The journey that I have decided to take with Siderus brought myself always in embarrassing moment on meetings Hyped discussion about “Blockchain” and data storage. In this article I don’t want to talk about the misconceptions about storing data into a blockchain, but instead I want to focus on a more generic question that I have been asked: Is a blockchain useful for human being? Can we use it for good?
During the last year I have learned how important it is to build, test and deploy using always the same docker container as well as reducing its size. As I have not found anything online, I want to remember and share it: I am testing my go packages with a multistage docker build inside my pipeline on GitLab.
One of the biggest things that I have been learning is the discipline of being focused on the main goal. I get distracted every few minutes, and if it is not an advertisement, or a funny cloud in the sky, it is an event that we may consider bigger than it actually is. Instead, I don’t want to lose the focus on the prize.
A month ago I have ordered, as a backup device, a Chromebook. I was watching videos on youtube and I have selected the ASUS Chromebook Flip without thinking much. It is powerful, cute, convertible, the screen is not that bad and the keyboard is meh… you can get used to its size. The main problem was not the hardware: after a month with Google ChromeOS, as a developer, I am really disappointed. I was expecting a device to work, and instead I got something to play cat videos.
I remember when I was 10 and my mother was worried about me staying too much in front of the computer, writing lines of weird text on a black and white screen; I used to be one of these boys that were not supported by friends and family, because it was hard to understand computers… 🤔 but now things have changed, and writing code is cool.
I consider myself a 75% self-taught developer, meaning that I have been learning how to write code by myself, a little in school and by working. I have been working with several developers that taught me a lot. Some good developers suggested me new and exciting things. Others bad developers taught me how to be a better developer. I have recognized a pattern in almost all of them: they are not continously learning new things, and they don’t care much.
I have always been in love with the concept of distributed and decentralised services. Those two concepts are aligning almost perfectly to my political an philosophical point of view. And this short note is not much about software, but more as a note to remember myself how much spoiled by centralised services we are.
On the airplane to Stockholm, It was hard to explain to my boyfriend how much we are relaying on centralized services, without talking about the centralised fallback and backup solutions. I made a simple “question-game” to explain this concept and try to find a fungible solution to solve the main problem. It is a series of “what if… ?”. With that question, any action is in not possible anymore, until a fungible solution is found. The goal of the game is to find something easy to find and replace, and that would make the action possible. Here is a simple example we made:
JavaScript development is crazy, and evolving fast… and the more you learn about it the more you realize how crazy it has become 😅. I think it is exciting, indeed, but Sean, in his clear post explained perfectly why a simple project is over-engineered and I have to disagree with him: some JavaScript’s frameworks, like React, are not the cause of unnecessarily complicated projects… and React is not over engineered!
Sean, by using a simple example of an Hello World App in React described the pain of using several tools and a big libraries, just to build a simple application. He said:
Finally I have decided to ditch Wordpress.com to start using Jekyll for my new personal blog. This decision was made after considering that the most of my blog posts are written in Italian. Only 2 years ago I have decided to write in English, to allow more people to easily read (access) my thoughts… and everybody knows that a not well-index blog with weird languages is not loved by google’s bots!
Joke aside, the main reasons that made me switch to Jekyll are:
I have my own clear vision of what it would be the future of value exchange. At the moment I am running a Bitcoin Classic, full node. This is because I want to keep a copy of the blockchain to verify my payments and make the Bitcoin network stronger. I have also a p2pool mining node and 2 miners, to be able to express myself with the bitcoin “consensus” (without thinking of profit).
During the last year my interests verted to security and privacy. I had time to explore and have fun with encryption and some protocols to strength the security and feel more safe from the bad guys, the annoying business, the stealing banks and the spying governments.