Alvan's digital garden

Status Update | 29 Dec 2021

First week of December

Well, 1 December was my 20th birthday :D. I got lovely gifts from my university group friends. They were magnet balls, a phone case and the most interesting one - Penguen doll (which I got from Samir). Although it was not that similar to real Linux mascott penguen, I still love the idea behind it. So anyways, it was okay birthday of mine.

More “serious stuff”

Later that week, I also got my first salary from Staffwerke. I was excited, yet kinda sceptical about my work. Although I was trying very hard to understand my tasks and do them, I couldn’t quite do those. I didn’t have any in-depth understanding of system but they kept complaining about my performance. I couldn’t solve any problems when I didn’t have any idea about what I was writing. For example, theye were entities: Claim, ClaimBatch, ClaimSnippet etc which made no sense to me. But to be honest, they gave all SQL queries ready to me. I could finish tasks where everything was very clear and correct, but if anything was different, I couldn’t do any debug etc.

Anyways, Working there was a diseaster. I continued 2 weeks after my first salary. Then I asked about my performance. They did a meeting with me and said they were going to shut the project down (which I don’t trust, probably they were unsatisfied with my work). So, I got last 2 weeks’ money and quit.

Unemployed times

To be honest, not having to work feeling was great. I spent 2-3 days wasting time online and then started learning new things. I guess this is when We - Bilgin.Az team applied to competition, but I’ll talk about these later.

I was spending my unemployed time learning and experimenting new things. Also wasting time on youtube, watching meme compilations and PewDiePie.

Alongside all of these, I was searching new job on djinni.co - a platform for ukranian companies in IT field (where I got the job from Staffwerke). But it was not going well as I was not doing good job applying.

Bilgin.Az news

Yes, regarding to out lovely startup - Bilgin.Az. Things are very interesting and exciting nowadays. As I mentioned above, we have applied to a competition for startups. It is called SabahLab. We had to create our pitch deck presentation for that project. This is when we also started having clear vision of project. So, we made presentation and applied.

Some time passed, then I got a call from them. Our project passed first stage. In this stage 150+ teams were eliminated among 300+ teams. Then they scheduled a meeting with out team which I had to attend alone (No one from team members was not available). In this stage, one of every ten teams could pass. Which means only 15 teams will survive. But guess what! Although I’m not that good at talking, I managed to pass that stage too! So, they scheduled another meeting with our team, the guys from SabahLab and Paris De L’Etraz himself.

In this stage, I talked with Ali (Co-Founder) about Samir. We decided to add him to our team, as we knew he will be good addition. He is very talented guy, I know and trust him since 2017. Anyways, Samir, Ali and me sit on a meeting and prepared our script for pitch.

After 2 days, actualy meeting took place and we presented out project to them. I think it was quite successful presentation. We managed to answer all of their questions and thoughts. I think they only had some sceptical views on our income strategy, but we tried our best to explain them. So, currently we are waiting. Almost 2 weeks have passed. I texted them via WhatsApp and they said “We will let you know until the end of next week”.

SabahLab Chat

After that week, we learned that If we can manage to pass this stage too and be one of five teams, we will get a investment of 25k Manats. LOL! We didn’t know this. But later we have decided it was for our own good. I mean, if we knew that investment, we could be more excited and stressed.

Anyways, these are all about Bilgin’s business side.

Bilgin.Az - Technical side

Things are a bit not-exciting in technical side.

First I started doing admin panel, then I got bored. That is why I decided to do some generic admin panel solution, which I later abandoned in it’s own branch. (That is exactly why I love using git. You can easily abandon features which is not interesting anymore and come back later 😂️)

Then I started working on storage service. This is still in progress. I’m writing it using golang. It is also great way to learn and enhance go knowledge. But again, I’m procastinating because I can’t quite get used to GoLang project structure. Maybe the reason is that I don’t learn things from zero and step by step, as I think it is easy to learn by doing (which is not the point sometimes). Anyways, I’m on it right now and will complete by the end of the year (in two days) hopefully.

New job opportunity

Earlier this month, I bringed one of my friends to the remote work “paradice”. After some time, he got a job from very good company. “They have provided me with certification prepearing materials and other cool stuff!” - said my friend. So, I got excited too and applied though djinni. Later that day, I got a response from their CTO and we scheduled a meeting for 28th of December (yesterday). The meeting went normal and I think I do have a positive feedback chance. He said he will return to me by the end of tomorrow, which is today. So, I’m waiting.

To be honest, I’m not that excited about this job. Because I have a hope to our startup and it’s possibe incoming investment.

Learning journey of mine

So, 4-5 days ago I was into functional programming. I started learning Haskell and lambda calculus. This is mainly because I love alternative things in every field. OS, Programming Paradigm, hardware, software and etc :D

Later that week, (not)suprisingly, I abandoned that activity too and came back to GoLang. BUT - I’m planning of giving a chance to F#. It is one of the languages in .NET family and is a functional one.

Currently, I’m on GoLang and C#.

Other startups

As I meantioned earlier, I was in a team of IoT related startup. Our first prototype device will arrive any time soon and we will start working on it.

Interesting things that are happening

Personal Life & Relationship Status

Unhandled Exception: NullReferenceException:
Topic reference not set to even an evidence of personal life.

Sigma grindset rule #4: Do not handle NullReferenceException in relationship status module.

Holiday!

Well, Happy New Year! This year was great, if not the greatest years in my life! What a busy one! I hope 2022 will be nice, successful year for all startups including ours.

What a coincidence! As I start writing this holiday themed part, very nice energic music started. So, anyways, see you next year! ❤️

Now, as always, music recommendations:

Actually you can listen all of these and many more from my playlist, named nice1

#weekly #rant