2026-01-16 22:59:00
Just finished reading listening “The Big Five for Life” by John Strelecky (narrated by the author)
and it is one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.
Set as a fictional story1 about a successful entrepreneur, it describes his way of leading his multiple companies. But in fact, it goes much further, and focuses on universal life advices that would benefit everyone, not only company owners and leaders.
Here are some easy to remember, but very impactful concepts from the book.
Imagine that at the end of your life, a museum is built that displays every single day you lived. Every action, conversation, and mood is presented there. If you spent 20% of your life at a job you didn’t like, 20% of the museum will be dedicated to it. And you’ll be guiding others thorough your personal exhibition for eternity.
A Good Museum Day is a day you would be proud to be displayed there.
Everyone has their PFE (Purpose for Existing) – the main goal of their life. Yours should align with the company you’re working on. The book focuses on hiring, but this advice may be applied when you’re applying for a work too.
The concept is also useful in private life just as well. If your and your partner’s PFE differ significantly, it may be impossible for you to coexist in balance.
What are the five things you want to do, see, or experience before you die? These are your Big Five for Life.
You should always remember them and ask yourself every day, what have you done to be a step closer to them?
After reading this book, I understood that I don’t exactly what is my PFE, and what items from my bucketlist I would call my Big Five for Life. So, my resolution for 2026 is to figure this out.
★★★★★ highly recommend
Similar to “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. And both have five in their titles. A coincidence? ↩︎
2026-01-06 23:44:10
Few weeks ago I downloaded my complete Instagram profile and published an archive here, on my personal website.
Next logical step was to do the same with Twitter, which was once my favorite social network. I left it right after it was overtaken by a billionaire and renamed, but it hosts around 15 years of memories. I don’t want to lose them, so I downloaded archive of my profile and (vibe-)coded a static page from it.
With very little effort from my side I was able to get a 5Mb HTML file and somewhat 400Mb media.
With some additional effort from AI and imagemagick/ffmpeg I shrinked them down to 2Mb and 120Mb respectively, which I find acceptable.
I enjoyed glancing through the history and remembering some long forgotten interactions with beautiful people around the world. I’ll miss them, but I’m out of social networks.
This is post 42 of #100DaysToOffload
2026-01-03 23:13:27
Some 1½ year ago I started my homelab.
I wanted to have a small local server to serve as NAS and a server for private services. I pay for iCloud and Google Drive for photos and documents storage, but I also want to have my backups locally and independently. Also, my wife’s and mine’s Time Machine backups are already quite big and the bill for cloud services would be significant.
The same for local services, which I want to run without dependency on network availability and without sharing too much private information. These are for example, Paperless to store all sorts of documents, or CarConnectivity to track various stats of my car.
I chose CM3588 NAS Kit to run my homelab for many reasons:
My CM3588 based homelab in a 3D printed case
Four SSD drives might be an overkill, but I really wanted it to be fanless and quiet. Increased disk access speed is not that important to me. As for total storage volume, I don’t need much, so a few 2TB drives in RAID array are enough for me.
For price-performance ratio I initially chose Western Digital Blue SN580 SSDs. However, I wouldn’t recommend them, as two of them crashed suddenly and, of course, at very inconvenient time. Sandisk (which are owners of Western Digital now) replaced them without questions, respect to them. But still, I needed to set up a lot of the things again.
An important lesson learned was that my backups worked and I didn’t lose any unrecoverable data.
As mentioned above, I run Paperless on it, and I will write a separate blog post about it later.
I also want to expand the number of self-hosted services this year with:
Do you know any other services worth trying?
This is post 41 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-12-31 19:56:59
Another year is over, and it is time to follow the annual tradition.
I finished my previous review with a brief mention of year compass. Although I haven’t opened it at all since then, it still influenced my life. Some important things I wrote there were: spend more time with the family ✅, travel more ✅, say ‘no’ to new projects more often ❌.
All in all, I had a lot of great moments this year, and this is how I remember 2025.
In general, I’d rate this year as good on a personal level. I’ve made some improvements here and there, but nothing to brag about. My smart home and homelab projects are doing great, and I still have plans to share more about them on this blog.
There were sad moments too. Our car has passed away at a solid age of fifteen years. Rest in peace, Ronnie. We will always love you.
My team worked tirelessly on two major releases this year: announcing Compose Multiplatform as stable on iOS, and beta on Web. The trip to KotlinConf was again one of the highlights of the year.
With a workshop, talks with colleagues, partners, and users, and the official conference app rebuilt from the ground up, I was so busy before and during the conference, that I needed some time afterwards to realize how much we have achieved.
I had much fewer business trips in 2025 compared to the previous year, however it still felt too much. I value in-person collaboration a lot, but often all business questions are better resolved asynchronously, and the time together is better spent just hanging out. And we had enough of it this year.
VW ID.7 Tourer. Image: Volkswagen
One of the biggest changes for my family this year was a new car and not just any new car, but an electric one. I enjoy driving it whenever I can and am absolutely excited about the future of electric mobility. I learned a lot about EVs this year, and can assure everyone that the infrastructure for them is already there, at least in Western Europe. If you’re still weighing when would be a good time to get an EV, don’t wait, the time is now.
It took me a while to choose one. A major factor for me was to support a European, and even better a German, manufacturer. Unsurprisingly, I decided for Volkswagen, who are together with their other brands are dominating European EV market.
Just a side note: I still commute to the office by bike mostly. And I cycled 1300 km almost exclusively between home and office this year.
And while I traveled less for business, we made quite a few vacation travels. Not at last because of the new spacious and very comfortable car.
We’ve been to Italy (for the fourth straight year) and this time I bought a transponder for toll roads. What a great idea it was, it saved us at least few hours of traffic jams before the toll plazas during just this one trip. Totally worth its money!
Together with my son we visited Budapest for the Hungarian Grand Prix and witnessed Lando Norris’ win on his way to F1 World Championship triumph.
And finally, we’ve traveled locally this time a lot, including a round trip through almost all Germany’s federal states.
This year I finally realized that I no longer want any social media. Instead, every time I had a spare minute, I improved some detail on my homepage, my very own place in the World Wide Web. I keep saying it every year, but I’d like to write more about it, and post more to my blog as well.
I had some failures too. I started the year with “One emoji a day” and did well for a few months, but then somehow forgot about it and only remembered when it was too late. I’m going to repeat the challenge in 2026.
With all the stuff happening in both personal and work life I completely missed all sport events. Wings for Life World Run was sold out faster than I expected, so I missed it despite having a great time there in 2024. I did not ride my road bike even once, and hiked less than I wanted too. The obvious plan for next year is to fix this.
Still, I got not one, but two perfect months on my Apple Watch, and completed all monthly challenges. (And 23 out of last 24, I failed the previous December one because I got terribly sick and had not enough time to catch up)
And this year I reduced my alcohol consumption to almost zero. I can’t yet say I quit drinking completely, but I do it so rare and don’t miss it at all.
I wasn’t as successful in avoiding sweets, I’ll take another attempt starting tomorrow.
I didn’t have much time to play video games this year. In fact, I played only four games in total: completed a Platinum trophy in LEGO Horizon Adventures and Spiderman 2, and finished Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, with platinum trophy there still in progress.
DEATH STRANDING 2: On the Beach
But my personal favorite was the co-op game Split Fiction from the authors of It Takes Two. Together with my wife, we enjoyed their previous game, and their new creation did not disappoint.
Overall gaming gave me what I wanted: a way to relax in the evening without much thinking.
In the past years I went to the cinema only once a year, and 2025 continued the streak. I haven’t had big hopes for the F1 movie, but it was better than I thought. Fast cars and some Easter eggs for long time fans is a good recipe for a summer blockbuster.
Overall, there are less and less exciting movies I’d like to see, let alone go to a cinema for it.
Last year we watched Silo and Severance and enjoyed their second seasons early this year. We also finally binge-watched 4 seasons of the Stranger Things and are ready for the epic finale.
I appreciate authors going for a risk of producing of a new original story. So, I also have high hopes for the new series from Vince Gilligan (of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul fame) – Pluribus.
But, yeah, it’s all mainstream.
Absolutely unexpectedly I started listening to audiobooks a lot. Three books last year were just the beginning. This year I listened to nine full-size books, mostly during my commute.
My favorite book of the year was, for sure, the Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir. I finally get to read (yes, I read it, not listened) it after YouTube suggested me to watch a trailer for the upcoming movie. I marked the trailer to watch later, and swallowed the book in under a week, which is a great result, given I didn’t have time for anything this year. It was the same feeling as with The Martian by the same author, who masterfully blends sci-fi and entertaining story.
We’ve got annual passes to the LEGOLAND Deutschland (just 1 hour by car from Munich) and visited it multiple times with kids this summer. It could have been my dream as kid, and I’m happy I can share it with my children.
McLaren MCL38 Image: LEGO
2025 sets joined my LEGO McLaren collection just in time for the second consecutive Constructors’ World Championship.
And I started a small personal project of building my apartment in minifigure scale, but it is not finished yet.
The past year was great, eventful, exciting, and satisfying. It was so intense that my energy level towards the end of December was permanently at zero.
My wish for the next year for now is to keep all things as exciting and great as before, but tune down intensity a bit. We’ve planned fewer family trips (but they will be no less scenic), I expect fewer releases of a smaller scale, but even more stability and quality at work.
Overall, I’m looking confidently into the next 365 days and can’t wait to write the next review looking back at how great I spent these days.
This is post 40 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-12-23 15:49:08
Following last year’s tradition, here is a list of things I learned this year, one for each week.
git was able to track itself from day one.&udm=14 to the search url.ßh invokes ssh on macOS.This is post 39 of #100DaysToOffload
2025-12-19 19:40:09
I used to have a number of social media accounts several years ago. And they were fun in the beginning. They helped to reconnect with old friends and find new ones, but soon these apps started to take their toll.
Twitter has declined rapidly after a billionaire acquired it and made it his personal toy. I quit it immediately after it was renamed. Mastodon and Bluesky haven’t reached the same levels of real engagement still. And I’m not sure if it would change anything for me personally.
Or consider LinkedIn: if you open anyone’s account there, it’s 99.9% success stories. People rarely share the struggles, countless hours of hard work, and sleepless nights on their road to a great release or personal promotion.
It has been proved by studies, that social networks induce anxiety, and I felt it myself. Everyone’s life as presented on Instagram is a fairytale. Although, I know that everyone only post their best moments there, intentionally or unintentionally creating an image of a perfect life, it doesn’t help. What could have been a good motivator, quickly becomes a huge demotivator.
I stopped posting and deleted Instagram app from my phone long time ago, but recently found myself checking it from the web. It sounded like an addiction. That’s when I decided to export all photos (they are mine after all!) and close my account.
My archived profile is now hosted on this site.
And the next steps are clear: do the same with all other socials. I can host my CV here instead of LinkedIn, and keep short posts in a special section of the blog too.
This is post 38 of #100DaysToOffload
