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. Nobody in my vicinity was trying to use money to make more money. You earn money with hard work and you spend it on mortgage, car, food and other necessities.
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.
Last Summer, after years of watching YouTube videos about tiny homes and van conversions, I made the decision. I’m going to buy myself a van. Convert it to a camper van and potentially even move into it.
Purchase
My requirements were quite simple. It needed to be L2H2 (classification of length and height). It had to be around 8K USD so that I’m not too afraid to drill and cut holes in it. Good condition and low mileage.
Today I’m going to be writing about one concept that is as common in software development as it is counterintuitive. With the added benefit that it translates well into every day life.
Imagine you are about to:
pick up painting as a new hobby
change career from salesperson to a carpenter
start going to the gym
If you are anything like me, you would do actions like:
buy yourself expensive art equipment and text books
quit your job and get a workshop
sign up for the gym and get new gym gear
If these seem like a reasonable steps, you are in for a treat.
After writing about privacy and security in general, this is the first time I’m going to be talking about a specific solution. Full disclosure: I’m not a security professional, more of an enthusiast, so please take the advice with a grain of salt.
I’ve been disconcerted with the messaging situation for a few years now. I’ve been super excited about using WhatsApp back in the days when it was still an independent company. Now it was just another app that gets my data and uses it for advertisement. Admittedly it’s still way better than using Facebook Messenger. That’s because WhatsApp only uses my metadata (social graph, contacts, who and when am I talking to) whilst Facebook Messenger parses the whole content of my message (and possibly my phone calls, who knows) and uses them to create my profile to sell me better to advertisers and of course provide it to US authorities (hopefully they are not interested in my shopping lists but still it’s non of their beeswax).
This post is an introduction to meditation. If you are meditating regularly, you can skip right over it.
What I mean by meditation?
When I refer to meditation, I mean mindfulness meditation. That means paying close attention to what is happening in your own mind and consciously trying not to change or force anything. The main goal (at least for me) is to understand better what my own mind is and how it operates.
I’ve just seen security report in the news about a critical Bluetooth Vulnerability on Android devices. The report says that the attacker was able to run arbitrary code on Android 8 and 9 devices. Just by being within the Bluetooth range. That got me thinking. How safe can I be from breaches of my privacy/security. Ever. No matter how much effort I would spend on keeping my devices and accounts secured.
Two years ago I read George Orwell’s novel 1984 that describes a dystopian future where authoritarian regime got complete control over people’s lives. The book is amazingly written and it is as relevant today as it ever was. Reading it sent me on down a rabbit hole of research about how much privacy do I have in my current life. Let me put on my tinfoil hat and tell you some of what I found.
This article is mainly a personal research to clear my thoughts about what FOSS is and isn’t. Before we start, let’s quickly mention some famous examples:
Firefox, Linux, Git, Gimp, Eclipse, GitLab, most programming languages and thousands more.
F is for Free
Usually when you publish a piece of software, you publish it “under a license”. Which means you attach a contract to your code that says how it can and can’t be used and shared.
Watching YouTube or reading a book? Scrolling through Instagram or calling a friend? Eating a pizza or working out? Playing computer games or going out for a walk?
If you are anything like me, you’d much more prefer to do the former. It’s so easy that you could almost say those things are doing you and not the other way around. I think this is happening because these things reward you immediately. Your nervous system that is still made much more for the African savannah as opposed to the modern city is incetivizing you to do things that feel good now, there might not be tomorrow.