Delivering things – from code to product
I'm starting a new regular monthly postly theme - TIL ${MONTH}. Although I've mostly disappeared from the social networks I still have a strong urge to share some curous discovery throughout the month.
It was switched on by default, I guess it won't be very suprising that admin has these level of intervention but still, huh.
It's been a long time since I shared something from my personal life, and generally, not much has been written on the blog in the last few years. Changes in lifestyle, health, and priorities have had a significant impact on how I process things and what I want to share.
The health state is worrying me more than before, which is gradually worsening.
Even when one thinks in English, it doesn't guarantee fluency or that one will sound like a native speaker. To me, one of the most expressive ways to communicate is through the use of phrases and idioms, as they convey rich meanings in just a few words, somewhat acting as memes.
Since I got quite fed up with crypto, I decided to jump on the hype train and try to make use of democratized AI, particularly locally deployed LLMs and StableDiffusion.
Much like how I missed the Ethereum "smart contract" revolution, I soon realized I was late to the AI party. But I suppose it's all relative; for some, Kotlin is still a new language, and for others, crypto is synonymous with drugs and money laundering.
As blockchains are expanding their influence, it's quite evident for an ordinary developer that Solidity has almost nothing to do with JavaScript.
I'm very particular about compile-time checks and runtime safety when it comes to writing software, and it becomes apparent if you read my other posts. In 2018, when I first came across Ethereum, also known as the 'world computer,' I knew nothing about the technologies behind it except that I'd need to use Solidity for this computer. The Solidity language website v2.2.0 stated, "Solidity is a high-level language whose syntax is similar to that of JavaScript, and it is designed to compile to code for the Ethereum Virtual Machine."
The reference to JavaScript alarmed me. How come someone use a potentially risky language like JavaScript to manage money? I know it mentioned only the syntax, but the reference was strong enough to discourage further exploration in that area, given at that time it didn't look something worth attention.
It couldn't be more helpful.
If you see this page likely you mentioned about how great traditional medicine is so please research this chart thoroughly.
(this meme was on my mind for too long, now it's offloaded to the blog)
Crypto and in particular DeFi can be technically very complex, and the general audience often might oversee the importance of understanding the technical implementation.
In colloquial language, people often say something like "I've got 10 USDT in my wallet" or "my wallet has 1M Shibu Dogs". It sounds normal and assuring; we all have experience of having money in our pocket. As usual, it's not that simple after looking into the details.
Without the fundamental understanding of where tokens are actually stored there is increasing risk of losing money. It's a DeFi 101.
Whoa, that's been a long 1.5 years without me creating any content. That's how much MacBook burned me out[pun intended].
Jokes aside - I do need to restart blogging at least occationally. These days I've got so much to share from my day work observations and even more from my personal projects.
The suspect is usual - "I have no time for that", and I don't have it indeed. Newborn baby, failing projects with money involved, personal challanges and of course the Putin's war.
That all makes me think it's not the best time to put something out and I'd rather focus on small projects just to keep myselves away from the outter world. Post-COVID world along with bustle caused by first time parenting makes it very easy to do so.
If you're reading this is because you're in the struggle. Your $$$$ computer is hot, literally hot, as the oven and as loud as saw chain cutting metal right next to you. At the same time, your computer performance degrading down to the ZX Spectrum levels. If it sounds familiar, keep reading; I have a "solution" for you.
Disclaimer before we continue. This blog post is not a joke, and I actually have gone through all these steps and attempts to calm down this piece of metal, the so-called "Apple computer for professionals". I've learnt a lot about MacBook & MacOS, but it's a topic for another post. I'll try to keep my sarcasm minimal and sincerely try to help because I understand how disturbing this experience could be.
One can be satisfied with the minimal tweaks; the other - will have to go for more extreme ways to make this computer work. As for an Android / Backend developer, this experience was unbearable and caused many suffering and mental distress. It all made me feel miserable.
There are dozens of reverse proxies and thousands of ways to configure them. Unlike many, Caddy is very easy to configure and use, it's very efficient and production-ready. It has sensible defaults and does everything for you out of the box.
Cloudflare is one of the biggest CDN(Content Delivery Network), widely used to speed up page loading, enable edge caching and mitigate attacks. It also provides HTTPS certificates for your website, for free, even on the free plan.
A month ago, I switched from Ubuntu to Pop Os, which wasn't an easy decision.
I've been using Linux as the desktop OS for the last 15 years, ten years of these - with Ubuntu, since 8.06. I always appreciated Ubuntu because it just works, unlike other rivals. It was stable and reliable OS I can rely on. Canonical invested a lot to the UI and UX, namely in Unity, as to me it's a game-changer and productivity booster.
But as Ubuntu developers and maintainers have chosen a different path. Long story short - the system becames very unstable and buggy, with poor user experience, Unity has been deprecated. Snaps are either broken or partially working. That made me look around in search of better desktop Linux, and after considering and trying a few options, I stopped at Pop!_OS.