Articles tagged as "personal"

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.

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.

In 2017 I failed two job interviews for React developer positions. Normally that isn’t much of a news by itself, but it all happened at a time when I was incredibly frustrated and I badly wanted something new. After receiving devastating feedback from my interview rounds, I needed a few years to rebuild my professional self-confidence. Things went very, very wrong back then and they would keep going wrong over and over again for a while. That’s how it all started and it didn’t feel romantic at all.

In 2016 the corporation I was working for signed a contract for building a unified business solution for all of its companies. The project was developed by an external entity, a very well-known name in the industry. We, the IT department employees, were supposed to maintain the new system once it was done. For a brief moment I thought something new and interesting was behind the corner. Then, a few years later, I abruptly woke up to a feeling I had made one of my biggest professional mistakes.

To say 2020 was a rough year is like saying nothing at all. I still have fresh memories of it so I’m going to jot them down before they evaporate so that I can have a moment of oddly-directed nostalgia in 2030.

I enjoy video games. Racing games is a genre I enjoy in particular. I played at least one on every single gaming platform I’ve owned. Some of them took hundreds of hours of my life and here is my love letter to all of them.

Okay, uhm… How do I start this without boring statements like ‘music has been part of my life since I remember, yadda yadda yadda’. Let’s try this: of all music-related things that happened in my life, none of them I owe to my music teacher or my family. If I could credit one person, it would have been Daisy Dee.

When I hear people talking about how they got online for the first time they often mention dial-up modems or expensive connections thier landline phone line. My story is somewhat different.

For two decades I’ve been using software, online services and various devices as parts of my daily life. I’m writing them down so that I can track how my preferences evolve over time and hopefully help my future choices. Besides, I like reading this kind of lists written by other people, so here’s mine for other freaks like me to enjoy.