known as @hacdias
Last month was Maintainer Month, a month were open source software maintainers are celebrated. A lot of the software in the world - and thus society itself - runs on open source software, which is something not known to a lot of people. During this past month, I read a few posts here and there about people sharing their journey and experience as an open source maintainer, and today I wanted to give my take on it.
In a few weeks I will be turning 25 years old. That’s an interesting number: it’s a quarter of a century, and it also feels like a pivotal moment in one’s life: the middle of one’s third decade, now closer to the beginning of the fourth decade than the end of the second decade. Instead of having a mid-life crisis, I decided to reflect a bit on the idea of getting older, but more importantly belonging.
Swimming. An activity that can be very relaxing, and, at the same time, straining and very good for your body. Since I was a kid, I’ve always had a complicated relationship with swimming. I enjoy the process of swimming, and I can swim, but as soon as the body of water is deeper than my height, it’s a hard no-go.
Two months ago I announced I was leaving my previous job, a completely remote position, for a on-site position. This is my first on-site position, since my previous job was also my first and only job until now. It’s been now a bit more than a month, and I have some thoughts I would like to share.
Over a bit more than a year ago, I started going to the gym. Since then, I went from going there one time a week, to two times a week, and more recently to three times a week. During this time, many things have changed, from my goals, progress, and how I feel about sports and being active in general.
After almost 7 years working on projects surrounding IPFS, the InterPlanetary File System, I am now saying goodbye. It’s been an incredible journey at Protocol Labs, and more recently at the Interplanetary Shipyard. However, I feel like it’s finally time for a change for me.
The title of this post is just a question I added to my impossible list back in September 2022. It has been sitting there since. After making a little cleanup to the page today, I thought: I really want to develop this feeling a bit more, and explain it better, as well as how I feel in this moment regarding my plans for “living abroad”.
Due to all the restructuring that has been happening at work, I am supposedly going to be working at a different company from next Monday on. The team will still be working on the same projects, albeit with more to choose our own direction. This has also given me time to reflect and think about what I want to learn and do next.
I was mindlessly navigating the socials and I saw someone posted an article that caught my attention: Shields Down. This article dives deep into the fact that “happy people don’t leave jobs they love”, or, more specifically, what led them to be in a “shields down” mode:
Your shields drop the moment you let a glimpse of a potential different future into your mind. It seems like a unconsidered off-the-cuff thought sans consequence, but the thought opens you to possibilities that did not exist the moment before the thought existed.
Once your shields are down, you’re more prone to look into other opportunities, and more prone to also accept them. The same author had also written Bored People Quit, which covers a lot of reasons why someone’s shields go down, being one of the most important reasons boredom.
I highly enjoyed reading these two articles, and I do think it is a valuable read for everyone, but especially for managers. Maybe the reason why I enjoyed them so much is because I’m feeling some resonance.
Learning a new language is interesting. There are new words. New structures. New verbs. New adjectives. New ways of explaining things. New ways of categorising things. New ways of describing things. New ways of thinking.
My first full year mark working full time just passed by, and so did my first year working full time remotely. Since this is my first actual job, I can’t really compare it with working in-person. Nevertheless, I want to share my experience, as well as some of the things I think might be the pros and the cons.
Some time ago, I decided to buy a gratitude journal 📓. I have been writing on and off on it for quite some time, definitely over a year and maybe two. Over this time, I think I can say that this has been beneficial for me. And I wanted to share this experience with others.
Online services. We all have accounts on those. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter Mastodon, or some other thing that is sucking the life out of us. Even though we are the same physical being behind all of those accounts, we don’t always come out the same way to all of them. We look different, we sound different. Maybe that’s the nature of what we post there. They are all online identities.
Today I had a bit too much time that I decided to work on my website. In the morning, I made a few tweaks to the home page in order to make it more useful: added some contact and social media links, as well as links for some pages on my website that are not included in the navigation bar. I think I achieved a neat result.
I’m now in my first year of my Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering which means that next year I am supposed to start (and hopefully finish) my Master’s project and thesis. As a consequence of that, I have been thinking a lot about it lately. I don’t want to make a rushed choice that will make me work on something I don’t enjoy for over half an year.
