January 2025 in review

This is the twenty-seventh post in my Month in review series.

This month, I spent lots of time reading, learning, programming, so I’ll be writing about that. On weekdays, I learned about user research, product management, software architecture, and data engineering. On weekends, I learned about politics, history, war, and economics.

I helped Riya finally put her website online: https://debaratidas.com/. Congratulations on your website launch! 🎉 🚀

Readings on history, geopolitics and economics

After reading US Constitution 101, I became increasingly curious and interested in World history, politics, and economics. I’m ⅔ through reading Why Nations Fail. I often pause reading it to do research on the topics the authors introduce in making their arguments. Then I do sub-research to understand the background for those topics. And then I bought a world map and a poster of the history of the world so that I can understand everything in context with everything else.

Topics I’ve learned about on YouTube:

• The Romans.
• The Silk Roads, the Venitians.
• The Indus Valley Civilization.
• The colonization of South America, Africa, India, and Asia by European countries.
• The history of Gaza.
• World War 1.
• World War 2.
• Soviet Russia.
• Nazi Germany.
• The Cold War.

News reading

I have definitely intensified my news reading and political awareness in recent months. I got burned out from obsessive scrolling on my phone, and numbed by daily outrage. But I scaled back down to preserve my sanity. Now I check the news only 8 to 10 times per day.

I recently discovered Ground News from this blog post I picked up from my Mastodon feeds. Ground News is a news aggregator which presents news stories with political bias and factuality figures based on existing media evaluation sources like the Media Bias Chart (static version). Ground News also has many AI-powered features and products.

At first, I feel ambivalent about it, it being very AI forward, and me being skeptical and slow to adopt new technology trends. I think AI-generated text summaries are bad in general, and so does the BBC.

On the other hand, Ground News is the first application of LLMs that I find very helpful. It allows me to stay informed in ways that I couldn’t otherwise. I think it may actually bring an innovation in journalism (or at least in news consumption).

Ground New is a Canadian startup by Harleen Kaur (LinkedIn, TED talk) and her brother Sukh Singh (couldn’t find web presence). In order to encourage them and to try out the full experience, I paid 60 CAD for a 1 year subscription.

Overall, in order of most to least frequenly accessed, my favorite news sources and medias are:

• Reddit (social)
• Mastodon (social)
• Instagram (social)
  • Especially @the4ckinnews with Alex Kellerman.
• Ground News (paid news aggregator service with bias indicators)
• BBC News
• The Guardian
• CBC News
• Ici Radio-Canada
• Al Jazeera
• Bloomberg
• Last Week Tonight with Joe Oliver
• Ars Technica (tech news)

Independent news companies that I noticed and go read sometimes:

• Dame Magazine
• 404 Media

Reuters and Associated Press websites are not that great for curating and prioritizing news for me, but I often click through to those sources from Ground News, to read their stories when I find a news event interesting. Their journalistic quality is top notch, and they also provide human-edited bullet-point summaries at the top of most of their articles (as opposed to Ground News whose summaries are AI-generated).

I just discovered The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge this week and subscribed to the YouTube channel. I see Chantal Hebert participating frequently, a journalist I respect for her wisdom and well grounded opinions.

Learning and professional development

I love PostgreSQL. The most advanced open-source database in History? I’d put my secrets in there.

I think the inventors of Event Sourcing and Event Modeling are onto something. 100% has blown my mind in the past 4 weeks.

Jobs-to-be-done is an extremely helpful way of approaching product problems.

The Jobs-to-be-done methodology provided me with a framework for user research and user interviews to uncover job maps and desired outcomes. This allows me and my customers to build an innovation strategy and make educated design decisions.

Event Modeling (website, 3rd party reference) is a way to design and document an information system clearly and in a way that focuses on the fundamental design elements and patterns. It is closely related to Domain Driven Design and Event Sourcing.

Proxmox migration

I upgraded my home virtualization platform from Libvirt/QEMU VMs managed via shell scripts to Proxmox LXC containers.

I’m really glad I made this change for two reasons:

1. Proxmox is a community supported full-featured virtualization platform, which greatly reduces the amount of time and work required for maintaining and upgrading my systems.
2. LXC containers provide operating system virtualization while being more lightweight than virtual machines. In particular, they require much less total memory than virtual machines, because LXC guest systems share the host’s memory.

On these LXC containers, I host websites, a monitoring system based on Prometheus and Grafana, a PostgreSQL database engine, a NodeRED instance (for automations and data pipelines).

Activities

Photography