I’ve been a happy user of various fediverse services (mostly Mastodon) for 2 years now and they are on a short list of things that make the rotten idea of social media exciting to me. But I still have a lot of natural curiosity about new things. What recently popped on my radar is Nostr - another take on decentralized social media.

There’s a particular category of devices used by majority of world’s population. Invented many decades ago, they quickly became so widespread that we hardly remember how we managed to live without them.

Kiedy zaczynałam przygodę z programowaniem w 2001 roku, na porządku dziennym w moich społecznościach było zdecydowane krytykowanie innych języków programowania. Inne języki były do dupy, a ludzie piszący w nich byli przegrywami albo idiotami. Gdyby tylko używali prawdziwego języka, takiego jak nasz, wszystko byłoby po prostu lepsze.

I changed the design of my blog for the third time since its start in 2020. In normal circumstances that isn’t that much of a news. However, if a quick and straightforward redesign takes two weeks and generates 80 tasks on the GitHub kanban board, we need to discuss this.

I started 2023 with a major purge in my digital corner. After moving my password vault from LastPass to Bitwarden, removing hundreds of dead entries and switching authentication from Authy to my Yubikeys wherever possible, my eyes rested on my browser bookmarks tab. I realized I had a problem.

Kryptografia to trudna dziedzina. Roi się w niej od dowodów matematycznych. Ale jeżeli nie zajmujesz się tworzeniem systemów kryptograficznych, to nie potrzebujesz znać wszystkich wewnętrznych zawiłości do wysokopoziomego zrozumienia ich działania.

Without further ado, like a year ago, let’s conclude 2022 with a personal summary. There is quite a lot to cover, and it was generally quite a bleak year. But some positive stuff happened too.

Okay, uhm… yeah. I guess we have to talk about TikTok. I can do that on easy mode and turn this article into a litany of ways TikTok is worse than Facebook and Instagram combined. But I could also try spending my keystrokes on something constructive. And so it happens that I figured out a hard yet somewhat productive way of extracting value out of TikTok and I feel like sharing it here.

In case it wasn’t obvious from the previous parts (first, second), the story of my side project is in fact a story of my job hunting. Yes, It started with a video game I loved and a desire to bring something of value to its community, but the true goal was to impress a very limited number of powerful people. Everything else was an optional objective.

For the whole time I was developing the extension, I was getting invitations to recruitment processes on a nearly constant basis. And I ignored pretty much all of them as I didn’t want more disappointment to drive me insane. My way of thinking was that once my project was out, I’d use it to prove my expertise until I have got relevant work experience in desired fields. Anyone who wanted could see it in action or read source code if they knew where to look. And, uhm, it kinda worked.