Alvan's digital garden

Status Update and some rant

Hi there! It is me, again, coming to you with another status update.

So, recently I’ve been looking at and refining my blog, and decided to write another post. But I was not sure about what to write. Yep. Thing that should be at first place was not there. Anyway, I’m writing, and you probably have better things to do, but procrastination is happening.

I’ve been planning to write about the third startup (Specterise) that I am working on, after failing first 2. But I feel weird pressure and responsibility around that topic. Instead, I’ll be writing about myself, again. But for sure, there will be a post, dedicated to the startup.

Lemme check what was the last thing on the most recent status update, brb.

Yep. I’m back.

Man, it feels like long time ago. I have a lot going on rn, and this feels amazing. Looks like someone who avoids life using work as an excuse. Can’t deny this, lol.

Well, at those times, we’ve been thinking of new startup idea (which later turned out to be that specterise), nothing that major. Then, a month later, university started, and I had to go to school in regular schedule, as covid things are gone now. This sucked! I’ve been working full time SWE job, trying to build specterise and going to uni, attending to our accelerator’s weekly meetings, as well as mentoring sessions (happened 3 per week), all at the same time. This kept tiring me, but soon after starting, uni things got less difficult, and I remembered that I don’t actually need to spend that much (of an) effort.

But still, I’ve been working a lot and sacrificing some core things that I wanted to do. Despite this, I was happy! Happier than ever. Oh, not because there were achievements etc.

Lemme tell you something about being raised at not that privileged family. When parents are not happy for their financial and social status, almost all they discuss, think about is financials. Because, let’s be real, it all boils down to financial freedom. Being able to go to hometown, having enough rest, sleeping well, being heathy etc.

So, of course, as a kid, you start developing survival skills on your own. E.g, to study, you motivate yourself with being able to afford nice things in future. You think that noone will be able to help you in future, but yourself. You have gotta do smth. Smth quick. So, occasionally this results in relatively successful kid. And I count myself as an example. I happened to like computers and got a job in relatively early age, which helped me to have motivation for learning programming, and started working actual job from 2nd year of uni. And I haven’t stopped from that time.

Let’s come back to my point. As I have coupled “working hard” with “living good life in future”, I’ve started to get my dopamine from - well - working hard :D. Most of the times, my mom calls me unconscious or forgetful. Which is just because I have a lot on my mind. I think she understands this, but idk why, she always complains as there is smth wrong with me. Anyways :D. What I am telling is, recently I’ve been working for long hours, and this made me feel very satisfied. I sometimes forget to eat or - literally - pee. This sometimes becomes surreal experience - I start to feel weird, happy, tired and accomplished, all at the same time. Isn’t this nice?

Look what have you built! It is a feature of specterise, it looks gorgeous, sure is spactacular, and just works!

Then I immediately take a screenshot of it and share on groupchat with the bois or a friend alone. Sleeping after this is an amazing experience. Blanket becomes the softest material in world, lol!

Part 2

So, as you already know, Elon Musk bought Twitter and started doing weird things on it. People wholeheartedly blame and curse him. I also do sometimes. But I have doubts.

I think he is a smart dude. He knows how to market things, and knows this well. Yes, I know, he already had money to start PayPal, government helped with SpaceX and Tesla etc. One thing I believe is, he is a smart dude. Or maybe he hired smart people. I’m not sure.

To back my thoughts, letme give an example:

Recently, he shared a diagram of Twitter backend architecture on twitter. Well this caused a lot of discussion and people from both sides tweeted things etc. There was a service called “TimeLine Service”.

Couple of days later, he tweeted:

Elon’s tweet, telling: “Maybe deprecate TLS” *I originally had tweet embedded, but it loads 10+ cookies if you visit this page, so there is no need :D

Pay attention to “maybe deprecate TLS” line. I personally think he did this on purpose, so people will think and discuss about “TLS - Transaction Layer Security”, and make this a hot topic.

Oh, btw, just wanted to confirm again, I don’t like him personally, he is quite an awful person, and should not have that kind of power to start with. But what can we do.

Mastodon!

Anyways, these actions of Elon, resulted in rather positive thing. People started to look for alternative social networks and found Fediverse, in particular, Mastodon. If you don’t know what it is:

The fediverse is an ensemble of federated servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting, but which, while independently hosted, can communicate with each other.

Yep. Very cool piece of tech.

This trend of people migrating to mastodon, made me to go and give it a second chance. Man, this felt amazing!

Imagine a place, where there is no algorithm to shove content to your face. You chose what to see and interact. Where “likes” do not matter, timeline page is actually posts sorted by timestamps, and everyone is nice to each other!

Oh, it is 04:16AM now, and I need to sleep :D

I know this was weird wrap-up, but letme recommend you some songs, as an apology. Thanks for reading this far, it was pleasure to write.

#monthly #rant #update