Swolog
2 minutes readI started lifting 10 years ago using the Starting Strength 5x5 iOS app1. I would still recommend it for beginners.
Then when I switched programs to 6 day Push/Pull/Legs 2, I switched to a paper notepad with just handwritten weights and reps like so:

Since my progression solely depended on the last time and the goal was to do “moar”, with a 6 day split it was easy, just flip 3 pages before and compare.
Eventually I started using multiple gyms, and didn’t have the notebook with me, so I switched to a long note in the Notes.app on iOS. There the comparison to previous time was more tedious, one had to scroll up and down.
Naturally I made an app. I started by making it an iOS app, but quickly abandoned that since I realized nobody will ever use it and I do not want to go through the review process.
Then I made it into a progressive web app.
You can find it here: https://apps.yozy.net/swolog/web
Note that I made this app for me. I am sharing it with the world since it is based on many open source contributions. I am licensing it under AGPLv3, but I provide no support, or would answer for any feature requests.
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I have used the Stronglifts app back around 2016, so I can’t say how it has evolved. ↩︎
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I really like the 6 day split, even though these days I usually do it over 2 weeks rather than a single one. Link Archive ↩︎
Postmortem of Oral-B iO Series 8s Electric Toothbrush
2 minutes readI bought this toothbrush almost exactly 4 years ago. It replaced my then 4 and a half years old Oral-B PRO 3000 toothbrush. Today, the Series 8s is dead, due to failed battery. This article is a little post-mortem, a review after the whole lifetime of the product.
Let us start with the good parts:
- The toothbrush cleans teeth well.
- The best feature is that the pressure sensor not only indicates when too much pressure is applied (all decent electric toothbrushes do this), but also indicates when you do not apply enough pressure.
- You can customize the color of the LED and it has RGB, which is always great.
However this is where the good parts end. The main problems with the device are:
- It is expensive, and so are the replacement brushes.
- Its smart features are pure gimmick: the position tracking does not work and nobody needs to track their brushing frequency.
- The travel pocket is way too small to actually fit the toothbrush properly.
- It gunks up easily.
- Too many brushing modes make the menu tedious to use.
The battery is so bad it merits its own paragraph. The toothbrush became unreliable after maybe two years of use. Randomly, in the morning it would drop charge from 100% to 0, suggesting faulty electronics. Even at its best it would not last through a 10 day trip.
Verdict
Do not buy this, and steer away from the iO line in general. Myself, I bought a newer model from the PRO series for two reasons:
- The battery in my old one still work and I use it when I go visit my parents.
- You can now get off-brand cheap (and ecological) brushes for the from The Humble Co.
Everybody Is a 10x Developer Now
Draft 3 minutes readWe all know the “10x developer”. A person who walks into the office after lunch and codes until they get kicked out by the night guard. In the morning their colleagues wake up to a ton of pull requests that require “immediate attention”.
They write verbose code of poor quality. They consider rules to be roadblocks: coding conventions, DRY, separation of concerns… However they deliver features, fast.
Leadership praises them because they do deliver. They are branded ‘10x’ developer because they seemingly deliver more value to the company than 10 of their colleagues.
But do they?
These individuals will pump out features at breakneck pace until everything grinds to a halt because of the countless refactoring the project has to go through. Naturally they do not refactor the code themselves, or they do them with disregard of other people’s work.
Eventually the 10x developer leaves the project because they are frustrated by the slowing pace. The team takes the blame for failure, and the life goes on.
In short, being a 10x developer means borrowing time from the future by eschewing good practices.
And now we have AI1
10x developers have been rare. After all, they needed to be proficient coders and have a strong work morale (if not ethic) to remain focused. If not for their ego and impatience, most would be excellent developers.
But with agentic AI anybody can be a 10x developer. That is: anybody can spew hundreds of lines of code that “do stuff”, and do not follow any rules.
I know this is a hot topic but LLMs in agentic mode absolutely can produce complex functional code all the way up to fully functional programs2.
Agents make it stupidly easy to create interactive prototypes from nothing.
Herein lies the problem: The quality of the code they produce follows the quality of the prompt. The LLM does not know about your good practices, unless your documentation is in context and extremely explicit it will pull the general good practices for React developers even if you write a fuel pump controller in ADA.
You will end up with a horrible mess, that nevertheless works (and is of course full of bugs). But debugging code is hard, and somebody using an LLM to just zero-shot things will have neither skill or patience to make it clean. They will send it to you for a review.
If you actually take the time to comment on all the problems, they will most probably just feed those back to the machine, inevitably losing context. Worst of all, they will not learn anything, so you will remain in the role of the slop reviewer forever.
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I don’t particularly care about the differences between machine learning, transformers, LLMs and so on; I use the term AI for anything that one would think of as one. ↩︎
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I am not talking about copy and pasting code from ChatGPT.
A modern agentic IDE is capable of:
- Planning step-by-step feature development with a test plan for each step.
- With multiple rounds of plan review.
- Gathering additional information from the web, documentation and any given resources.
- Running programs, opening webpages, interacting with both, recording the interactions in screenshots and video and using these artifacts as additional input.
All this to say that you can give a screenshot of a bug of your web application to your IDE with the istruction “fix it”, and it will do it. ↩︎
- Planning step-by-step feature development with a test plan for each step.
Know Your Fitness Influencer
Draft One minute readHere is a little overview of the current most popular fitness influencers, and what you should know about them before listening to anything they say.
The Team
Alexander Bromley
My favourite at the moment. Unfortunately the last video contains AI generated animations which I’m not fond of.
- Bro
Mike Israetel
- Science Based
Milo Wolf
- Science Based
Greg Doucette
Drug dealer with a loud mouth. Has an absolutely insane video editor.
His videos are 90% drama with some workout advice sprinkled on top. His workout advice is extrememly basic and generally good.
Do not listen to him concerning supplements, even if everything he sold worked, he is still very much in the game of peddling turk (which has never shown any efficacy).