The Champion’s Mind
How Great Athletes Think, Train, and Thrive
Jim Afremow, 2013
A sports-psychology handbook read from the wrong side of an Ironman build: 250 pages that could have been 80, but the 80 are good.
Erik Pillon — Luxembourg
Mathematician.
Actuary.
Curious about
far too many things.
I think like a physicist, but I code like a mathematician.
At work I figure out how much an insurer needs to put aside for claims that haven't happened yet, which is a very good excuse to think about probability all day. The rest of the time I build small tools, read a lot, write about books and the history of science, and train for races that are longer than they need to be.
it all follows whatever I'm into at the time, which is a polite way of saying there's too much
Open Finance
2024 —Where my money actually is
A webapp for keeping track of my spending, my investments and where my money actually sits — built mostly so I'd stop kidding myself about it. Sign up, or just play around with a made-up portfolio.
liveNext.js · Python · Postgres
Distill
2024 —A second brain that survives contact with paper
Half paper notebook, half app. A place to catch ideas and find them again later, because they never turn up when I'm ready for them. Still very much a building site.
buildingNext.js · Zettelkasten
Let'z Quiz
Your friendly neighbourhood quizmaster
I write and host pub quizzes around Luxembourg. The site is the archive of every question I've set, plus where the next quiz nights get announced.
live
Scientific Chronicles
2024 —How science actually happened
The people, the dates and the discoveries that shaped science, told as stories rather than as a syllabus. Published on Substack.
live
Accelerate
Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, Gene Kim, 2018
What 23,000 survey responses actually say about high-performing engineering teams — and why the answer turns out to be culture rather than tooling.
Database Normalization Forms and all that Jazz
Personal introduction to RDBMS Normalization Forms with a taste of Formula 1
03
The rest of it
not everything lives here — the newsletter and the dashboards have their own homes
- NewsletterScientific ChroniclesLonger pieces on the people, dates and discoveries that shaped science. New issues land here first.
- ArchiveScientific Chronicles: AnniversariesThe companion site: an archive of scientific anniversaries you can browse a day at a time.
- Quiz nightsLet'z QuizThe archive of every question I've set as quizmaster, and where the next quiz nights get announced.
Last book I took notes on: The Champion’s Mind · Jim Afremow