The practice that fell apart after ten minutes
A beautifully structured 90-minute U12 baseball practice fell apart in ten minutes. The fix was not a better spreadsheet, but a one-sentence pocket plan.
Richard Lemon
Richard Lemon is a Creative Web Experience Developer at Ideebv, Maastricht. He writes about frontend craft, AI workflows, and tools that make work feel less like work. Youth baseball coach, chronic self-optimizer, builder in public.
When I Stop Correcting a Young Player
How I decide when another coaching cue will help a young player and when it will only create noise, freeze them up, and block real learning.
Why my posts now start with five bullets
I stopped asking my automation to invent posts from topics and started feeding it five ugly bullets from real life instead. The system did not change much, but the writing did.
Why I Prototype Motion Before Polishing Layout
Static layouts can look perfect and still refuse to move. By prototyping motion early, spacing, hierarchy and components evolve around how the interface actually behaves.
What I Write Down During a Youth Baseball Game
During youth baseball games, I let the app track the score and use my notebook for the human data: faces, failed drills, invisible players, and one actionable line per kid.
A Month of Ignoring Daily Body-Fat Numbers
I hid the body-fat tile on my smart scale for 30 days and watched only a 7-day rolling weight average. The results were calmer mornings and steadier habits, not worse progress.
Fluent emptiness and the missing Tuesday morning
A draft about my Withings scale sounded polished and personal, but it was fluent emptiness. Here is how I now spot that pattern and push writing back to real detail.
The boring training week I can actually repeat
My training week is aggressively boring: a fixed 20-minute kettlebell session, rec softball as a social anchor, wildcard days that can be nothing, and recovery as the actual plan.
The Hour I Lost to a Plausible AI Debugging Answer
A confident AI diagnosis of a React Native hydration issue sent me refactoring the wrong layer for 45 minutes. The real bug was a string "null" in the API.
The client code I will not paste into an AI tool
A practical line between “helpful AI code review” and “leaking your client’s business model,” based on operational privacy rather than legal fine print.
The frontend code I deliberately keep boring
One feature taught me that a neat React state machine was less valuable than three plain useState hooks, and it changed how I choose boring frontend code.
The metric I stopped letting ruin my morning
For months my HRV score decided if I was allowed to feel competent that day. A 90-day experiment changed it from a verdict into one quiet input among many.