Week 09, 2026

Reading & Listening

I made more progress in Continuous Deployment by Valentina Servile. Even though I am still working through the fundamentals, revisiting them is genuinely valuable. The chapter on Lean development in particular sparked a lot of thinking.

I also started listening to Software Engineering at Google as an audiobook. Early chapters, but already engaging.

Random Thoughts

Working on my personal setup this week, I came back to an idea I care about: keep the number of tools as small as possible and let the tools carry the complexity, not the workflow. Switching between tools not only adds friction, it also costs cognitive context every time.

So I reworked my Neovim setup to cover more ground. It now works as a file manager and as a full replacement for Obsidian. The only thing missing is the graph view, which is a nice-to-have for me anyway. Right now my entire private setup fits into three things: a browser, a terminal, and Neovim.

The contrast with how tooling often works in professional contexts is striking. Tools get combined not because they fit together, but because nobody wants to change the existing workflow. The result is friction that slows people down. A few examples that come to mind: productivity reporting done in Excel via Jira exports because planning still happens in quarters and releases rather than sprints. Version control systems in automotive that were never designed for CI. Or model-based development frameworks bolted onto handcode projects and the other way around.

In all these cases the complexity ends up in the process instead of the tool. That is the part worth fixing.