I’m working on two of my three Haskell startups. I’m now at a point where I can live off just doing this, so I don’t need to even slightly regret quitting my consulting gig. Aside from that:
Looking for a new rental apartment in the North of Poland
Writing a speech for my best friend’s 30th birthday next weekend
Maybe writing a talk for a couple of conferences I’m considering submitting to this year (I’ve spoken at both of these conferences before)
My longest running project is a SaaS product I did entirely solo. It only makes a few hundred GBP per month, but in some countries that would be an average monthly salary anyway. After living out of a suitcase and slowly travelling for a year, I have now returned to Poland and that money is currently covering my rent. There is lots of room for growth for this business, and I simply haven’t exploited that yet.
My second project is an InsurTech business, somewhat in stealth mode. I have two partners in this, and we recently closed a seed round of funding. The majority of my income now comes from here.
The third project is a price comparison product that I run with one other guy. He’s taking care of the business side, and I write the software. We are currently not making money, as we are beholden to a few large businesses doing deals with us. This process is out of my hands, as I made a conscious decision (after finding my first paying customers for NewBusinessMonitor) to focus on technology and leave sales and business stuff to other people.
All projects use roughly the same tech, namely Haskell, Elm, Nix, Postgres, Redis, and AWS. All of my business partners are based in London, and for the sake of my sanity I do my best to stay away from that city.
Last weekend was a personal success. In the same environment like weekdays I had about 10 pickups of my tablet just to do these tasks as quick as possible:
messaging
look for events
lookup / search
Total time spent online: around 1hr.
My laptop went untouched. And I don’t have a smartphone since last autumn.
The goal of this diet - now practiced also weekdays - is to reduce my online presence just to basics: work, communication, lookup.
Anything else like fun, socialization, learning is already done offline.
How do I feel? This Monday I was proud. One immediate result is that my eyes are sharper. And more attention.
Since last year I find tech hostile. It’s mainstream, it’s obtrusive, it’s against humanity, tries to eat all. I’m not a luddite but I find the offline world getting more and more interesting and fulfilling. Soon I’ll completely leave online including work.
Since last year I find tech hostile. It’s mainstream, it’s obtrusive, it’s against humanity, tries to eat all. I’m not a luddite but I find the offline world getting more and more interesting and fulfilling. Soon I’ll completely leave online including work.
Hard to upvote this one since it felt like supporting your goals and telling you to leave at same time. Although I definitely get your position, I want to remind you there’s slices of tech that are the opposite of that. There’s tech that empowers the human mind to create, helps us remember things, and so on. If about real-world interactions, there’s tech that facilitates and/or aids that. I’d also guess the vast majority of tech is boring stuff that powers businesses and nonprofits, some of which do good things for people.
I think you’ve been staring at all the worst stuff for so long you might have forgotten about the rest. I remember another Lobster had same problem since he stayed dealing with startups. We had to remind him they’re a small niche in a big world. There’s tech projects and jobs that are ethical. Sometimes people find tech that’s highly fulfilling. Started with what they were focused on. I’d say think on that a while before you ditch tech entirely.
I just wonder where one can find projects which empower the human mind, projects which are ethical.
Less than that, I can’t even find projects where all my skills can be used: design, development, and writing. I feel stupid. First, they don’t believe me. Then after a chat, when works are presented, they go silent. Moreover, in one of the recent projects I was asked do not tell the CEO the whole tech / design department is wasting the budget.
I don’t think I’m overskilled. What I see is that tech doesn’t needs me. What if I reduce all to just writing? Without tech. Maybe that will empower the human mind.
I finally finished Nicomachean Ethics. I also read Animal Farm and I’m about to finish Brave New World. Now it’s on to Machiavelli’s Art of War. I should finish Book of Proof this weekend as well, which means I can start on Apostol’s Calculus.
On Saturday, going to Pen Show Poland \^u^/ — excitedly waiting for this day since ~half year ago, when I discovered, and subsequently got lost in, the fountain pen addiction “hobby” :D
Otherwise, hopefully finding some time to work a bit on the .dex/.apk assembler/linker I’m trying to write in Nim — recently in collaboration with @enow, who started some initial experiments towards adding a Dalvik backend to the Nim compiler (yay!)
I will continue to play with aiohttp in Python to make a metasearch engine based on Wikimedia APIs (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, …) and other useful (and open) APIs.
I plan to add other search backends, such as the StackOverflow API, the OMDB API, …
The final goal is to be smart enough to infer what the query is about and to present the most appropriate sources. For example, If I search for “locke”, I would expect to have the Wikisource results first.
If I search for “blade runner”, I would expect to have the OMDB result displayed at the top.
Of course, the last part is the most interesting and challenging!
Luck! I don’t know where you are in your career path but something I wish I’d learned sooner: Don’t forget that you’re evaluating them as much as they’re evaluating you :)
Four or five hours, pizza, drinks, the kids run around like maniacs, that sort of thing. 1-3 times a year we all go camping at some land that one of us owns; that’s a two or three day affair.
Trying to learn Rust by coding that CodinGame ASCII art puzzle. I struggle with UTF-8 (Rust’s strings are actually vectors/slices of u8s) and the borrow checker. Also, my solution is unsafe so far (taking an indexed slice of a string is dangerous). I might be coding it wrong, though.
I am trying to write a generic prompt function accepting a BufRead implementation – so I can feed it io::stdin() during normal execution, and a slice of u8s during automated tests –, but its read_line method does seem to consume the reader, so I can’t use my function several times. I have tried using borrows (references), but BufRead doesn’t seem to like that.
I would be curious to see the solution of this exercise written by a more experienced developer.
Figuring out how to integrate imperative components into a Prolog runtime. Initial idea is to force all the imperative components to just write facts to stdout that the runtime will then evaluate to update the database.
No need to fork an implementation. SWI Prolog has all the facilities required for managing sub-processes and interpreting the output of a subprocess as an assertion.
I definitely plan to write about it because I think it is an extremely useful pattern to have in one’s toolkit and the more people that know about it the better.
Some of my Saturday will be spent on further contributing to and getting my wip PR ready for Amber, a rails like MVC framework written in Crystal, a ruby like language that is “as fast as C”. It is of course therefore compiled and statically typed.
I am stll learning the language and framework and instead of using amber for a project - like I did with Rails - I’m trying to learn it via contribution.
Working on my startup, programming the profile and companies list. One day I’d love to have a convenient way for investors to schedule calls with founders and vice versa.
doing some phone number verifications, making my custom search filters use a proper PEG syntax to accept parenthesis and priorities), adding more validations on inputs, and cleaning things out in general
I’m working on combining file chunking with torrent byte slices so XMLHTTPRequests can be used as an alternative transfer method for webtorrenting. I then I get to figure out how to integrate webrtc into libtorrent, libtransmission and rtorrent. Also, I need to exercise.
Tomorrow is an Easter egg run for my oldest kid and one of my goddaughter, after that probably some people coming at our home for a nice diner.
Sunday is pool time with my oldest kid and in pm we gonna pierce the ear of my youngest. My friend will come home after that to play the switch with us.
Computer related activities:
Gonna work to setup a dev instance with a spare computer for running my PDB project. Devops is something I would like to try a bit more so this should be fun!
Skiing one of the days, depending on when/if any of my friends are going up. Probably Saturday.
Other than that, I’d like to catch up on sleep and reading.
I’ll also work on theBlend2D CL bindings I’ve been creating. I really want to avoid writing the whole thing by hand, so I’m trying to get swig or cl-autowrap to work, but I’m running into problems.
With all my CS tests behind me, I’m looking forward to spending my time with something totally different: Programming!
I’ve got a few new ideas, a lot of old ones, and I guess I’ll be jumping around, making plans to see what it will be worth spending some time with. My main goal is to push a stable version of my small web-video sync app (to be found here), based on a rewrite of a slightly more complicated project I was working on last summer.
And if I have the time, I might try some distro hopping again (Maybe Guix, maybe OpenBSD. Or Void again?). My current installation is getting boring ;^)
Taking daughter to her first Youth Squad meet at the Sailing Club, which should be exciting. I get to spend a couple of hours cleaning & fettling our flying fifteen out the water, whilst she’s sailing round having fun with other kids.
Back to Sailing Club on Sunday as Safety Officer for the Sunday races
Other bits and pieces around the house I suspect. One car needs an oil/filter change, as I’ll be doing a 900 mile trip in it in a couple of weeks it seems which will push it well past the service mileage.
Cleaning up the garage, having some friends over to watch basketball tomorrow, spending time outside. Cooking dinner for the week Sunday. In general, keeping busy and not thinking overmuch about work.
Visiting a Cirque show with the wife, packing for a move.
On the professional level, I should keep working on my AAA microservice so I can start working on building a multi-user edition of a service I’m passionate about. Horrifically disinterested in the “business logic” side of things, but don’t feel like spending the money or taking the dependency to integrate with a SaaS.
I really want to dabble with the oculus SDK example code, but it doesn’t even build. Maybe I’ll try to figure out why.
Other than that I plan to sit in a hammock and read about birds.
Working my butt off for my evil overlord employers and also attending the wedding of a good friend.
And maybe, if I can squeeze it in, making some more progress on The Brain of the Firm. I’m about 3 chapters in and really enjoying it. Thus far a lot of the ideas he’s presented are a crystallization of ideas that have been floating around in modern tech culture so they’re familiar to me, but none the less impressive since the book was written in 1973.
Continuing with working on my 7.5” e-ink stats display for my living room. To code is all hacked together so it’s time to refactor it and make it nicer, create a nice writeup about it on my blog and seperate the e-ink driver code.
I’m working on two of my three Haskell startups. I’m now at a point where I can live off just doing this, so I don’t need to even slightly regret quitting my consulting gig. Aside from that:
Congratulations on getting that far!
Congratulations. What is the business model of the startups?
Thank you!
My longest running project is a SaaS product I did entirely solo. It only makes a few hundred GBP per month, but in some countries that would be an average monthly salary anyway. After living out of a suitcase and slowly travelling for a year, I have now returned to Poland and that money is currently covering my rent. There is lots of room for growth for this business, and I simply haven’t exploited that yet.
My second project is an InsurTech business, somewhat in stealth mode. I have two partners in this, and we recently closed a seed round of funding. The majority of my income now comes from here.
The third project is a price comparison product that I run with one other guy. He’s taking care of the business side, and I write the software. We are currently not making money, as we are beholden to a few large businesses doing deals with us. This process is out of my hands, as I made a conscious decision (after finding my first paying customers for NewBusinessMonitor) to focus on technology and leave sales and business stuff to other people.
All projects use roughly the same tech, namely Haskell, Elm, Nix, Postgres, Redis, and AWS. All of my business partners are based in London, and for the sake of my sanity I do my best to stay away from that city.
Like last weekend, staying offline: https://lobste.rs/s/br7uxb/what_are_you_doing_this_weekend#c_rcrzqz
Last weekend was a personal success. In the same environment like weekdays I had about 10 pickups of my tablet just to do these tasks as quick as possible:
Total time spent online: around 1hr.
My laptop went untouched. And I don’t have a smartphone since last autumn.
The goal of this diet - now practiced also weekdays - is to reduce my online presence just to basics: work, communication, lookup. Anything else like fun, socialization, learning is already done offline.
How do I feel? This Monday I was proud. One immediate result is that my eyes are sharper. And more attention.
Since last year I find tech hostile. It’s mainstream, it’s obtrusive, it’s against humanity, tries to eat all. I’m not a luddite but I find the offline world getting more and more interesting and fulfilling. Soon I’ll completely leave online including work.
Hard to upvote this one since it felt like supporting your goals and telling you to leave at same time. Although I definitely get your position, I want to remind you there’s slices of tech that are the opposite of that. There’s tech that empowers the human mind to create, helps us remember things, and so on. If about real-world interactions, there’s tech that facilitates and/or aids that. I’d also guess the vast majority of tech is boring stuff that powers businesses and nonprofits, some of which do good things for people.
I think you’ve been staring at all the worst stuff for so long you might have forgotten about the rest. I remember another Lobster had same problem since he stayed dealing with startups. We had to remind him they’re a small niche in a big world. There’s tech projects and jobs that are ethical. Sometimes people find tech that’s highly fulfilling. Started with what they were focused on. I’d say think on that a while before you ditch tech entirely.
Down to the bone. Thank you. I needed that.
I just wonder where one can find projects which empower the human mind, projects which are ethical.
Less than that, I can’t even find projects where all my skills can be used: design, development, and writing. I feel stupid. First, they don’t believe me. Then after a chat, when works are presented, they go silent. Moreover, in one of the recent projects I was asked do not tell the CEO the whole tech / design department is wasting the budget.
I don’t think I’m overskilled. What I see is that tech doesn’t needs me. What if I reduce all to just writing? Without tech. Maybe that will empower the human mind.
Hear hear!
People think tech == big corporate tech. ‘tain’t necessarily so.
I finally finished Nicomachean Ethics. I also read Animal Farm and I’m about to finish Brave New World. Now it’s on to Machiavelli’s Art of War. I should finish Book of Proof this weekend as well, which means I can start on Apostol’s Calculus.
On Saturday, going to Pen Show Poland \^u^/ — excitedly waiting for this day since ~half year ago, when I discovered, and subsequently got lost in, the fountain pen
addiction“hobby” :DOtherwise, hopefully finding some time to work a bit on the .dex/.apk assembler/linker I’m trying to write in Nim — recently in collaboration with @enow, who started some initial experiments towards adding a Dalvik backend to the Nim compiler (yay!)
I will continue to play with
aiohttpin Python to make a metasearch engine based on Wikimedia APIs (Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikisource, …) and other useful (and open) APIs.Can you ELI5 how a search engine utilizes Wikimedia APIs? Does it search only WIkimedia properties?
I think they use the Wikidata API.
That’s right. I use various endpoints such as:
https://en.wikisource.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=%shttps://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=opensearch&search=%sI plan to add other search backends, such as the StackOverflow API, the OMDB API, …
The final goal is to be smart enough to infer what the query is about and to present the most appropriate sources. For example, If I search for “
locke”, I would expect to have the Wikisource results first.If I search for “
blade runner”, I would expect to have the OMDB result displayed at the top.Of course, the last part is the most interesting and challenging!
Interview prep, got my coding phone screen next Thursday.
Will spend a good amount of time cranking through LeetCode problems.
mind sharing what company are you interviewing for?
Uber, Amsterdam
Luck! I don’t know where you are in your career path but something I wish I’d learned sooner: Don’t forget that you’re evaluating them as much as they’re evaluating you :)
We and two other families rotate who hosts a monthly-ish get-together and it’s our turn to host. A pleasant time is guaranteed for all.
What kind of get-together? Like dinner and drinks afterwards? All-day affair with outdoor and indoor games, multiple meals?
Four or five hours, pizza, drinks, the kids run around like maniacs, that sort of thing. 1-3 times a year we all go camping at some land that one of us owns; that’s a two or three day affair.
Sounds like an amazing relationship to have for your family. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you. We are indeed very lucky.
Trying to learn Rust by coding that CodinGame ASCII art puzzle. I struggle with UTF-8 (Rust’s strings are actually vectors/slices of
u8s) and the borrow checker. Also, my solution isunsafeso far (taking an indexed slice of a string is dangerous). I might be coding it wrong, though.I am trying to write a generic
promptfunction accepting aBufReadimplementation – so I can feed itio::stdin()during normal execution, and a slice ofu8s during automated tests –, but itsread_linemethod does seem to consume the reader, so I can’t use my function several times. I have tried using borrows (references), butBufReaddoesn’t seem to like that.I would be curious to see the solution of this exercise written by a more experienced developer.
EDIT: I’m gonna try implementing the
FromStrtrait like in this article (look at how nice this main function looks like).Figuring out how to integrate imperative components into a Prolog runtime. Initial idea is to force all the imperative components to just write facts to stdout that the runtime will then evaluate to update the database.
Interesting. Have you forked a Prolog implementation for that?
Please, let us know how it goes!
No need to fork an implementation. SWI Prolog has all the facilities required for managing sub-processes and interpreting the output of a subprocess as an assertion.
I definitely plan to write about it because I think it is an extremely useful pattern to have in one’s toolkit and the more people that know about it the better.
Some of my Saturday will be spent on further contributing to and getting my wip PR ready for Amber, a rails like MVC framework written in Crystal, a ruby like language that is “as fast as C”. It is of course therefore compiled and statically typed.
I am stll learning the language and framework and instead of using amber for a project - like I did with Rails - I’m trying to learn it via contribution.
Working on my startup, programming the profile and companies list. One day I’d love to have a convenient way for investors to schedule calls with founders and vice versa.
doing some phone number verifications, making my custom search filters use a proper PEG syntax to accept parenthesis and priorities), adding more validations on inputs, and cleaning things out in general
I’m working on combining file chunking with torrent byte slices so XMLHTTPRequests can be used as an alternative transfer method for webtorrenting. I then I get to figure out how to integrate webrtc into libtorrent, libtransmission and rtorrent. Also, I need to exercise.
Lots of non-computer related activities:
Computer related activities:
Gonna work to setup a dev instance with a spare computer for running my PDB project. Devops is something I would like to try a bit more so this should be fun!
Skiing one of the days, depending on when/if any of my friends are going up. Probably Saturday.
Other than that, I’d like to catch up on sleep and reading.
I’ll also work on theBlend2D CL bindings I’ve been creating. I really want to avoid writing the whole thing by hand, so I’m trying to get swig or cl-autowrap to work, but I’m running into problems.
With all my CS tests behind me, I’m looking forward to spending my time with something totally different: Programming!
I’ve got a few new ideas, a lot of old ones, and I guess I’ll be jumping around, making plans to see what it will be worth spending some time with. My main goal is to push a stable version of my small web-video sync app (to be found here), based on a rewrite of a slightly more complicated project I was working on last summer.
And if I have the time, I might try some distro hopping again (Maybe Guix, maybe OpenBSD. Or Void again?). My current installation is getting boring ;^)
Cleaning up the garage, having some friends over to watch basketball tomorrow, spending time outside. Cooking dinner for the week Sunday. In general, keeping busy and not thinking overmuch about work.
Hacknight tonight! Teaching rust to some interested people. Sunday visiting a friend that destroyed her leg and can’t move from home.
I’ve been working on more When Then Zen. I’ve had a stressful month and I’m making an expanded form of the metta article.
I also hope to get more on the Site to Site WireGuard Caddy post done. Maybe I’ll add category support to my blog too.
Visiting a Cirque show with the wife, packing for a move.
On the professional level, I should keep working on my AAA microservice so I can start working on building a multi-user edition of a service I’m passionate about. Horrifically disinterested in the “business logic” side of things, but don’t feel like spending the money or taking the dependency to integrate with a SaaS.
I really want to dabble with the oculus SDK example code, but it doesn’t even build. Maybe I’ll try to figure out why. Other than that I plan to sit in a hammock and read about birds.
I’m shorting my to-do list, cleaning up a bit, and maybe starting to learn some Rust or try to improve my C skills…
Working my butt off for my evil overlord employers and also attending the wedding of a good friend.
And maybe, if I can squeeze it in, making some more progress on The Brain of the Firm. I’m about 3 chapters in and really enjoying it. Thus far a lot of the ideas he’s presented are a crystallization of ideas that have been floating around in modern tech culture so they’re familiar to me, but none the less impressive since the book was written in 1973.
I will be writing my annual review for work and filing my tax return.
Invited for donuts and drinks later today and tomorrow I’m off to visit a friend, with another friend and we’ll play board games for a few hours.
Off next week due to Easter, so also maybe some planning about what to do there.
Continuing with working on my 7.5” e-ink stats display for my living room. To code is all hacked together so it’s time to refactor it and make it nicer, create a nice writeup about it on my blog and seperate the e-ink driver code.