As you age you get a better understanding about time and how quickly it passed. Instead of counting days or weeks, you think in years. You don’t say anymore, oh who knows what’s going to happen in six months. You start planning 2 years in advance because you know very quickly that two years passes. Of course this insight doesn’t come for free, at least in my case it’s cost me a sizable amount of gray hair!

The TV series 24 hooked me to TV I watched like 2 seasons in a few days, but even though I like it, it is going on my nerves, they stretch the story too far for too long. I like the idea that the whole season takes place in 24 hours but you got to come up with a rational and plausible sequence of events that are also entertaining. In this show people don’t learn from their mistakes and the same person gets kidnapped like 10 times in 24 hours.

I have a condition, which makes me susceptible to being unhappy and unsatisfied. I have a decent life but I know not as good as it should be. The problem is that I cannot get myself to focus and achieve more and move towards my goals. I have read a great book by James Clear called Atomic Habits, it’s a great book to learn and maintain them. I should use that to my advantage and by practicing and creating these habit I could get to my goals sooner.

After going through a number of due diligence processes in a few companies I kinda have mixed feelings. Sometimes you see overly lengthy processes that take months and sometimes only a few weeks very shallow just overall financial with almost no investigation into technology and the team. I don’t know how to feel about it but the investors that doesn’t take due diligence seriously better lose their money! Same goes for the ones wasting the companies resources and in the end not going through with a term sheet.

As an executive you should be decisive and have the guts to cut fat and keep the company lean and nimble. If you don’t do that, the whole enterprise would be negatively affected. The moral would drop, moreover higher cash leak forces the company to take on assignments and projects that not inline with companies vision but will provide a little cash. Don’t do this. Fire people that you don’t need, keep the team small and focus on the objective.

The more I read about the history of financial systems and governments, the more I lose my respect and support for the state. They are inefficient machineries that milk their citizens in every way possible. Don’t get me wrong, I understand lots of the benefits that they provide and value of their services it’s just they need to understand that they are working for the people and their goal, like any other enterprise is to provide the best service at a reasonable cost.

I don’t know why, but I don’t seem to have either of them. I can spend the whole day watching TV and don’t write a single line of code. What is wrong with me? Why cannot I just sit down and do one thing until I get to the bottom of it? Sometimes I hate myself for it, but at the same time it feels good! I just enjoy binge watching good TV!

We have a new colleague in the office. She’s not going to work with me directly but I’ll have interactions with her occasionally. So imagine it’s her second day and not many are in the office. She asked a couple of questions and I tried to help her, even things that I’m not usually involved with, we got to a point that she doesn’t have a clear idea of what Excel is and what it does.

Life is short, do something that matters. Live your life on your own terms. Don’t try to please others too much, they don’t deserve your time and efforts. Be self sufficient but kind to others. There’s always someone that is a perfect match for you. Sometimes you have to try a few perfect and non perfect matches to find the right one. And if you realise you haven’t found the right person yet, don’t worry they might be just the next person you meet.

Every once in a while I get very emotional about myself, who I am and what i wish to become. Latest episode occurred when watching “For all mankind” I just started to scream/cry and couldn’t stop for some time. At these moments I become a jerk to myself and blame myself for not having accomplished much more and not pursuing something extraordinary. It’s a valid point and I like this feeling in a sense it proves to me that I’m not dead inside and all hope is not lost.

The greatest sin in IT industry is to lose your customer’s data. Of course redundancies will cost you. You can always cut corners to keep the costs low and increase your profit margins but when the disaster strikes you will lose all your credebility and chances are you’ll have to spend a lot more to recover from the situation. Don’t cut corners on customer data unless you know how to handle the disasters.

It’s 1st March, two months gone from 2021 and I’m still here with no significant progress from the beginning of the year. I’m totally disappointing myself, and I’m embarrassed sed by me. I don’t remember who said this but the saying goes “you’re the worst boss that you worked for”. Basically we blame ourselves a lot worse than the worse bosses, and I think it’s totally true, at least for me with all the bosses I worked with.

Today I visited my university where I spent 4 years doing research. Making friends, finding love, picking up coffee drinking habits, and a ton more. Many of my closest friends I met there. People I miss, and more than that, it reminded me of the life before pandemic. Why? Because soon after I finished my PhD pandemic heated up. Going to café for coffee with colleagues after lunch, walking around the campus, chatting with random people about random things, all those stupid things now seem a lot more precious and exciting.

I’m a researcher, my current job is not research but I worked in research centers for over 6 years. The experience you have is going to be very different country by country, university to university, department by department and research team to research team. What’s guaranteed is that there is a low chance you wouldn’t be affected by politics and grant money drama. The fitness function is flawed, people are optimizing on number of papers or just getting a paper accepted in a reputed conference or journal (depending on your field of study).

I work at a tech company. Even though we have our own products sometimes (more than I’d like) we take consultancy projects. Basically we rent out our engineers and data scientists, hourly, I know it sounds like a particular profession that is often frowned upon but what we do is totally legal in most of the world. Any how, there’s a new project that we are working on with this other company.

Today for the first time I invested in a company as an investor. Not to buy shares of a public company but to participate in a series B. I didn’t put tons of money, it’s more as an experience. But I hope it will be fruitful down the line (I probably have to wait 5 years to see any returns) but even if it’s not, it will be a great experience.

It’s very important to be able to trust your colleagues. Trust comes in different forms and shapes. The simplest form would be to rely on them to show up to a meeting on-time or to trusting them with your life. Feeling that any moment they are going behind your back or having to check on them to get some work done. Or to be sure the quality of work they provide is subpar or on point it’s all of great value.

We see these days (past 2 years) that there are startups on every industry and field of business claiming to have AI based solutions. Of course I’m no expert on these fields and have not been exposed to the details of their solutions but I can already tell that very likely most of them don’t use any kind of AI. Funny thing I also work for one of those AI based companies but we never use any ML.

I bought a PS5 right when it was releases. Since then I have many friends that still have not managed to get their hands on one. The funny thing is that even though I got mine already I don’t really use it that much, but still I feel good that I have it! I know that sounds odd but trust me, I just have better things to do. Don’t get me wrong it’s an awesome console, I love the controller too.

I sometimes wonder why there are so few European unicorns. Unicorn is a startup that is valued at over 1 Billion dollars, in European context, maybe it should be considered 1 Billion Euros? but usually on those scales 50 million doesn’t really matter that much. In general there are very few European startups when you compare with the US or China. Not only that, there almost no European tech giants.

I’m planning to start my own business, that should not be a news by now. However, the mystery is I do not know if I want to raise any money. I kinda sort of like to bootstrap everything and keep all the money and credit for myself. On the other hand I don’t want to be in principle be in debt to someone else. I know it doesn’t have to debt, but in a sense you have to answer to them, I want to be my own boss.

What’s your Carbon footprint? Do you have any idea about the number? and what would it mean? Honestly I don’t, it’s a topic that that I’d like to dive into. We all have heard that meat, especially beef has very large impact on global warming, both because it requires a lot of calories to feed the cattle and because of methane produced by the animal! I’m not going to become vegetarian anytime soon but I have reduced my mean consumption by a lot, mainly for health concerns.

Recently I crave doing research and publishing papers. It’s a fun process, months of work, late night writing and coding sessions to make it to the deadline. The thrill of waiting for the notifications and the best part attending the conferences to present your work in exotic locations! Well since I’m not in the Uni. anymore doing this means I have to pay by myself for the registration fees and travel expenses, not sure if it’s worth it!

In case you don’t know “Halt and Catch Fire” is the name of an amazing show from AMC. It’s hands down one of my favorite TV shows, especially among the shows with a tech theme. The story takes place in the 80s, and has a lot of elements from real stories of the early computers but in short it tells the story of few visionaries and talented engineers that go about innovating in the nascent world of computers and go forward to predict the internet and create the first networked games and online communities.

Sometimes when the task at hand is too complicated I feel overwhelmed and I just do nothing. Doing nothing might be an exaggeration, to be more accurate, I do anything but working on what I should be working on. Today was one of those days. In the evening I started to get done a significant part of the platform I’m working on but after 1 hour of research and making some conclusions on the direction to take, I couldn’t get myself to actually write any code.

What’s the best way to start a day? To go to a nice café, order coffee and a nice pastry. Something like croissant or pain au chocolat or anything else, just a good pastry from a good bakery. I see you my American friends, good bakeries are probably in short supply in your neighborhoods but those who live in certain parts of Europe, for example in or somewhat around France, usually have good bakeries, almost everywhere.

For all mankind from AppleTV+ is one hell of a show. It gives the millenials (including me) and Gen Z a glimpse of excitement that Gen X (post boomers!) from the space race and going to the moon. It’s an alternate history in which Soviets make it to the moon before the US. I like that the show narrates the story of a few characters separately so there’s hopefully at least one that you can relate to closely.

A few months back a product manager joined our team which seemed to have experience with things that were new to me. For a few months I would always ask his opinion on the those matters hoping that he knows a thing or two more than me. Every time he would say a few things but nothing specific that assure me he know his way around such topics very well. Not that she was claiming to know more, it’s just I assumed she knows it and I always respected her opinion and tried to act in line with her suggestions.

So turns out our company is not doing very well and in order to survive we have to lay off a few people. It’s a difficult situation and it’s hard to say goodbye to the colleagues you worked with for more than a year. Even more difficult is to deliver them the news, knowing that you cannot offer any decent severence package adds one more level of complexity. Entrepreneurship is hard, even in Europe with lots of help from the govenrment.

One full month is passed since the beginning of 2021. I didn’t have many new year’s resolutions but I expected a lot from this year. To be more precise from myself. I don’t believe that I let myself down, in fact I made a great progress thus far. Yet, I wish I had done more, and how quick the days go by worries me. I’m going to write another dedicated post reflecting on the second month of 2021, and I promise you by then I have launched my new venture.

What happened to GameStop’s stock was the first of it’s kind (probably), but it won’t be the last. Robinhood brought stock market investment to the masses, and we are grateful for that. However preventing their customers from purchasing certain stocks put us the commoners or retail investors in a disadvantageous position. Following the restrictions, Robinhood in a blog post shed some light on the rational behind the action, which was to control their risk and satisfy thresholds required by the clearinghouse.

One my top goals in life is to have financial freedom. What is financial freedom? I don’t think there’s an official meaning for it but here’s my definition. You are financially free when you can decide to do what you want when you want. That also implies at any point in time you can be anywhere you please. This doesn’t mean I want to live like a hippy and constantly travel and never settle, it’s just I want to be able to do so if I wish.

Relationships are often complicated, and when you use the work complicated to describe a relationship is probably not a healthy one. Something that’s been difficult for me is to discuss the fact that I don’t see the current relationship I’m in to advance any further with my partner. We’re in good terms, enjoying our time together and you could say everything is perfect, it really is, but at the same time I know that this is not the person I would love to spend the rest of my life with.

The pandemic has worn everyone down. Sometime a simple visit from a not so close friend is a bliss. Today a friends who is in the same profession as me visited me in my town. We went for a walk in the woods and exchanged ideas on any random topic you could think of. In the end she came in for a cup of tea and some snacks. Even though we were both tested negative recently and had no interaction with third-parties we unconsciously maintained the awkward 6 feet or 2 meters in real units.

What makes a good investor? I can make a couple guesses but I don’t have much experience in this area, but I can tell you what are the signs of a bad investor. To be clear now I’m talking about investors in tech companies, maybe I should say VC or Angel, but in the case of my story the investor is neither a VC nor an Angel. Our company has one investor so far, and although they do not have the full control of the board, in practice most of the time they control the majority.

I’m exhausted. It’s not the work, I have some free time during the day to catch a breath and recover from the never-ending Zoom! calls. But I’m exhausted. It’s constant thinking of not belonging. It’s the feeling that you’re not valued. It’s the thinking that you’re wasting your youth on a pointless struggle. Others are paying their mortgage back and driving expensive leased vehicles and I’m just extending their livelihood until the whole house of cards comes down collapsing.

Motivation, is one of the most important factors in achieving goals and getting work done. I certainly am affected highly by motivation and how I feel about certain tasks. If I don’t like doing a certain thing and there are no good incentives I would most likely postpone that task indefinitely. There are some tasks that I know I cannot get rid of and by choice or force I got to get done.

Today the 3rd week of 2021 is coming to an end. We are still struggling with the covid-19. We have vaccines but countries, especially the European ones are acting slow. Businesses struggle, meanwhile I’m contemplating quitting my job and starting my own business. I’m sure many would call me crazy because in the middle of pandemic it wouldn’t be easy to find a new job, but since I’m not looking for a job that logic shouldn’t apply to me.

In this modern times people have become lonely. This statement sounds odd because we are more connected than ever. However we see have a shallow connection to other people and we rarely get so close to share our feelings and to really care about each other. At least this true for me, I have a few close friends which I talk to frequently and when we are in the same country!

Recently I came across Charlie Munger’s USC Law commencement speech, which you can easily find it on YouTube. In his speech Charlie speaks about lessons he learned in his life. There are invaluable gems which I highly recommend to listen to and to put in use in life. One of these learnings which struck me the most was “Assiduity”, he likes how it sounds and suggests everyone to practice and learn to be able to just sit their asses down and get the job done.

This is a simple note. It’s only purpose is to maintain my writing streak. It’s been 21 days starting from first day of 2021. I remember the new years eve like it was yesterday, yet the January is almost over. Time passes so quickly, days come and go, the winner is one that goes to bed every night happy and a little wiser and more accomplished than they woke up. Tonight I go to bed, knowing a thing or two more, but that’s the minimum, do better.

How can one make money? Getting a job right? well it works but it’s difficult to grow, also do you want to spend your life working for someone else? Start a VC backed company? Too much stress, you might never get anywhere, also works nicely in SF not in Europe. Becoming an Instagram influencer? Well depends on your physics! and attitude, could actually work nicely. Youtuber? Game streaming? Live coding on Twitch?

It’s crucial to look after our mental health. I felt this more than ever in the last two years of my PhD. Long hours of work, high stress, uncertainty and pressure all were weighing on me. Through podcasts and some other sources I landed on two tools that saved my mind from blowing up! Meditation and Stoicism! I started meditation with the help of a great App called Headspace, although these days I don’t practice meditation daily, I can tell that it was quite helpful and would give a a level of clarity and calmness that I could never get.

These days I’ve gained a huge appetite which lead me put on a few kilos. Today I tried to trick myself so I reduce the calory intake! I skipped breakfast (I often do) and delayed my lunch until around 5pm, moreover I didn’t just cook anything I made a vegetarian dish, sort of a stew but with zucchini, tomato and bell peppers and a bit of potatoes. Since it had lots of liquid the plan was to count on the fact that it’ll stuff me and therefore prevent me from nibbling on snacks and other high calory food.

Another week went by, lots of great things happened and some progress was made, but not enough. I can do better, and I will do better. Every hour should count, and every day I should get closer to my goals. Life is tough, especially if you don’t want to be average. I gotta work harder and smarter. On a completely different note I’m thinking about writing longer pieces with more depth!

Snow is beautiful and I had very much missed it. I remember when I was a kid, winters were often snowy and we would always go out and have all the typical winter fun activities such as making snowman and snowball fights. Unfortunately it’s a couple of years that sometimes winters come and go with not even a few days of snow fall and snowy white landscapes. This year however winter is delivering at least for one instance of decent snowfall and it’s going to last for a few days.

Privacy preserving everything. This past week we witnessed a mass migration from WhatsApp to Signal. Users fearing their privacy and afraid of how Facebook would use their private data migrated to Signal, another messaging platform which is run by a non-profit and provides end-to-end encryption and favourable privacy policies. One aspect of this migration was quite interesting because masses were encouraged by what I would call celebrities on the Internet, such as Elon Musk or Edward Snowden.

I have an opportunity to free myself from the routine and perhaps find my calling. There’s a narrow windows of a few months and I have to take my shot. I need to apply myself, in whole to this new idea. Work in the evenings and on weekends. Follow two narratives until I can let go of one. This is all on me. I know most people would be happy to have my current role, not me.

I wish to be more gritty. I’m alright, when I care about something enough, I show grit, but other times, I have problems showing up and doing the job. I will get it done eventually if need be, but I procrastinate. I was watching some magic tricks recently, mostly card tricks. It’s fascinating how much effort and years of practice has gone into those tricks. I was thinking if you show up everyday and practice, get the work done, you’ll improve.

What is life? It’s a game, it’s mostly single player. There are NPCs that you need to collaborate, live with and protect. They help you to unlock new quests and hidden contents. But remember it’s single player game. And a game. Don’t take it too seriously. There’s no ultimate goal. A bigger divine plan or an after-life ( a sequel?). Most importantly you have one life, use it wisely. Make the most out of it, don’t get hung up being the average Joe.

It’s Monday, more precisely it’s the second Monday of the year. I’m demotivated as it’s the last week of the year. Even though I’ve made my decision to look for other opportunity still I wish I was more motivated. I somehow feel it’s just my excuse to be a bit more lazy. I’m kind of hoping that I’ll recover after I rest! Well I’m still tired of eating all those amazing food during the holidays.

Ownership, I love to have stuff, well certain kinds of stuff. But at the same time I live in a small rental apartment, the trouble is I don’t even know in 6 months, in which city or even country I would be living and that terrifies me. How could I move all this junk? You get the idea, a few weeks back I was finally processing the last moving boxes from 10 months ago!

I’ve learned great many things over the many years I lived on this planet. Here are a few: I learned that most people are not that bright. Average is boring. To always be calm. Never curse in written or in person. One can save lots of time by just refraining from arguing with people that don’t matter. Don’t be late to meetings. Be respectful to everyone regardless of their appearance or occupation, with interaction some people will lose their initial level of respect and some will gain.

Do you ever think about changing the world? I don’t! Is that a bad thing? Maybe. Some entrepreneurs say if you don’t set out to change the world you won’t succeed in your business. I think that wrong. There’s another version of this thought, if start a business to make money you won’t succeed, you have to do it for the business (product). I don’t agree with this either. There’s some truth to it though, if you love what you’re working you’ll understand it better, see the customer’s needs clearly, persevere longer and therefore have a higher chance at success.

What is my life philosophy? I do not know. What am I seeking? I know I’m no ordinary folk, what I truly want to do is to create things, both physical and intangible (software). I have long history of making, something that is abandoned in last 6-7 years. I spent those years to obtain status and privilege, but I think I am in a good stage of my life to take a year off and build something of myself.

What are your goals in life? Start a family? Buy a house? Make a million $ a year? All of the above? Get a job in a Fortune 500 company? Think bigger, even bigger than that. If you want to be successful, you got to set ambitious goals and work hard to reach them. Have set my goals? Not really, I’m guilty on that count, but you know better! I don’t even have new year resolutions.

I remember last year the phrase 10x engineer became a meme on Twitter and probably everywhere on the Internet. I don’t think that I’m a 10x engineer, but I’d like to think that I was a decent engineer at some point in my career. There’s a book called 10x rule by Grant Cardone, I listened to it in audiobook form, I believe it’s read by the author and this guy is so energetic that I feel like I want to go full power 10x on every aspect of my life.

First day of work. It kind of feels like the first day of school. You have to show up to both, one because you’re a responsible adult and the other because your parents would make a huge fuss about it and you probably would be grounded (to put it mildly for the younger ones). It’s nice to see the colleagues after a few weeks (barely two), some of them you don’t like, some you love, some make bring smile to your lips, some make feel anxious, even though they work for you and normally you expect this feeling to be directed in the opposite way.

Yesterday I watched Pixar’s latest movie, Soul. It’s a great, beautiful graphics, gorgeous character design, amazing story. It even made me cry for a few times and made me think hard about my life choices and how I live. When we make decisions, do we take into account that we might drop dead tomorrow? What if we don’t make it to retirement, what happens to our lives? What’s the point of working our butts off and not actually living?

This is the first Saturday of the year. Thank goodness this year January 2nd is a Saturday, that would mean there are 2 more days of holidays before going back to work. Yes, you read me right I have a job! and I go to work, well not really at least thanks to covid-19 (as strange that this statement sounds) I work remotely, like many these days or perhaps better to say these past months.

The year 2020 is gone, with all its horrors and sufferings caused largely by the covid-19. Today was the first day of 2021, nothing unusual for me, I was a little bit unwell due to hangover caused by heavy drinking the night before! pretty standard! aside from that just a usual day. Although the vaccines are now in the picture and we all hope that soon thing will go back to normal (something that I too strive for) but we must be realistic and to take into account various facets of the situation.

You see I was a very productive person, who loves to make and break things. But in the past months, no matter how much I love to make, I just do nothing, sometimes I do nothing because I have to do X or Y, but the point is, if I don’t do X or Y then I don’t do anything at all. Why not split the time, allocate 2,4,5 hours a day to X or Y, and if it didn’t work out, just switch to something else and make something.

You can clearly see that it’s almost a year since my last breakdown and urge to squeeze out a blog post out of me. Funny thing is that it’s about the same topic, not being able to get the work done, it’s not that I’m not capable, it’s just I cannot begin, there’s some Resistance! I hate this resistance. To get past the resistance I resorted to “War of Art” by Steven Pressfield.