Adrian Stobbe

Last September, I moved to Barcelona for an exchange semester at UPC. Now that I’m leaving the city, I want to look back on the past months. Living in Spain was a dream come true. Since I was little, I felt attracted to the country: the people, the language and the weather. Barcelona was an obvious choice after falling in love with the city and making a good friend there in 2018.

I hope you had a good start in the new year! I’m late in the game, but I want to share my goals for this year with you.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing - Henry Ford. In 2021, I took more time to reflect on my failures. While doing my yearly review, I decided to pick 3 fuckups and share them with you. Maybe it can help you, avoid similar mistakes. And if not, may my naiveness at least make you laugh! The MacBook that proved light as air Earlier this year, I bought a used MacBook Air.

Testing can sometimes seem hard and tedious. We might be faced with complex setup logic and many mocks. But this is a smell of poor code design. When properly done, mocks are rarely needed. TDD helps to avoid tight coupling and it naturally tends towards functional code. In this post, I cover how the functional style leads to less error prone code and fewer code to be tested. Moreover, we will explore when it is proper to use mocks.

After many years of Windows, I switched to MacOS this year - with no regrets. Besides the big plus of being UNIX-based, I got to appreciate the user-friendliness and smooth integrations with the iPad. My favourites are using the iPad as an external sreen, Airdrop, signing documents and continuity. But the system switch, also made me find new ways to interact with it. In the following I want to show a few tools and shortcuts that optimize my workflow on the Mac:

Journaling is one of the habits that many find desirable, yet few achieve to establish. I felt the same struggle, until I found a nice workflow in my notetaking app Obsidian that I want to share with you. The value of Journaling I believe that people fail to journal regularly because it’s never urgent. So it recedes from the urgent but not necessarily important tasks. Yet it’s those that would probably most benefit from it.