Recently, I read a post from Edward O'Brien where he was writing about his personality profile, and how it has influenced his career. I commented on his post, but want to expand here a little bit more on my own experiences.

The “Colors” theory is not a gang sort of thing, but a great way to get a concrete description of your personality, understand how your behavior effects others and improve your communication and cooperation skills. Of course there are also other assessments, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but this is the one that, at least for me, was easy to understand and also to explain to others. I got a recommendation to do it about 12 years ago, after a not-so-positive leadership review I received. That feedback, and this assessment, sent me down a long reflection road that at the end led to biggest breakthroughs in my personal development.

Where is your team?

As a young professional, I joined Mercedes-Benz AG in 2009, and was tasked with building up test management and preparing a test strategy for a car system that would have to comply with ISO 26262 when it becomes a certification precondition. I tackled the task very intensively, as I had already two years of test engineer experience and was eager to reach the next step in my career. After about two years of hard work, I had an internally assessed test strategy that was aligned with ISO 26262, and a working test management on the system level. This success brought me a good performance review from my management, and as it usually goes, I got tasked with something even harder, although I didn't recognize this at the time. The next task was to extend the test strategy to also include component-level analysis and then align it with all the component responsible and their suppliers. In order to give me the attention I needed, I actually got a slot in the management meeting every second Friday, where I could present my progress. So everything was setup, to deliver great results and get, the ever so needed, visibility for my work.

I did then what I always did. I dug into the topic, worked out a very good technical solution, and invited component-responsible people for regular connects to present them the solution and then push them until completion. I presented, pushed, explained, escalated in those management syncs when there was no progress... and after a year or so of fighting, we reached our first successful SOP. Now I was really looking forward to my next performance review. And the review started very well, as I was commended for reaching the goals and given a good raise. But then I asked about my leadership performance ... and got a feedback that was very short and to the point: “You have reached the goals, but at the finishing line, you were the only one there. Where is your team?”

At first, I didn't understand the feedback because results had been delivered; therefore, I had proven my worth, right? The team performed and delivered, so what's the problem then? The issue was that the project team would not do me. They had delivered but reported to their line management that they felt uninvolved, pressured, and burned. This hit me hard, as I actually thought that everything I did took them with me. But it seems, it came out the wrong way, and I was stunned by what went wrong.

Paper Mind Model, an addition to the Colors

It was clear that I needed to take people with me, and as I wrote, I was convinced that I was sending out that message all the time in our meetings. But why did the receivers get something completely different? And on which level did I not engage with the people who had different levels of technical expertise?

Finding out through the assessment that I am mostly Red and Blue offered an explanation for why I lost colleagues with Yellow and Green shades. The fact that my German was colored with a strong Eastern European accent seemed to be enough to push others away, as I was perceived as someone very strict and military-like.

But still there was the problem of engaging people on the right technical and abstraction level, in order to help them understand the goals and thus enable their active contribution without feeling overruled or uninvolved. I figured out that my pace was too fast. For some time I thought I lost people because they were not technically skilled enough. But that wasn't the reason. We all need different levels of abstraction to grasp ideas, and have different processing speeds to understand them. Having a higher processing speed doesn't mean you will deliver better results; it only means you can deliver first results faster, which says little about the quality of those same results. In my experience, processing speed can get higher as we gather technical and life experience, but this change is not so drastic. So I stopped making an assumption that if I am in a room with people who have a lot of technical experience, then very high levels of abstraction are sufficient. And vice versa, that juniors need detailed instruction lists to deliver results. Instead, I developed a mind model for myself that I like to call 'Paper Mind Model'.

In this mind model, I imagine a sheet of empty paper and ask myself how many lines of text on that sheet will the person in front of me need to understand what I am talking about and get involved in the idea, task, project etc.

Following are three levels that I have seen in real life:

• A headline is enough.

  • This is a type of person where writing just one headline or title on paper is sufficient to get them started. As an example, for me, the headline “We need a Test Strategy that is aligned with ISO 26262” was enough to get me going.
  • The benefit of this type of people is that they can generate concepts, solutions, and ideas almost out of thin air. However, there is a risk that they might miss the target because you can misinterpret a lot from just one headline or title.
  • As a leader, it's important to invest time in refining their ideas with them. They will need boundaries, but these can be provided later; let them generate freely first.

• Explain me your idea.

  • This is the most common type of people. It takes about half a page of text for them to get started and dig into the details.
  • The benefit here is that they help define the task better by either asking questions or being hesitant with the idea, which forces you to think harder and explain your purpose more clearly.
  • These individuals are valuable assets in the team as they often do not generate new ideas independently but can make your team work more efficiently by providing steady flow of improvements.

• I need clear instructions.

  • For this type of people, it's essential to invest time breaking down the idea or task into sub-items and explain what needs to get done in a level of detail that might sometimes be tiring for fast-paced people among us. It could require a full page of text or more, but if done properly, it is good investment.
  • Some people argue that these types need to be more independent and build more experience, because we need more of the other two types mentioned earlier. However, I disagree. Some of them, mostly fresh graduates, will move upwards in abstraction level over time, but some remain at this level for a long period. This is good as they can deliver a foundation for bigger projects and work with you through daily grind when high potentials are already moving on.

Noteworthy is also a category of people who need no text or headlines to produce results. These individuals listen carefully what's happening around them, what was discussed in meetings, and then start generating improvements and ideas without being explicitly triggered. I do this sort of brain-dumping often and like to call it 'fishing'. Sometimes I catch a fish, and sometimes the idea is just not worth it.

Conclusion

So that's it; the combination of Color Theory and Paper Mind Model helped me a lot in reaching people and leading them to success. As with the colors, you need a good mixture of these types in a successful team. And as a leader, you have to figure out who is who in your team in order to lead them efficiently. But when strong colors get mixed with demanding paper types, this is where leadership gets very interesting.

Time has come to release a new version of Brainiac. The whole configuration file has been almost completly restructured, cleaned up and properly commented. So I will declare this to be version 2.0.

Following changes have been made:

• READ.md has been extended to explain the installation and usage.
• Readability improvements:
  • All colors decisions are now left to Modus themes, we only change typografy, e.g. underline the PROG tasks to encode work in progress.
  • Multiple Org elements were restyled, e.g. ellipsis, tags etc., to improve scanability in large documents.
  • Added the configuration for fixed and variable pitch fonts. You may set the font family to your liking.
  • Packages org-bullets, org-appear and diminish introduced.
  • Priority cookies are removed after the task is closed, to remove visual clutter.
  • When saving, the tags will be aligned automatically.
• Added number of matches to isearch.
• Repeaters are now visible in the agenda.
• When jumping to items from the agenda, automatic narrow is done to improve focus.
• Capture from anywhere is now implemented by a custom script based on org-protocol.
• Many, many small tweaks, fixes and changes.

Get the new release from here.

Enjoy and keep hacking!

Reflection is the key ingredient for self-growth, this is a known fact. However, I figured out I need to be careful and consider several factors.

There are different types of reflection. I noticed, until now, these two types:

1. The type that stimulates self-growth.
2. The self-destructive type.

My mind jumps often from one type to another. Often I catch myself in the self-destructive type, as I have a very strong achiever mentality and a very loud, perfection focused inner critic. It is sometimes a challenge, to calm down my spiraling mind, but I am getting better at it. This needs constant practice.

However, I also have to take care of not investing too much time in reflection, as this is actually using the present to think about the past, which can diminish the time I invest in planing and steering my future.

WriteFreely, which I self-host for this blog, cannot natively serve images. It is designed so that you combine it with a photo serving platform like e.g. snap.as.

I found the solution for this problem by using NGINX and Nextcloud:

• I use a Nextcloud folder to upload the images I want to use.
• Then using NGINX reverse proxy I expose that folder.

  # Serve images                                                                        
        location /images/ {                                                                   
                 alias /home/nc_data/Kemal/files/Public/;                                     
                 autoindex off;                                                               
                 access_log off;                                                              
                 expires 30d;                                                                 
                 add_header Cache-Control "public";                                           
                 } 

• After that I can link images in the blog posts using this

![Name](https://write.moxnet.eu/images/Name.jpg)

Hope this helps someone else also.

Keep on hacking!

Hello everyone!

I have been using the Brainiac intensively over the last months and made some changes to the configuration along the way. Get your update here or from Codeberg.

Improvements:

• Added journal.org to the list of refile targets.
• Reduced the width of comment, source, etc. boxes in brainiac.css.
• The attached items are now visibly listed in the drawer of the headline.
• Minor changes in the configuration, e.g. increase of idle time etc.

New things:

• Added org-crypt to the config, so that sensitive information can be encrypted if storing files on public servers.
• To integrate Brainiac into your system menu, I propose the following: copy brainiac.desktop to ~/.local/share/applications and brainiac.svg to ~/.local/share/icons.
• I added basic AI support by using a customized ollama-buddy-mini and running models locally with ollama. Although I previously stated that Brainiac would not have AI, the chosen combination presents a nice compromise between functionality and privacy.
• I also introduced the abbrev-mode as a template storage for some useful org templates and as a mechanism for storing AI prompts for future usage.
• In order to consolidate important functions and keystrokes, I configured a menu which can be reached by pressing C-c b using transient.

This setup was done on an HP EliteBook 840 with Intel Tiger Lake hardware, running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, but I used tips from Arch Wiki as well. So I presume most of it is transferable to other distributions.

Ubuntu ships with PipeWire and WirePlumber by default, which is a solid audio foundation—but getting microphone with noise suppression and sane device naming requires some manual tuning.

Enable Pro Audio Mode for the microphone to work

To be able to use the microphone, the audio card must run in pro-audio profile, which can be done with pactl. Now open alsamixer and set all relevant channels to 100%. Then test the mic.

When the mic starts working we need some noise suppression, in order to use it for calls. Install RNNoise for PipeWire from here:

👉 https://github.com/werman/noise-suppression-for-voice

Once installed, we need to set the RNNoise source as your default microphone. For that, and other tweaks, I recommend to take the code below, put it in a script and run it on every reboot.

pactl set-card-profile alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic pro-audio
pactl set-default-sink alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-output-0
amixer -c 0 set Master 100%
pactl set-default-source rnnoise_source

WirePlumber Configuration

WirePlumber allows fine-grained control over audio devices using Lua scripts.

Default ALSA device names are long and unreadable. This rule renames the main audio device to something human-friendly.

rule = {
  matches = {
    {
      { "device.name", "matches", "alsa_card.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic" },
    },
  },
  apply_properties = {
    ["device.description"] = "Laptop Audio"
  },
}

table.insert(alsa_monitor.rules, rule)

Pro-audio mode exposes many unused nodes. Disabling them keeps the device list clean and avoids accidental routing.

rule = {
  matches = {
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-output-3" } },
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-output-4" } },
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-output-5" } },
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_output.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-output-31" } },
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-input-0" } },
    { { "node.name", "equals", "alsa_input.pci-0000_00_1f.3-platform-skl_hda_dsp_generic.pro-input-6" } },
  },
  apply_properties = {
    ["node.disabled"] = true,
  },
}

table.insert(alsa_monitor.rules, rule)

Faster audio source/sink switching in GNOME

For this install the GNOME extension:

Quick Settings Audio Panel

This makes switching audio sources and sinks fast and practical during daily work.

Enjoy!

Because “... each tiny “I don't care” iteration to tech products is a small step closer to Star Trek's promised land of holodecks, abundance, and hot aliens ...“, and I want that future!

Note to leaders.

Have a look at what your team is working on, are you producing real future proof value for the company or just chasing another tech trend trying to show that you are „on the bleeding edge“?

Producing real value doesn’t just help your company keep the business in long term, it gives your team purpose and enables them to optimize their contribution.

A couple of days ago I was going to the office. It was Friday, I had some meetings scheduled and some light office tasks to do. All in all, it should be an easy day as it was the first working week of the year.

As I was walking from the car park to the office, I noticed a guy walking in front of me. He was strolling along, with a coffee in his hand and looking kind of dreamy. Unintentionally I set off to overtake him and hurry along my way. Then it hit me: “Why am I in a hurry?”. As I wrote above, there is no urgent meeting that I needed to attend or a task I had to do. Where did this urge to overtake him and look busy come from?

The modern life being promoted around us, teaches us not to loose time and to always be busy. If we are not, then we will not be successful, reach our goals or we will simply be brand-marked as slackers.

But this time I intentionally chose to stop my overtaking and match the speed of a dreamy looking guy. Our lives are marathons, not sprints. Preserve your energy for the moments where you really need them.

This year the company did their bi-annual Employee Survey powered by Gallup. As we did this 2 years ago, my team's results were among the lowest ranking. But this time the Employees Engagement Index went up significantly. I was rated very good by the people I lead concerning my leadership skills and they showed way higher engagement values than comparable teams. So what led to this improvement?

I took the low results very seriously. In the first workshop I had with the team they stated that most of the ratings are low due to volatile project goals, instabilities in the software we are testing, too short timelines, etc. So a lot of stuff you could put in the drawer „That’s life, not under my control.“ and forget about it. But I didn’t. I invested a lot of time in 1:1 talks, smaller workshops and did a lot of incremental changes to the processes, meeting culture, external marketing of the team’s successes.

As the new results came in and we improved across the board, I was very proud and happy about it. I couldn’t stop talking about it for weeks 🤣. I think at some point everyone was getting bored by me, but I didn’t care 😬.

After reflecting on the new results and talking to my team, I think the reasons boil down to these two important cultural pillars:

• Take responsibility and give your team focus by making decisions when they need it. The worst thing you can do is to get afraid and try to sit it out. If you do that, the whole team will grind to a halt. We live in chaotic and volatile (business) times. People need clear direction and managers should be the people giving them what they need. Sometimes you can just say what has to be done in this week, so do that and be open about the low visibility. When the visibility gets better, then aim for longer time periods and loosen the „micromanagement“.

• Be authentic and treat your people the way you would want to be treated. I do not believe in the nonsense of „separate your personal and work behaviors“, because I think you would need to be a psychopath to be able to pull that off convincingly. E.g. when you are sick, do you want your boss asking you to join meetings or call you during your sick days? No, you probably want some words of assurance that everything will be taken care of, that you should go offline and have some (chicken) soup. The same applies if you find out that your employee has a sick child, wife has family issues etc. Treat your team with respect and speak to them openly about the good things and the improvement points. Integrity is the magic word.

It‘s start of the year and time of dreaming about big goals we want to achieve this year. I tend to give myself too many, or too ambitious, goals. Then I either drive myself crazy to reach them, or the regular life gets to me and I get a bad feeling in the stomach because of „my failure“.

This year I‘ll just aim for consistency in healthy habits and things that give me joy, e.g. if my goal is regular running then I‘ll aim to go like 3 times a week but do not care about the speed or distance, or I’ll try to go fishing once a week even if it’s just a couple of hours etc.