Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W39: Acquisitions

September 21​–​27, 2026

Quick bits

  • Something I’m still not used to in the UK: external doors generally have handles and don’t fall into a lock. In Germany, you better make sure you have your keys with you when you leave; if the door falls closed you won’t be getting back in. (I’ve never been locked out of my flat.)

  • I upgraded to macOS Golden Gate and after installation, it reopened the windows that I had open previously. The smoothness of this OS upgrade is impressive.

    Not sure why I upgraded otherwise, though. Visually, it’s a step up from Tahoe but still worse than what I had before. And it’s buggy, too! The red traffic light occasionally doesn’t close windows, and instead leaves them as unfocusable and non-interactable ghost windows.

  • J—— and I set out to head to a book store, but we never made it there… because we got distracted by a different book store.1

    In any case — new book acquisitions: Short stories in French2 (so that I can practice the language), and three by Olga Tokarczuk: Flights,3 The Empusium,4 and Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead.5 I had already read Drive Your Plow on my e-reader, but it’s such a good book that I wanted to own it in physical form.

  • I miss watching films. I don’t have a TV or a large-enough screen, and I don’t have a comfy sofa or armchair to relax in.

  • Now that the Nanoc web site is migrated to a subdomain, I’ve been tempted to redesign it. Something simpler and more modern; something more practical and efficient. (As if I don’t have enough projects.)

  • London is so much windier than Berlin.

  • I had the idea of streaming my week­notes writing yesterday, but my internet connection (uplink) just isn’t reliable enough. I guess I’ll not be a streamer then. Or perhaps I just shouldn’t care about the stream quality: it’s useful as an accountability tool without it.

  • Overheard: “No, darling, that’s waterboarding. I’m talking about onboarding.”

Shower thoughts

  • Not to brag, but I was born when I was only zero years old.

  • I hate it when signs are incorrect. So when I see a sign that says “thieves operate in this area,” I do a little bit of stealing just to be sure. (Look… if they didn’t want to have thieves around, they would simply remove the sign.)

  • Vampires tend to be poor because they have such an enormous lifespan and so it takes forever to get an inheritance.

This week’s projects

I’m trialing a section of my week­notes where I talk about ongoing projects — a bit like a Now page.

More thoughts about tacit knowledge

When I talked about tacit knowledge last week, it was really not from the perspective of acquiring it. I think that’s because I’ve long been thinking about how to share the knowledge that I have; a particularly tough challenge.

In part 1 of the series (Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice), there is this line:

deliberate practice is defined as possible only in domains with a long history of well-established pedagogy.

I was wondering: is this true for software development? I don’t think it is. In almost all companies I have ever worked for, there is constant pressure to deliver, and virtually no time for training or self-improvement. Studying and practicing is generally expected to be done outside working hours. It is a sad state of affairs.

As for me: I learned my craft by working on hobby projects. I easily have dozens of them. Those hobby projects solve real problems (for me), but I also started them with the intention of figuring out what a ‘good’ solution would look like. Case in point: ddenv is the fourth incarnation of the idea behind it, and I’m working on a fifth iteration, alongside an article on the underlying concept. I’ve been able to work on hobby projects because I have had plenty of time and plenty of curiosity and drive.

I enjoy coaching and mentoring people on everything related to software development. But the coaching and mentoring that I have done at previous workplaces have rarely been about learning, and often been about “how can you help me meet the next deadline” — and time taken for learning has to be justified, sometimes even if it is only thirty minutes. I find that workplaces are, in general, atrocious places to learn the craft.

Occasionally, I hear the idea of guilds and apprenticeships being floated around in software development. It’s an idea that has no chance of taking off in a hyper-corporate world.

My idea of writing down my Software engineering principles in a teachable way is, as a result, likely doomed to fail: no matter how good and extensive it is, it will barely have a target audience.

I am pessimistic and grumpy.

Entertainment

  • I’m about one third of the way through Spiritfarer.7

  • I’ve bought Nighthawks8 because I’ll literally buy anything developed or published by Wadjet Eye. I only just started playing it, and I’m hooked.

Tech links:

  1. And also by a lovely stationery store: Present & Correct, at 12 Bury Pl, London WC1A 2JL. ↩︎

  2. Richard Coward, ed. and trans., Short stories in French (London: Penguin Books, 1999). ↩︎

  3. Olga Tokarczuk, Flights, 12th ed., trans. Jennifer Croft (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2018). ↩︎

  4. Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story, 4th ed., trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024). ↩︎

  5. Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, 13th ed., trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2019). ↩︎

  6. Uta Hagen, Respect for Acting: Expanded Version (John Wiley & Sons, 2023). ↩︎

  7. Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games, 2021). ↩︎

  8. Nighthawks (The Curiosity Engine / Wadjet Eye, 2026). ↩︎

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