I love these places on the internet. In no particular order, for now.

Austin Kleon – Drawing writer with a great blog.

Brain Pickings – Maria Popova’s labour of love on books and other beautiful things.

Mr Motley – Great Dutch site about art.

Beeple-crap – Wonderful artist, became known for selling digital works as art with NFT’s. I think his daily work is immensely inspiring.

Boing Boing – Despite being somewhat North-America oriented, a beautiful site by my favorite internet person Mark Frauenfelder. (You will have to accept too many too disgusting ads, that are apparently needed to keep the site alive.)

booooooom – A beautiful art platform. Scrolling around cheers up your mind.

Swissmiss – A design blog it says, but it is much more. Run by Tina Roth Eisenberg. I would say it is her personal “thing that delight me on the web” log.

https://www.dirtyharrry.com – For a visual orgasm.

Seth Godin – Well, guess it needs no elaboration – Seth Godin’s blog. All about making a ruckus.

The Correspondent – Probably the most refreshing journalistic platform in the world, focusing on “unbreaking news”. Here the original (even better) Dutch De Correspondent.

Derek Sivers – Slow thinker comes to unique points of view. Now redirecting to https://sive.rs/. Hope he will re-start posting.

kk.org – A wealth of Kevin Kelly interesting initiatives, thoughts, articles, stuff.

elsadorfman.com – The website of Elsa Dorfman, 20×24 Polaroid portait photographer. An relatively old website I found recently after she passed away. This site keeps engaging me.

B – Blake Andrews’s long running blog. On (street) photography, and other interests from Blake.

Recomendo – another site/newsletter by Mark Frauenfelder.

I am hiring, and because this is new to me, I researched a bit how companies are recruiting nowadays, and where (Indeed seems to be the incumbent).

Going through the job description I noticed how many skills requirements drastically limit their target audience by including long lists of technologies and tools. I gathered the following list from just a handful of job descriptions:

Rundeck, Jira, Jenkins, UrbanCode, ServiceNow, Git(hub), Python, Flask, Bootstrap, PHP, Golang, Ansible, React, Angular, Docker, Kubernetes, Javascript, HTML5, Java, Node.js, CSS, R, AWS, Sonar, Fortity, Polymer/Lit, Hadoop, Elastic.

Sites list these technologies as prerequisites. This will put off very good people that just have not acquired a specific tool-skill yet. On the other hand very good people that have too much of a preference for the latest and hottest tool, may be put off by these specific tech lists.

More importantly, the variety in the list above seems to imply that tools are not as important a skills as the eagerness and ability to quickly learn new skills and tools. And also it warns you that if your skills are too narrowly based on specific tools, you may be sailing in shallow water.

The Human Capital Trends 2019 report from Deloitte similarly predicts a future of jobs where new skills needs “are forcing organizations to create more flexible and evolving, less rigidly defined positions and roles”.

We will need to learn lots of skills and tools. But we only know which ones, when it happens.