Tomas Vik

Posts

Break free from the shackles of YouTube

Understand how much time you spend on YouTube, disarm the suggestion algorithm and save time and attention.

A script to analyse 7+ years of my YouTube history

Use Google Takeout to analyse a complete history of all videos you watched.

Give it to me: A polite request for feedback

Today we’ll have a look at how you can give me feedback for these articles. I’ll explain my motivation for writing, why is your opinion important to me and how you can share it. I guarantee I’m going to read every single comment.

What would you do if you lost your Google account?

What happens when you forget your password or loose your phone? What Google wants to know to validate your identity?

Using text passwords for encryption is safe enough

Is my Keepass key chain safe if I only use text password to protect it? Yes it is.

My workflow

How I structure my work to battle procrastination.

Minimalism

I was sitting in my rented room in central Melbourne. After months of preparations I was closing my suitcase, expecting an Uber any minute taking me to the airport. Leaving Australia after almost five years of living there and closing or at least pausing a chapter in my life. This article is going to be focused on one critical section of the previous paragraph: “my suitcase”. I’m going to be writing about how I managed to squish five years of my life to a suitcase, even though I lived in a fully furnished house, owned motorbike and at one point in time even a car.

Why I Love SpaceX

Probably my favourite company of all time, SpaceX, is a manufacturer of rockets and satellites. They inspire people around the whole world and are a great showcase of what is good about US. 1 - Making life multi planetary SpaceX’s mission is nothing less than making sure that humanity can survive a mass extinction event on Earth. It’s the whole way Elon Musk, the influential founder and Chief Engineer of SpaceX evaluates his priorities when faced between two options: Which option is going to get us humans faster to having a self-sustained colony on Mars.

Opportunity cost

Thanks to the virus the economy goes bananas. My initial instinct is to do nothing. I mean financially. Hold on to my savings and wait this situation out. And this initial reflex, hoarding savings, is what nudged me to write about a concept that is still quite foreign to me. I grew up in a lower middle class family. Both parents educated but not earning too much money. There was always a big emphasis on saving in my upbringing.

Remote

Interesting times, interesting times. Let’s not wait till the government orders quarantine. If your work involves predominantly computer, you have to start working remotely. This is how you do it. Who am I to talk? I’m a software engineer at GitLab, the largest all remote company in the world. In my ten-year career I’ve worked in teams as small as two and as large as forty people. I’ve had all collocated team, I’ve worked with outsourced offshore team from China and now it’s all remote.