As well as ’ Goals ’, ’ Teams ’, ‘Topics’ (ah no, wait - we changed that to ’ Tags ’) and ’ Projects ’. But please, don’t confuse them with Jira ‘Projects’ - which are actually called ‘Spaces’ from now on. ‘Spaces’ in Confluence are almost the same hierarchical entity anyway (I really mean this one unironically).

You’ll be delighted to find that within the ’ Board ’ of your Jira ‘Space’, there is a ’ Timeline ’ - unless you have multiple ‘Spaces’ within your ‘Board’ and ’ Advanced Roadmaps ’. Then you’ll have to leave your ‘Board’ and go to ‘Plans’.

Your ‘Board’ can reference multiple ‘Spaces’ if it’s a company-managed Space. Team-managed Spaces are not allowed to. They’re coming to ‘Plans’, though.

The main thing you’re here for, of course, is Jira ‘issues’ -  which you’ll appreciate are called “Work” now.

‘You can now include work items from team-managed spaces in your plans!’ Source

I get that I sound like I’m just raging along - and to some extent, that might be accurate.

However, I sincerely appreciate product teams investing in their terminology to make their products more understandable, intuitive, and aligned with existing mental models.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to deeply understand the struggles product teams face when it comes to intentionally developing and maintaining consistent terminology. I believe that having terms that are

• helpful - allowing people to quickly grasp complex concepts,
• straightforward - offering coherent mental models where relationships are obvious, and
• friendly - enabling newcomers inside and outside your organization to understand your product without memorizing every term first,

is a competitive advantage.

To learn even more, I’m conducting a short survey on the topic. If you’re working in product development and interested in participating, I’d highly appreciate you taking 7–10 minutes of your time.

👉 Participate in the survey right here

Update 2026-03-25: The survey has been closed. Thank you for your participation.

The book «Accelerate» is the result of years of research by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim that is scientifically rigorous and practical. Their research shows capabilities your organization should develop to positively influence its development. For anyone working in the field I think it’s worth a read. For one thing it confirms lots of aspects around DevOps practices I anecdotally felt are helping me stay sane and improve delivery. But additionally to that it packs a few surprises that uncover links I have never thought about.

Be it your own network attached storage at home with mirrored cloud backups, company internal online office suites, your own platform as a service. Today with the richness that the open-source community provides and the amazing hardware products that have a one-off price with little running costs attached we are very much in a dream land regarding self-hosting your stuff.

Quick overview of what I’m currently using:

• Synology network attached storage: A comparatively cheap solution to very large volumes of locally available, secure and with a little configuration safe backup storage. Comes with a solid office suite and very nice photos cross-platform app similar to what Google or Apple photos apps offer.
• Coolify (hosted on Hetzner): One or a couple of cheap VMs are set up almost instantly with a single command with Coolify. You can run open-source software pre-configured to one-click install on your servers, setup any docker compose service stack, dockerfile or nix package as well as build your own web software on top of these possibilities with many amazing features (easy GitHub connection for CD, feature environments w/ docker compose, TLS termination, …).

Especially web development with large language model agents such as GitHub Co-Pilot agent is very nice with Coolify, docker compose and feature environments. Imagine this:

• You want to build a feature you can imagine roughly
• You create a PR through Co-Pilot agent mode with the description of what you want
• Co-Pilot creates an implementation
• Coolify sees the new feature branch and is able to spin up a full environment of your software with the new implementation automatically
• You get to review both the code and the actual software amazingly quickly

And the best of all: You’re not locked into any vendor. You’re self-hosted. And you’re running all of this cheaply. You’re fully in control.

Of course great power comes with great responsibility – but automated updates for your services and servers themselves has also never been easier than with Coolify.

Software product teams are always looking for features or ideas that can differentiate their product from their competitors’. Most of the time the teams are looking at what piece can still be added to the „Jenga” tower of features they’ve built in the past. Chasing after the next big thing that can just turn the world around for them.

I find the game of „Jenga” to be a good analogy for a lot of software in this world:

• You begin with a bare bones setup und build up this tower of features and ideas
• The more that time moves on the more features and ideas get rearranged, get reshuffled or rebuilt
• Most importantly people stack more on top
• As time progresses further the architecture gets a whole lot more brittle and shaky

Yes, the analogy falls apart in various ways, too. But I believe the point comes across: It’s not always about what you can stack on top of what you’ve already built. Sometimes it’s also about what not to build. Where to reduce complexity. Where to rebuild things properly. Or where to simply leave things alone.

Especially for small to mid-sized companies it can be game changing to not build a feature their competitor has. It can be game changing to leave out things. It might just save you a whole lot of headache and complexity you’ll have to carry into the future.

I’m getting asked time and time again for some references for keeping up in the web dev world and overall. I’d like to share a few sources of inspiration and update channels for future reference here.

First off a shameless plug: My project nuzelettr.email helps you keep up by giving you a dedicated email address and inbox for only your newsletters - this is also my main hub of reading inspiration and curation. If offers a nice reading experience and comes with lots of small goodies such as dark/light mode, reduced styling reading mode, a command palette and lots of keyboard shortcuts for moving through the user interface.

Anyway, moving on to actual content I’d like to curate a few of my highlights:

Newsletters

• WebDev: TL;DR WebDev
• WebDev: The History of the Web
• WebDev: unzip.dev
• WebDev: JavaScript weekly
• WebDev: Node Weekly
• UX/UI: Norman Nielsen Group
• UX/UI: UX Design Weekly
• Rust: This week in rust
• Experiments: untested.io by Rafał Pastuszak

Youtube Channels

• Youtube Channel: „Chrome for Developers”
• Youtube Channel: „Code Aesthetic”
• Youtube Channel: „Fireship”
• Youtube Channel: „FunFunFunction” and their newly released newsletter
• Youtube Channel: „Joy of Code”
• Youtube Channel: „NoBoilerplate”
• Youtube Channel: „Sebastian Lague”
• Youtube Channel: „ThePrimeagen”
• Anything with Rich Harris speaking

RSS feeds / blogs

• https://github.blog
• https://dev.37signals.com
• https://world.hey.com/dhh
• https://heinrichhartmann.com
• https://lethain.com
• https://world.hey.com/jason
• https://tonsky.me
• https://overreacted.io

Lately I’ve been reiterating on my workflows a bit. I’m building my workflow around long form writing. Long form writing can help you make this more clear in your head. By typing out your whole thought process, the problems you notice while doing it and reflecting on those things you gain a new perspective.

Noting my thoughts allows me to perform ”Six thinking hats” without even actively thinking about it. While writing thoughts I notice flaws in my previous assumptions, instincts or ideas. And immediately my brain jumps to the next thoughts and continues onwards. Keeping those also on record, I gain so much food for Sleeping on it that I can come back the next day and move on with renewed joy for the thing I was working on.

One tool I absolutely learned to love recently while writing more is Obsidian. It’s an excellent writing tool which can be extended in so many ways it’s mind blowing at first sight. But once you’re a little into it you cannot imagine working without it ever again.

• I can write freely, without disruptions
• I can prepare presentations immediately from my writing
• I can build rich tables and aggregate notes
• I could even publish my notes to the web immediately (by the way: I’m actually thinking about moving this blog onto the Publish platform because of it’s simplicity).

Anyway, I just think writing out everything that crosses my mind has been a great new workflow. Helping me be more thoughtful about concepts, more detailed about problems and solutions and more creative, too. You should try it.

Over the years my musical taste has shifted from being very specific and hating everything outside of my niche. Becoming an adult I finally learned to love all kinds of music and broaden my worldview. This could be applied to both listening to different styles of music but also on my whole life scale. This made me a happier person. I laid off a kind of shame about enjoying music that might not be popular with people around me. I laid off shame more and more throughout my life.

Today I‘d like to lay off the shame about my own little music. I‘m not a music nerd. Far off from it to be honest. I have literally no idea about formal musical education — most of what I learnt has come from trial and error, trying to play along to songs I wanted to learn with tabs and just fiddling around. Of course I will care if people like it or not — that‘s just part of me.

Starting today I will publish unpolished music. Music that‘s created in the evening after a day of work, that‘s created on a free hour on the weekend or that just comes out of me at moment of inner peace.

One can say I loved everything about it. The build quality, the features, the feeling of my mouth after using it! It charges wirelessly on a stand it came with, it has various modes for brushing, it has a nice UI. One button paired with a few backlit lines of text and vibration motor indicating at certain points in time you should move to a new quadrant. It also comes with incredible battery life and you can wash and clean it everywhere you’d like as there’s no charging port.

Well, everything was fine. And that for a quite long time. More or less precisely for four years. But now I hate it completely and wanted to smash it to pieces several times. Why?

It started on a business trip a few days ago where, magically, in the middle of the night I heard a loud, annoying, buzzing sound in the apartment somewhere. First I thought it was an upstairs neighbor or something outside of the building producing the noise. But as it persisted for several minutes I wanted to locate it and understand what it is at least.

So I got up and moved through the floor, wandering in the dark and tracing the noise to the bathroom. After opening the door I saw the green battery indicator light flashing and the white backlit text of the „mode“-switcher of the toothbrush being lit up. Well turns out the thing turned on by itself.

I clicked the button to turn it off and went back to my bedroom. Would have been fine if I was able to end the story here. But that’s not how that worked out. That same night the toothbrush turned back on four more times. Rest assured, I turned it off again a few times, took it to my bedroom as well to be able to turn it off faster again. With me on that business trip were two other colleagues who shared the same bathroom and floor – so if I could hear that sound they could as well. And they could lie awake because of it too.

I started googling around and found out there might be some humidity inside causing the button to be triggered without pressing. However for this model of toothbrush there is no way to unscrew it and take out the battery. It is glued together and there’s not a whole lot you can do about it.

In that night I violently started to press the button in hopes of „unstucking“ the button if it was, shaking the toothbrush in case that could cause humidity to flow another way and not trigger the on-switch again. I finally decided to move it to another room afar from mine and the other rooms of my colleagues and went to bed. Since the apartment was huge enough, I only heard it silently buzz one more time until I fell asleep again.

Two days later I’m at home, playing a video game, my girlfriend and baby daughter lying asleep next door. And that buzzing sound starts again. In fury from the moment the sound started appearing I ran to the bathroom, taking the toothbrush and trying to turn it off again. The model I’m using can switch between its modes if you hit the button multiple times in quick succession. Looking at the backlit text indicators of the modes flashing every few seconds I realized the problem seemed to have intensified - triggering the button press every few seconds. Shortly enough that the mode-switch is triggered. The second thing you need to know is that it resets the timer for the toothbrush automatically when switching modes — which makes sense in normal use.

In this malfunctioning case though, it’s extremely annoying behaviour. Since it will mean that anytime the cycle of auto triggering begins it will keep on vibrating until the battery is dead unless you trigger the button yourself and it does not trigger by itself again for long enough. But that night I struggled for at least seven minutes until I was able to turn it off. Rest assured it turned back on again of course. It drove me crazy — I thought of all options I had. Smash it with a hammer? Too loud and too rash of a solution as of now. Keep turning it off again and again? Too nervewrecking. Put it somewhere else? Well…

First I thought of the house trash in our courtyard. That wouldn’t work as it’s right before the bed window. My car? Parked too far, don’t want to wander around with something vibrating in my hand in the middle of the night. The cellar? Well that could be an option, I thought initially.

So I grabbed the keys and walked downstairs. Opening my cellar department and wrapping the toothbrush with a few cardboard packagings lying around and even some bubble wrap. I thought I had found the temporary solution .

I went upstairs and taking my last step of the staircase I heard the loud buzzing again. Damn, that toothbrush is ultrasound and will sound through even two doors, a few layers of cardboard and bubblewrap. My apartment’s on the first floor — but there are people living on ground floor. They would hear it. So I grabbed it again, turned it off once more and took it back to my apartment.

Arriving there I reconsidered my options. I turned it off again and decided to try repositioning it. I turned it upside down and left it alone. Waited a few minutes. Nothing. With a little feeling of success I went to bed and was not woken up again that night.

Yesterday we weren’t at home for the full day. I did not touch the toothbrush and it has not turned again.

Fast forward to today. Day four of the whole situation. I’m standing at my desk with my daughter in the baby carrier. She’s barely falling asleep after trying to gently rock her into it for half an hour and just closes her eyes and — magic timing. The thing turns on again.

Morale of story. None. Just a bit pissed off at glued together pieces of plastics without a killswitch altogether.

(Saw this on on Chris Coyier’s blog who saw it on Matt C.’s blog who joined the trend from Tracy Durnell and following suit.)

📨 Mail Client: Spark (Private), Outlook (Work)

📮 Mail Server: 1blu, GMail, …

📝 Notes: Notion & Microsoft Loop (Work), Notion & Obsidian (Private) - Currently trying to streamline

✅ To-Do: Todoist ❤️

📷 Photo Shooting: iPhone 15 Pro

🎨 Photo Editing: n/a

📆 Calendar: Busycal via Setapp (Private), Outlook (Work)

📁 Cloud File Storage: Mostly: Google Drive. For iOS apps: iCloud Drive

📖 RSS: Reeder, nuzelettr.email (shameless plug!)

🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: iOS contacts

🌐 Browser: Desktop: Arc (MacOS), Chrome (Windows); iOS: Safari

💬 Chat: In order of quantity: WhatsApp, Signal, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Discord

🔖 Bookmarks & 📑 Read It Later: Raindrop.io, Notion Web Clipper - Trying to streamline

📜 Word Processing: None, if forced Microsoft Word or Google Docs

📈 Spreadsheets: Google Sheets

📊 Presentations: Google Presentations

🛒 Shopping Lists: Bring

🍴 Meal Planning: Coopes

💰 Budgeting and Personal Finance: Finanzguru (I assume only available in Germany)

📰 News: nuzelettr.email (shameless plug again!)

🎵 Music: Spotify

🎤 Podcasts: Pocket Casts

🔐 Password Management: 1Password (Work), Enpass (Private)

🧑‍💻 Code Editor: VS Code, as scratch-pad: QuokkaJS

✈️ VPN: NordVPN

📝 Blogging: Strapi & self-built frontend w/ SvelteKit SSG

🎸 Playing music: Garage Band for iPad

Others: ChatGPT (You’ve heard of it), TablePlus (Databases), Basecamp (Hobby Project Management), Setapp (Subscription app store alternative for MacOS)

Meta

Something I noticed while compiling this list is that there seem to be different strategies regarding app landing pages:

• Have a dedicated landing page and a dedicated url for the application; Examples: Basecamp, TablePlus and most others
• Overlapping url for landing page and application - depending whether you’re already signed in to the app you’ll be routed to the app or to the landing page instead; Example: Notion;
• No landing page at all (?); Example: Spotify

The two latter patterns I found to be extremely irritating. Yes, they are pretty known brands and products but I don’t think that justifies this behaviour.

The linked article illustrates some relatively simple techniques to build a full-text search engine based on PostgreSQL.

Integrated functionalities may not have the exact same feature set of specialized tools like Elastic- / Opensearch and others alike. However adding new tools to your tech stack will make working on your product a lot harder than just sticking to what you’ve already got. Even though it may not have the same final high-end potential, it may serve you well for an extremely long time.

Stick to what you’ve already got. Appreciate a low amount of components. Keep it simple.

Staying up to date has always involved a combination of multiple channels of information. With «nuzelettr.email» I’m trying to build a calm, unified inbox for your newsletters and feeds. It’s supposed to be a nice place that doesn’t try to distract you but let’s you dive deeply into reading mode.

If you’re interested, sign up to the early access test group now. I’ll select a few people to get a better feeling for what’s working and what isn’t.

As simple as the approach of having a demo website with a real-time adaptable color scheme for all elements is, as practical and useful it also is. Maybe this helps anybody out there too.

Treat yourself and buy a copy!