Christof Damian: 12.2025

A white city model in the middle of a dark room illuminated from above

Clearly, I have been slacking for the last weeks.

Just look at all the links from other people at the bottom!

This might also be the last post for the year, as I will be enjoying the festive season.

Nonetheless, a lot of great content this week. I discovered a few new blogs that will keep me busy for the future.

Leadership

Are women less convincing or perceivers biased? Understanding differential reactions towards men and women’s intentions to exert influence [Paper] - No. "In the context of our study, we thus do not find evidence that women and men differ in their ability to exert influence, or that others are biased towards women when evaluating their speeches."

Futurespectives: learning from failures that haven’t happened yet - nice idea, similar to pre-mortems.

Stop Looking for Silver Bullets and Start Looking at Your Context - I must confess I sometimes still fall for them.

Most Technical Problems Are Really People Problems - 100% agree

The Mathematics of the Christmas Rush: Why ‘One Last Push’ Guarantees You’ll Be Late - yep.

40 questions to ask yourself every year - I'll try that.

Engineering

Turbo Vision - A modern port of Turbo Vision 2.0

Automatically merging dependabot PRs - I quite like to do that manually, but with many projects, this is probably a good idea.

AIs Exploiting Smart Contracts - I never liked them either.

Linux kernel version numbers - short version: everything is stable and higher is newer

Strategic re-architecture, moving beyond the “black hole” fear - this makes a lot of assumptions about the team :-)

It’s The End Of Observability As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) - frankly, I would appreciate any observability.

Programming peaked - maybe, or perhaps JavaScript peaked.

Level 9 code archive is now open source - if you want to look at some ancient code

Urbanism

How London Built A Utopia [YouTube] - The Barbican

Spain to launch €60 monthly public transport ticket for buses, Rodalies, and medium-distance rail network - Spanish Deutschlandticket!

You Need a Train to Get to this Hotel [YouTube] - this is a bit specific

Almost 2,000 homeless people in Barcelona, 43% increase from 2023 - there is enough space for them. Instead, we are evicting more.

AI vs. Human Drivers - we don't know yet if it is good or bad, probably bad.

The Data on Self-Driving Cars Is Clear. We Have to Change Course. - another angle.

Bad Cyclists? or… Bad Infrastructure? [YouTube] - nice to see that the channel is back. Some of the infrastructure in Barcelona is a mess, and this crossing is pretty new.

Access City Award - Spain is well represented!

Car Culture, Part 1: The Battle for Disneyland - Autopia going electric.

Mapping Diversity - embarrasing.