Ambient music is my workday companion. The albums collected here — ranging from spectral drones to late-night meditative jazz to minimalist classical pieces — have a peculiar effect: they help me carve out a space where focus is sustained and time seems to suspend itself. These are the records that have colored my working hours throughout 2024.

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Façadisms

Endurance (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Earthen Sea - Recollection

Jakob Bro - Taking Turns

Malibu - Palaces of Pity

Jon Hopkins - Ritual

Alva Noto - Xerrox, Vol. 5

Roger Eno - The Skies: Rarities

Not Waving & Romance - Wings of Desire

Suso Saiz - Distorted Clamor

Marc Andreessen on Chris Williamson’s podcast:

I’m not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does. But if you go back in history, you find characters more like him, especially the industrialists of the late 1800s, early 1900s, people like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie, or Thomas Watson, who built IBM.

The top line thing is just this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be completely knowledgeable about every aspect of it and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work, deeply understanding the issues and being the lead problem solver in the organization.

Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, identifies the biggest problem that the company is having that week and fixes it. Then he does that every week for 52 weeks in a row. And then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year. Most other large companies are still having the planning meeting for the pre-planning meeting, for the board meeting, for the presentation, for the compliance review and the legal review.

He delegates almost everything… [except] the biggest problem right now until that thing is fixed.

The best founders focus on fixing their biggest problems instead of managing them - but doing this week after week, year after year, is a brutal standard that most can’t meet.

Sebastian Bensusan, writing about how digital work is invisible by default:

Imagine you work at a paper store:

1. One day, you observe there are a lot more customers in the store, mostly Chinese, and they are all buying red paper. Some of them ask for red envelopes, which you don’t have.
2. Eventually you ask them, what are the envelopes for? “Honboa?! Chinese New Year gifts of course!”. Trying to orient yourself, you read the Wikipedia page and it all clicks together.
3. You decide that you should be ready for the next Chinese New Year.
4. You act by ordering the envelopes which 10x sales. Success!

This wasn’t a tough mystery to solve… if you work at the store.

Yet if you work at an e-commerce store selling the exact same items, it’s almost impossible to get this depth of information at comparable speed:

By default you know nothing, not even if you had sales that day. To know that, you have to:

• Decide that you want to know the daily revenue.
• Calculate it (and debug it!) with a SQL query, then put it on a dashboard.
• Look at the dashboard daily.

But are you breaking the revenue by ethnicity / nationality? Are you breaking it down by paper color? Did you notice Chinese New Year?

Most likely not. In a software business, you are default blind.

The concept of organizational blindness is one of the most under-discussed challenges in digital business.

What makes this article powerful is how it shows that blindness isn’t just about lacking data or tools. It’s about constantly working with an unknown number of unknown unknowns.

Looking back, most of my career has been about building tools that make the invisible parts of work visible: first with Semaphore and CI/CD workflows in software development, and now with business operations in Operately.

There’s no silver bullet except developing a habit of actively observing and questioning what’s happening around you, and sharing what you learn with others.

Semaphore launched a new YouTube channel called Semaphore Backstage to document the engineering journey building the next-generation CI/CD features. The first video takes you inside a product meeting where the team tackles real challenges in continuous delivery – from multi-region deployments to version queuing. Smash the like button and subscribe!

For decades, we’ve been presented with a choice in consumer tech: either surrender your personal data to the surveillance economy or pay a high premium for privacy-focused alternatives, often sold by companies that don’t sustain over time. This dichotomy has become so ingrained that we barely question it anymore.

The Cudis smart ring appears to be attempting something different, storing user health data using IPFS and blockchain verification, with users maintaining ownership. The company claims users could monetize their own health data—up to $5,000 per year. While that specific figure warrants skepticism, the model itself is intriguing. When crypto enthusiasts talk about use cases this is the kind of practical application that’s been missing—not speculative tokens, but fundamental restructuring of data ownership. Whether it works remains to be seen, but it’s refreshing to see someone challenging the assumption that privacy must come at a premium.

Conceived by Tame Impala and created by Telepathic Instruments, Orchid is

an advanced chord generating hardware synthesizer developed for songwriters, producers and musicians to expand the possibilities of songwriting and musical exploration.

What a fascinating design. One of those rare things that bring out the inner child in me.

I haven’t hit “subscribe” this quickly in ages. While I’ve been using Claude and its artifacts as my programming sidekick for months, Windsurf editor takes the AI coding experience to new heights.

What makes it stand out:

• Full codebase awareness with ability to mention specific files and folders
• Direct command execution
• Intelligent reasoning about manual (is this how we will call it now?) code changes
• Seamless multi-file workflows

My number one advice to anyone struggling to get results from products like this: you need to improve at explaining what you mean.

Still fascinated by the effects of genuinely building Operately in public - from meetings on YouTube to public Discord discussions. As a tiny challenger in the market, every breadcrumb we leave in public becomes both a trail for the right people to find us and a record of our journey. The supposed risk of openness pales in comparison to the risk of never being found at all.

There’s something wonderfully absurd about starting a personal blog in 2024. The whole concept feels outdated – like buying a typewriter or developing your own film. And yet, here we are.

In recent years, I was convinced that maintaining a personal blog would be self-indulgent at best and a waste of time at worst. After all, I have enough obligations, and we have social media.

But lately I’ve been thinking about what we lost when we all moved our thoughts to social platforms. There’s a peculiar kind of clarity that comes from writing—and reflecting back—on your own website. It’s just you and your thoughts, without the constant background radiation of likes, trending topics, and engagement farming.

Every social platform wants us to be performance artists now. They want us to create “content” exclusively for their walled gardens, each with their own arbitrary rules and algorithms. Post an external link? Algorithm penalty. Share something not aligned with your designated topic? Sorry, we’ll have to limit your reach going forward. It’s exhausting, and worse, it shapes how we think.

I miss the weird personal websites of the early web. They were genuinely personal. People shared what they liked with actual commentary, posted random thoughts without worrying about engagement metrics, and generally treated their websites like digital gardens rather than content farms.

So here’s what this space is going to be: a place for notes, quotes, pretty images, and bookmarks about business, software, open source, art, and whatever else feels worth sharing. Will anyone read it? Maybe, maybe not. But if nothing else, I’ve found that the simple act of curating and publishing things publicly helps me clarify thoughts and nourish creativity.

Think of this as a quiet corner of the internet where the wifi is decent and the algorithms can’t find us. No pop-ups, no ads, no growth hacking – just some notes from someone who believes the internet works best when people have their own spaces to think out loud and connect with others.

Welcome to my corner.