Will it make sense? I started this blog with the premise I would not care.
The Evening
I wanted to talk again. I knew this was due. I did not expect it would be today. And you know what broke the spell? Music. Of course.
The “best set”, “best” anything in arts is a show off stupidity if you ever hear it. Either frequencies resonate with your current composition or they don’t. Anyhow, when I finally decided to stop watching youtube (last vid was behind the scenes on the creation of original, British “The Office” by the way), being laid on my belly for at least last 2 hours, with partial snoozes, I wanted to listen something more meaningful while I prepare the dinner.
The old issue arose when I plugged my (proper, on ear) headphones to phone. Google assistant (primary suspect) started changing volume, tracks from my android AIMP player.. At approximate moment I found assistant interface>plugged in devices>my headphones. This set from my sets playlist started. And it’s not the first time I could not turn it off. While (if) you read the rest, may I in musical terms, transport you to the place I’m at, having just hit repeat on this masterpiece?
The Week
Although it’s a running season (once a week April – October), last week I skipped my run. Sunday was a perfect weather and I had a choice in the mid-day on my conscience whether i wanna put my self on a right track for this week. I choose the devil. I nolifed Entropia Universe into 4AM, nearly the same as a night before.
I got into this mission, that is evidently above my avatar skill level, and debating whether I should pursue, I made a second deposit of 92 Euros, something like a decade after me and my buddy opened accounts as investment in Calypso Land Deeds. Browsing is distraction. Normally you would get a lot of hyperlinks in the text, sorry, not today. If you have no idea what something means. select->right click, ot ctrl+t -> search the term.
After pushing an update yesterday that integrated chart.js, first time featured in my production app, work of three days with other minor updates from last week I jumped back into grinding and exploring the virtual world staged for me by Swedes. Worry not. I increased my internal game “holdings”, pissed away for fun only a fraction of it.
Alarm clocks can’t return discipline when you go to bed beyond 23. They can at the expense of heart. I mine is unfortunately not too strong, genetically speaking.
Re-involvement was pretty weird too. I used to log in once a quarter or even less frequent to log dividends into excel in case I took this student-times gig more serious anytime later. But for that we got to turn the clock once again.
The Month
Now that I think about it: this is a special month. I shipped a first new feature, out of 6-ish in our roadmap. +75Euros/month worth, to a base subscription of 450 a month. I had similar income in previous months. However another arrangement was at play in August: plenty of changes, that a) either were unrelated to new module or b) highlighted a poor planning on client side (foreseeing corner cases). So we’re looking at ~1k income in few days.
What’s particularly different – is we finally managed to sell moms car, for which I was responsible. Mother promised she would split sale amount 50:50 and give half to me. This is a) a pity (I’ll take it) b) a gratitude for my company to Germany in spring to roll 8 new wheels home (+4 winter set, duh).
And so, this was a first month in fucking year that I could – almost, to my horror make it plural (years) – not plan my cash flow into fractions of Euros into second half of the month, not sell revolut BTC CFD, not borrow from anybody. And I could spend. On whatever I wanted. A game. A fucking miracle I had to create.
I would like to escape that boring Entropia Universe story ending, but let’s close all the gaps in this bucket… I postponed research into that “internal investment deeds” split, but finally got to it. Got it figured out. Lower price, higher turnover, lower (likely) yield. Just like stocks. Nothing fancy. But.. since the price is now lower. There’s a faster reinvestment opportunity, and an idea-seed was planted for shorter login intervals to compound.
Then, one Sunday, I picked up my 2 yr old hated Thinkpad (who puts sleep button at the corner of keyboard?!) with intention to install Stable Diffusion in hopes of clearning one of of my bookmarks (github repo on web UI for image-gen models) Idea was to save my chicka’s euros she spends on midjourney, experiment myself and keep a closer eye (github level) on recent advances on image generation.
Got basic model working. Generated the stuff you probably could have encountered a decade ago, but fed up with error party when trying to load recent SDXL0.9/1.0. And I don’t fancy windows anymore, since moving my development to Linux more than a year ago…
Also, this month I got into dialog with a close friend of mine about developing internal system for his firm. Had a sit-down of 4-5 hours – catch up and primary objectives sketching. Encouraging and timely development.
2023
When I was thinking of this post, I thought I would post screenshot of my github activity pane. For those uninitiated. That’s a trailing 12month (of for a year for that matter) activity log for each day. 365 little squares. Black square – no activity. green square – commits. Green intensity – commits per day. Gamified vanity metric for coders. I can assure you, with few lapses (Germany, weekends (some), forced burnout rest, research on libraries, coding experiments that did not involve github activity or learning linux/bash intricacies) – my shit up there is LIT. Literally.
We failed to meet with my cousin this summer. Bummer. Wild and free. The energy I so much miss. When I started this most difficult epoch of the post I imagined I would be telling this as If I was talking to her. But probably would be too close to “How my summer went” type writing. Too little camp fires. Too little of everything. But at least the heatwave in my apartment was absent for most of the summer. Working in 26oC, rather that 36oC makes whole a lot of difference for a home office like mine.
After settling on base case vision for my clients application in last October, I had not imagined, having been learning, debugging, screaming internally, attacking myself, developed shit for free for more than a year, that the most difficult part was still ahead. It’s negotiations that took the most of me.
I can surely tell now – both sides were unprepared. Application, internal system, after two months of research, experimentation with decent, semi modern stack went live in 2023-01-26. May was the first paid month, after 1 demo month and additional one month postpone due to refactoring related to idiotic practices (have you seen a retailer without barcodes?).
This is a custom as custom can get. I wanted final payoff, they were unsure if this is worth it in the end. A natural clash. LTV of cash flows vs realistic value created, on and on goes the mental gymnastics. The hardest part was not the process, but the outcome.
Despite the glamour of awareness this blog might have painted the picture of over the years, let me tell you. Everything goes out the fucking window when you are broke. In 2010’s I had important relation to treehuggers. I understood them. In recent two years I’ve gained another important perspective on fraction of society living on a brink.
I head this idea in a podcast with planB years ago. I don’t remember if I ever shared it:
“Money gives time to think”
I can’t find a higher truth to encompass my experience. Subpar food impacts brain circuitry, negatively, it’s cheaper and faster after all. The speed is everything. I have a vision. At the end of this vision is passive income. The faster, the more I code, the faster this misery ends. I take care of that – I move on. I don’t ditch this mid-way. I ain’t no fucking quitter. Meditation is a waste of time. It’s either rest after you are brain-dead, you code or you put a some facade of mandatory social gathering and plan what to code next.
There’s no money. There’s no travel either. Tunnel vision. The project. New branches, challenges, bugs, integrations, tutorials, mentors, libraries, languages. Same project. This is my bed.
Remains of awareness lies in silent, compassionate companion. Music. Turn that off and I’m a bee, that people are stepping on whenever I’m forced to participate out of habit of social contract. And I string. I hurt people around me in pursuit of this.
Generalist’s Lab was dead. Posts cost time. Readership is abysmal. My hosting sucks, wordpress sucks, php sucks (pythonista can’t say otherwise). Now that I have tested production, this is a matter of time before I get rid of the bloat of wordpress. Write/migrate my own shit. Cheapen the maintenance, Speed this puppy up a notch. And to return, experience host side HTTP 520, when creating “Add New”? I was not ready. I had no emotional strength.
Weekends, some evenings, unexpected waiting-for-response workdays – most spent catching up with newsletters, quarterly earnings, OMXB screener updates (not a single 6M report updated yet…), technology, news, war…
Semi-expected – I started commenting way more. Way way more. Tolerance for bullshit, hipocrisy went away completely. I was the troll in some sense.
The blame game, ugh… Why are you the way that you are. How did you get here. That’s a perversely fun road. Why I accept money from mother, when I have a stock portfolio? Why I don’t just go to a work, like normal people? Why be in this negative swarm, when an additional shopping, 200Eur in bank account from more sold savings would almost certainly change so goddamn much? Why?
Anger is a furious driving force. I would spend 3-4 days in a row coding 12h+ days. I kept the pedal to the metal , because it was effective. I’m on third repeat btw ^.
I’ll close the dark chapter with an idiotic story that will live with me till the end of my days.
Lithuania has a deposit system for glass/plastic bottles. When you buy a drink, you pay extra for cartridge, but can get it back if you bring empty stuff to taromats. And so, like 10-15 lined up near my bin, finally decided to bring them to taromat on my nearly daily lunch walk to this place I eat my most stable meal of the day. Packed bottles into plastic bag, and on my way stopped at taromat near a shop, close by. I got there maybe at 2:30, had to finish some updates, was starving already. A cleaning break. Locked doors. I will not bring empty fucking bottles to a dining place, I’m not going back home either. I look around, nobody’s looking, very few people in nearby bus stop. I leave the bag on a huge pile of plastic bottles packed for transportation out of taromat. It’s a corner under summer trees shadow, not the place people walk by usually.
I go to lunch, come back. Walk fast, time is money. Bag is gone. At that particular day. On two of my bank accounts, and cash in wallet – I’m sure common balance was below 6 Euros. That bag was intended to buy a yogurt. Half of three breakfasts with cereal…
The Bright Side
A quick detour from our backwards time machine, just to brighten the mood a little. There’s always an inferiority complex. Not helping is the fact I’m working alone. I have no frame of reference. For hours I would try to move center divs in some cases. Who would have known keeping footer on the foot is challenging. And Brendan Eich? Dude, go fuck your self. There’s just so much stupid stuff in javascript I shake my head every time I have to write above 50 lines of it.
I’m not sure coding is a cycling like skill. If you don’t do it continuously I’m afraid it fades. Especially as the field evolves. I’m rambling. I’m just trying to say I’m grateful for the experience. I started with flask, ended up writing bash scripts to create, rotate, duplicate backups.
In the window of opportunity (waiting-for-response and similar) I have created another app to track employer turnover based on gov data for my buddy (run locally). Had my foot wet into extension development at one point (javascript yuck yuck yuck) and have a reasonable opportunity to develop another internal system for a friend, founder in manufacturing space.
By no means this project is finished, but I feel like i’m gaining a control of my time again.
How it started
Turning the clock once again, I’m tempted to link to two posts on this blog. One on the day-before I quit my corporate bitch life and the second – on microdosing experiment. I got into excel VBA stuff programming my own screener, applied it, build stuff for my engineering firm friend’s place. We dined together with his other friend – my current main client – retailer. We shared the days at the table. Got involved there too. Across the years built workbooks, that replaced me.
Lower requests – lower income. My aspiration is freedom. To plan the day, mostly. I went through mental exercise of going into normal IT job for experience / frame of reference and of course money numerous times throughout past years. Still not ruling that out, but it’s not my dream. You can refer to first of mentioned blogposts, shouldn’t be hard to find. Everything still applies, after what, 5 years?
I had to program myself back in. And that’s what I’m doing up to this day. Ultimately it’s not the app I was building. It’s the leverage.
Closing Words
I shared this, because that set.. it’s very close to my heart. It came through one of my tinder dates. And I doubt I shared it with anyone before. It has this dark aura, out of this darkness, the beauty that’s born there… I cherish that beauty way more, I think it has more reality levels attached to it, than visible to naked eye and thus more true.
I was about to break silence on this blog with one of two ways: a) backstory where I was b) “Poor man’s Jenkins” – an explainer to single script, that enables CI/CD pipeline (when 30s-1m downtime is tolerated on update) and c) was born minutes into preparing dinner with this dark beauty. To share it. The music. And it spoke to me in the exact same energy I started this blog with in 2017. Speaking to myself. Understanding myself. Archiving the lessons.
I left out a lot, believe me. But I feel it was enough of an offload. If you are still here. I’m really proud to have you as a reader.
This will be the ugly duckling. No picture, no links. Poor formatting and reader experience. Zero effort at SEO. Will not share this on social platforms.
See you around.
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