MonkeHacks #83

H1-3120, Office, Illusions

Author

Monke
November 10, 2025

MonkeHacks #83

Late issue again as I had the H1-3120 Live Hacking Event in Amsterdam, hacking on Salesforce’s AI scope. My team (busfactor, rafax and myself) put in a strong performance (I think!). I’m back in Edinburgh again now, and this week I’m moving to my new apartment (it’s pretty close to my current one). The cats have settled in pretty well.

Girl with a Pearl Earring, Mauritshuis, The Hague, Netherlands

Weekly Ideas / Notes 

  • I had H1-3120 in Amsterdam this week! I had a fantastic time onsite. There’s a few familiar faces I’ll only see once or twice a year as a result of attending these events, so it was great to see the hacker friends and acquaintances again. Once you’ve been to more than one LHE, you recognise the regulars, and they recognise you, so it becomes this fun reunion occasion. The scope and program experience can have ups and downs in various events but the on-site experience is always really fun. Amsterdam, in particular, was familiar territory to me, as I’ve lived in the Netherlands for long enough to know how to get by there. It was like the Edinburgh LHE last year - when you know a city, it’s easier to focus on the hacking part.

  • I went to The Hague this week with Busfactor and Rafax - I showed them my old apartment, we went to my favourite cafes in the city, and we saw the Girl With a Pearl Earring painting in the Mauritshuis gallery. I’m thankful that my two teammates tagged along on my nostalgic little daytrip back to Den Haag. It was a good day out.

  • I’m firmly in recuperation mode after the intense hacking period of the last two weeks or so. Well, my idea of recuperation is doing less intense/high-pressure work, and spending more time unwinding and getting through administrative stuff, so that’s what I’ll be doing this week.

  • I’m thinking about what to set up in my planned office. There’s a big difference between what I want and what I need. At the very least, I’ll need two monitors, and I’m strongly considering getting a relatively cheap mini-PC so I can load Omarchy onto it and do my day-to-day hacking on Linux. I’ll probably need to get an ergonomic chair as well. I’m still hacking from cafes without any external monitors so I’m probably sacrificing a good deal of productivity. The recent CTBB episode talks about reducing friction and I definitely need to embark on a friction-reducing mission this month to streamline my processes.

  • Conversely, it’s pretty easy to focus on the wrong things and spend too much time optimising. This kind of optimisation gives you the illusion of productivity ("this will pay off eventually!”) when in reality, you’re just giving yourself an excuse to procrastinate. It’s like spending money. There’s a balance somewhere between spending and saving, and likewise there’s a balance somewhere between doing things and optimising your processes. So much of overall success is dependent on properly hitting this “rational balance” of planning and doing. It takes a significant amount of self-reflection to identify when you’re not hitting this balance properly.

  • I’m working my way through Founders at Work and the number of startups that were founded from a bunch of people going “let’s build something cool” and then just… executing on an idea is really surprising. It’s pretty clear to me that the people who just do things instead of dwelling on things too much are the ones who succeed in the long run.

Reading List

  • Currently:

    • Fiction:

      • Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu (130/600 pages)

      • Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett

    • Non-Fiction:

      • A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel (150/300 pages)

      • How The World Made The West by Josephine Crawley Quinn (232/400 pages)

      • Founders At Work by Jessica Livingston (172/472 pages)

  • Next on the list:

    • Fiction: Mort by Terry Pratchett

    • Non-Fiction: Day Zero to Zero Day by Eugene Lim (SpaceRaccoon)

Resources