Front End Engineers, but with "full-stack" ones who only knew how to use certain UI frameworks (be it Tailwind, Material UI, ...).

Any deviation from these frameworks resulted in extended sprints and deep frictions between engineers and designers. This is what sparked the wave of articles suggesting "designers should learn to code."

It might be tempting to place the burden on designers, considering that HTML & CSS aren't overly complicated (the fear of engineers grappling with complex algorithms all day towards CSS is something I never quite understood). However, dealing with whatever framework the engineering team ended up choosing (often well before any designer joined the project) presents an entirely different level of complexity.

As a result, we find ourselves simplifying design artifacts, aligning them more and more with the default framework. In the Agile process, the focus is on delivering value to the user, often translating to actionable items and revenue generation within a company setting.

Any design input that even slightly extends a sprint is viewed as a threat to the engineers' velocity. Consequently, the significance of any design changes amplifies with the diminishing knowledge of anything front-end related on the engineers' side.

I believe designers should learn to code within reasonable limits. However, I also believe we are witnessing a concerning and alarming decline in front-end skills and craftsmanship on the engineers' side. The "full-stack" role has adopted a back-end mindset, primarily caring about whether things worked, disregarding how they functioned and how they appeared and performed.

If we want the "engineer+designer" pair to work, we should strive to build bridges between those functions. When engineers want to be included in product decisions, designers have to be included when engineers are working on their technical strategies and framework selections.

While we have to teach designers about how the web, the code, applications work, we also have to educate engineers about the importance of a company's brand, of the look and feel, of the experience of the company's applications and websites. Making things work is one thing; making them delightful to use while being functional is where we get the best value.

Growing Automation

Growing Automation

I have a mixed feeling toward automation and its impact on the future of a lot of business. Lots of teams around the world are working toward full automation and I can���t stop but wonder what can happen if you scale this automation more and more.

While not being a Luddite, I���m wondering until which point we can downsize human teams by improving automation, this leading automatically to less and less available jobs.

While we are working toward a more automated world, relying on both IA and strong systems, I feel our politic systems and the way we envision our lives don���t move at all at the same pace. While there were several attempts and tests about an universal income, those learnings don���t see to infuse as the majority of people are stuck in a mentality of ����we shouldn���t pay others to do nothing���� and our politics, instead of being able to plan for the future, are more and more stuck in a shortest and shortest vision, aiming only for the next election.

I wonder what will be the breaking point between this global movement toward automation and its impact.

At the same time I think a lot of executives are fantasising about what automation can really bring and how much they can get on without humans interacting and solving the quirks. As a species we are quite specialised in edge cases and we too often tend to imagine that working on a ����default���� system will be sufficient.

This quick evolutions doesn���t lead per se to a shortage of jobs but increase the agility needed to work, as every month brings more and more things to learn, areas to evolve in and competencies to get.

Too often I feel we are building a world that move more quickly than we of our systems are able to follow and I wonder how long we can wait before we collectively need to increase our pace, at the cost of leaving a lot of us behind.

They stole the future

They stole the future

Growing up, the future was bright, interesting, and full of mysteries. I grew up surrounded by the golden age of science-fiction novels, dreaming of space travels and discovering great mysteries still hidden from us. I grew up with the European Union growing stronger, bringing a dream of unity, peace, the removal of borders, and the promise of being able to travel anywhere.

The Internet appeared, and suddenly the future also promised unlimited knowledge, the possibility to find any answer at the tip of my fingers, giving me the chance to delve into anything and quench my thirst. It was discovering that I could talk with people from all over the world, uncovering new cultures, new countries, forming bonds across physical space.

It also offered so much freedom. Entire days were spent riding my bike, playing games with my best friend while his mother yelled at us to go outside and enjoy the sun (the sun and I have never been friends, at least that hasn't changed), building forts in trees, pitching tents to spend evenings in the garden, crossing barriers to explore fields and evade cows, imagining cities buried in the past among some trash left in a field that looked a lot like ruins.

But then they stole the future. The first blow was Dutroux, a child molester in Belgium. Suddenly, our world shrank. I had to call every time I arrived at my best friend's house. We were doubting people who were loved before, spending days outside on our bikes, just the two of us, was a thing of the past. Unsupervised times when we lost ourselves in the woods, dreaming of wonders, building imaginary worlds were taken from us and our mothers, who were once so keen to ask us to play outside, suddenly looked kindly at us spending time behind our computer screens.

Then my grandfather fell into a coma, destroying my refuge, the place where I felt the safest, the person with whom I shared the greatest times of my youth (along with my beloved dog). The unity, safety, and warmth I felt in my mother's side of the family were suddenly destroyed in one fateful day. He never came back the same. Years went by, trying to get to know another version of him, only for him to leave us a second time as we built fragile bridges.

The final blow was 9/11. While it was distant from me, I lived the moment through television, feeling like I was in a dream, totally disconnected. The event itself didn't impact my life much, but it changed the world afterward. Where the world once seemed limitless, it suddenly shrank even further. Borders that were once open were now scrutinised; traveling became a cumbersome idea; strangers, who were once bringers of mysteries, suddenly became bringers of doubts and unknown terrors.

My world shrank, gradually filled with fear. Suddenly, adults were terrified of everything: a train, a plane, a trip to a land a bit "too foreign." And with this fear, they changed the politics and rules that governed our lives. Countries turned inward, blaming "the outsider" for everything, enacting laws after laws enabling more and more surveillance.

The Internet transformed from an infinite space full of knowledge to a wasteland surrounded by a Big Brother surveillance system where every part of our lives was subjected to creating more and more money. Knowledge became hard to find, hidden behind all this garbage, often locked in walled gardens.

Our hopes for the planet were crushed. While in the '90s, we were slowly fighting greenhouse gases, and everyone seemed to want a greener future, suddenly, the momentum stopped. Every possible solution was debated, often giving up on the best ideas because of biased politics or unfounded fears. Looking ahead, I don't know how people are still able to conceive children with the climate projections and the present immobility.

I miss the future "from before." I miss being able to look at the stars and dream of reaching them. I miss dreaming of chrome cities, filled with robots helping us enjoy our leisure time, with clean air and blue skies. I miss dreaming of limitless travels, of building bridges with people beyond physical limitations. I miss being able to see further than the short-term future without being filled with anxiety.

They stole the future and replaced it with the tiniest world, filled with fears and problems they are adamant to ignore until they die. And we are left with ashes of our dreams, waiting for them to depart, hopefully quickly, to at least be able to salvage some parts of them before it all turns to dust.