Introduction and Welcome
I’ve always wanted to have my own blog, but I never knew what I would possibly write in it. I am nothing special, I have nothing special to say, I am not funny, I am not incredibly smart. So what’s the point?
Well, for one, I’ve always liked to write. English is not my native language, and I could not imagine myself writing in English, but it is still writing, and writing makes me feel good.
Second, there is a lot of chaos in my life. I have never had a path that I would follow, that would satisfy me fully, that would define who I am. Instead, I have always been an experimenter, an adventurer open to any kind of gig as long as it sparked my curiosity.
I don’t have a good education, I have never had inclinations or special abilities. Instead, I was capable of almost everything besides probably singing. I could write, draw. My math teacher used to tell me that it was a pity that my parents thought of me as a humanitarian because I had great potential as a mathematician. And so on and so forth… I never knew what I wanted, I never really understood who I was, and I was obsessed with trying to find my place, my mission.
In the meantime, life got in the way. I married, I have kids, I needed to provide for my family, so I took every job that I was able to find. Ten years ago, I moved to another country (Poland), so I had to make sure that my family and I could stay here because there was no way we would return to our home country (Russia). So I again had to take any job I could find, and I needed to stick with it to have stability. Last year, we became Polish citizens, which took off a little bit of pressure. I can probably think of doing something interesting instead of just constantly grinding and surviving. The world as a whole does not make it easier, though, so the grind will certainly continue.
During all those years, I have tried so many things. I have taught myself a little bit of programming, data analysis (that is how, although with a great amount of luck, I got my current job), I learned to like Linux, I learned the command line. I tried some web development too. And even at 45 years old, I am still dreaming that I will someday learn a low-level programming language and become a hacker (in the true and authentic meaning of the word—that is, a hacker, not a cracker).
So one day, I thought, why not try to at least describe the chaos that is happening in my life? Even if no one ever reads it, it can still be valuable for me personally.
Here is a plan for this blog. I will be posting about things I am doing or things that interest me, such as data analytics, Python programming, probability and statistics, Linux, the command line, Vim (which is my favorite text editor, by the way—let’s get this straight), weird stuff like me learning Rust (my latest obsession), or building an app on top of ATProtocol. But I will also write about other things I like—baseball, music, and even thoughts about life.
That should be enough for an introduction. Whoever reads this, you are welcome. Whoever reads this, if you want to connect or want to yell at me for something, I am on Bluesky, although I don’t post much there.
And thus, I begin…