Category Archives: Thoughts

Antranig Vartanian

June 5, 2024

I’m having a hard time understanding how these BootCamps work. Their whole value is teaching people how to code, sometimes they also teach programming, but not always. As far as I can tell, they never teach how to use a computer, which is weird.

Take car mechanics as an example, I assume they know how to use a car and the basics of how it works before they start fixing things. But the same doesn’t seem to be true about coding/programming.

I met with a couple of students today who were going to a BootCamp to learn coding-y, DevOps-y and Security things, but they were not able to define what an OS process is. They also had a hard time interacting with a computer.

How did we get here? No, this is not a rhetorical question, I really want to know.

I’m not saying that everyone should know everything about every operating system, but during your work, where you get paid, you will need to use tools such as grep, AWK, xargs, etc.

I remember, once, years ago, I was supposed to teach “security” to a group of students, but I realized it would be more helpful if I teach them Unix and computer networking, so we ended up doing that.

Months after their graduation, I saw one of the students, and he asked me “hey, can we do these Unix classes again? Looks like they were important”.

I ended up mentoring him, and now he does mostly Taco Bell programming and he gets things done.

My feeling is that we need a book for everyone that’s named “learn this before learning how to program” and we teach basic things such as process management, service management, the Unix shell, how a computer network works, etc.

But alas, I barely have time to blog, however I feel that this computer book would be a best seller everywhere.

Back to work, cheers.

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Antranig Vartanian

June 1, 2024

The cab driver is playing classical music, Symphony in C: IV. Finale (Allegro Vivace) by Orchestre National de France & Jean Martinon to be more specific and I’m loving it.

Looks like someone will be getting ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ and a large tip.

I’m pretty sure it’s radio (I can see the music player) but it’s still lovely.

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Antranig Vartanian

September 12, 2023

After 6 weeks of being unproductive, I’m finally able to get things done thanks to a whole day of planning, awesome software and friends pushing me to do better.

See you soon!

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Antranig Vartanian

July 1, 2023

I just learned that the WordPress mobile app supports non-block classical editor. Wow this is a life saver! Now I can blog on the move without opening my laptop or mobile browser!

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Pen and Paper

For the last 6 to 10 months, I’ve been trying to find the proper digital tools to manage my life. Spoiler alert: I keep failing to do that.

In the last 5 years, my main and only job was to do one thing and one thing only, run illuria, Inc., a company that I co-founded with my friends. At some point, specifically when your team has more than three people, you need some kind of task management tool. And I’ll be honest here, I don’t care which one that is, most of them do the same thing anyway. We ended up using Notion, and we like it very much. I like the database feature and my team loves the Kanban boards. Half of the team does development and the other half does development-related things (release engineering, infra) and business-y stuff, such as sales, marketing, what have you, so we never had any issues with Notion.

(To be clear, while I like Notion and any other tool would do the job as well, I have to say that I never liked Jira’s UI/UX. That one is, indeed, enterprise-y, but that’s a story for another day).

But last year I started taking some more responsibilities (kind-of-)outside of work. Co-hosting and producing a podcast, running a community of Armenian hackers, teaching cybersecurity (I actually end up teaching Unix + Networking + how computers work, but turns out that’s what actually 80% of cybersecurity is anyway), contributing more to open-source (specially since we open-sourced our little utility, Jailer) to name a few.

Which meant that I needed a digital tool to manage the non-work part of my life as well.

The obvious choice was to use Notion, since I know it anyway. That ended up being a disaster for a very weird reason: It only works online. Even if you have the desktop app, it’s still just a wrapper around the website with some nice things like desktop notifications and such.

I know, this sounds strange to many people, but I don’t like being online all the time. Sometimes I enable iOS/macOS’s DnD, to get some work done, but sometimes I go completely offline with no distractions at all.

Unlike most other developers, I work completely locally. From my development environment to my infrastructure tools, everything is synced local/prod. This is actually a good reason to not use the fancy features of the cloud, but again, that’s a story for another day.

I have been told, by my friends, that my options are the following:

Go as basic as possible and use Notes.app. Well, I like this option, but I had two issues.

First, it’s Apple only. Yes, you can actually connect the Notes.app to your IMAP account and sync that with other Unix machines using clients like Evolution, but now the features are limited to text only. Not even tables :/

Second, the iCloud sync has some weird issues. not always, but from time to time, I was shouting “WHERE ARE MY NOTES???” just to see them appear minutes later.

Apple Notes.app? tested, liked it overall, but it’s not for me.

My friends’ second option? Go as deep as Obsidian!

I fired up Obsidian and I fell in love immediately. It was like love at first sight. Vi keybindings? it’s there. Plugins? it’s there. Run shell commands on your notes? it’s there!

After couple of days, I had everything ready. I had my folders (please, let’s call them directories!), my notes all migrated, all the plugins I needed for my weekly and daily notes (similar to what we had on Notion at work), etc etc.

And then days passed, and then weeks passed. What happened? I totally forgot that Obsidian even exists. I noticed that my wall had… sticky notes (FreeBSD branded!), my Mac had… sticky notes!

This made me so frustrated for multiple reasons.

Not that I only had two types of sticky notes (analog and digital), I also could not “search” in them!

I ended up turning the analog notes into digital, and tagging them at their title, so I could at least search using the macOS Window API.

And then I saw something awesome. Cortex Podcast released the Sidekick Notepad!

Wait wait wait, are you thinking that I bought the Sidekick Notepad? Nope, I did not 🙂

But what I ended up doing is putting all of our office’s legal pads next to me at home, we were not using them in the office anyway!

Two weeks later and I’m writing everything as needed. I take notes, I write my todo lists. I made my legal pads horizontal, similar to the Sidekick Notepad and woof is was awesome!

For a moment there I started using the Moleskine Classic Notebook, since it was more portable than yellow/white legal pads, but that didn’t work as well. I guess I needed something that can be teardown on the fly and no very-hard cover.

Why am I telling you about all of this? Well, uncle Dexter has asked on Mastodon “500 reMarkable ads later… Is anyone using one? Would you recommend it?”

I have used reMarkable (the first one), and I loved it. Not because it was an awesome technology or such, but because it made me think the same as if I was writing on paper with a pen.

So, if you, like me, have suffered for a long time to find the best “digital time/notes/todo management tool”, then you’re probably an analog person, like me.

Just take a sheet of paper, start writing on it with a pen.

That’s all folks…

P.S. I might actually end up buying the reMarkable 2 and check how that goes, or even the Sidekick Notepad. But with my writing speed, I’d need at least 4 Sidekicks every 3 months. Let’s wait and see 🙂

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Antranig Vartanian

June 25, 2023

“If eyes are the window to the soul, then writing is the door to the mind.”
It’s Only Words
Colin Walker

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5 Years of Blogging

5 years ago today, I wrote my first English blog post.

At the time I was using Hugo, the hosting was (and still is) provided by me, with the electricity that comes to my house, with an ISP that gave me IP addresses for (kinda-)free and all of it using FreeBSD.

These days, it’s not much different. I still use FreeBSD, I still use electricity, but I’ve moved from Hugo to WordPress and I write using MarsEdit, my favorite macOS software.

So, what have I done in the last 5 years? Well, not much, here are some basic statistic.

I have

Published 96 posts
Written 27,245 words
Uploaded 102 images
Told myself 256 times that “From now on I will blog every day”

And I want to thank you all, for being here, with me, during my hardest days and happiest nights.

I love you all 🙂

Cheers!

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Domains as Verification

Couple of days ago when I was browsing the internet I stumbled upon Jim Nielsen’s blog, where at the top it said

Verified ($10/year for the domain)

Luckily, his blog is so organized (unlike mine) where I found the post named Verified Personal Website in which he talked about this.

Personally, I don’t have enough CSS skills to do that, but I added a check mark next to my name on my blog (thank you Unicode!).

I think this is amazing and it should be used more by bloggers everywhere. If someone opens a blog they should see a check mark. Maybe a cute one in SVG, maybe a CSS trick, maybe it’s just an image, but it should be there.

Why? so we remind people that on the internet, whenever you have a domain, you are already verified.

Can scammers scam and criminals phish? yes, indeed. But unlike the not-very-social-media, it’s hard to do that.

Ironically, having a website on the internet costs less than having a “verified” social media account, say on Twitter.

Currently, Twitter Blue costs $8/month or $84/year.

Let’s see how much would it cost to have a blog on the internet.

First thing first, you need a domain, and it can be anything that you feel awesome with. Awesome-ness is the first and only rule.

Here’s an awesome domain that I found is available using NameCheap.

This is awesome!

Next, we need to host our website. Well, lemme check my favorite server hosting platform, Vultr.

A machine with a single CPU and a 1GB of RAM, that’s plenty!

I mean, with that much power, you can easily run WordPress (if you’re using caching).

Or, if you don’t want to get techy-techy at all, you can use a static site generator. You like Markdown and text files? There’s Hugo for you. Do you want to just click on buttons and BOOM, your website is ready? Have a look at Publii!

So, how much does it cost in the end? Here’s how it looks like if you pay annually or monthly, per year.

A/M	Twitter Blue	Website on the Internet
Monthly	$8×12 = $96	$8×12 + $10 = $70
Annually	$84	$8×12 + $10 = $70

So yes, it is cheaper to have a website on the internet.

Wait a second, annually vs monthly looks the same? OF COURSE IT DOES! THIS IS THE INTERNET! We want you to think “huh, 70 dollars? well that’s dope” and not about “well, if I pay annually now, I will save 12 dollars” and then completely forget about that service anyway.

Oh, and did I tell you about the features of having a website on the internet? Well we don’t have a list, but here’s some things from the top of my head.

You get to be verified, because welcome to the internet
You get to post whatever you want
you get to edit them! can you believe that?
You can upload photos and make it looks like a photo blog
Unlike other platforms, which seemed to be for photographers but not anymore, you can tag things, and make albums!
You can upload podcasts!
Hell, and if you ever want to leave, you can just redirect your domain to somewhere else 🙂

And I’m not even talking about the other awesome features of having a domain, like, custom emails! Be that person that does NOT have a @gmail.com, but @AwesomeIsHere.net!

And hey, Twitter Blue might die, Twitter might die, every other company might die, but the internet will not 🙂

That’s all folks…

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Antranig Vartanian

April 7, 2023

At this point all I want is MarsEdit for iOS. I just noticed that I haven’t logged into my WordPress website using the admin interface for weeks, which means that MarsEdit is REALLY awesome.

On the other hand, the WordPress App on iOS is very much tied with the WordPress services such as WordPress.com and Jetpack. While I like both services and recommend them to friends, they are not for me, so that’s a pass…

MarsEdit for iOS, I’d even pay monthly for that.

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Antranig Vartanian

March 26, 2023

Couple of years ago, I saw an article that said “By the year 20XX 70% of all created content will be video”. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark the article, so I can’t link it.

But I did not believe that. More importantly, I did not want to believe that, and for a long time, I thought that it was wrong.

But couple of weeks ago, while sitting next to my girlfriend, I watched her scroll in Instagram, and oh my god, that article was very much accurate. Everything was a video.

This is specifically sad, because Instagram was a photo sharing platform and now most of the content there is indeed video.

After weeks of researching, looks like that most things ARE video these days.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I wonder if there are any non-Instagram, non-TikTok, actually a real world wide web, video blogs. We’ve seen web logs, we’ve seen photo blogs, but video blogs wold be very interesting. Maintaining them too!

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