Starting to post again
I'm back.
I didn't think I would be back. But turns out being reflective has more benefits than I thought.
Since then, my old site omraheja.us.to went out of service and the SSL certificates stopped working. After finding NameCheap's edu offer for a website, I am back on omraheja.me!
It's been longer than 8 months since I've last written anything here. In that time, I started doing whatever interested me and I really learned to embrace failure. After doing LeanGap this summer, I acquired a taste for entrepreneurship.
I've also somewhat lost my interest in finance. Money is interesting, but the financial sector has no impact on the real world. I don't think I'll ever get back to reading SEC pages on companies, but I've started aquarc in the past few months and I might have to learn about all the technical details in there anyway.
To expand on my work at aquarc, I decided to make an all-in-one platform for high schoolers. Actually, it wasn't my idea. I was working on aviquo but the team wasn't really moving at the pace I wanted it to. That's not to say that the people there aren't smart, just that I needed room to fully expend my random and spontaneous bursts of energy whenever I get them. It's kind of like a car; the entire vehicle moves due to spontaneous explosions happening in the engine. Just that I needed a few more of those to fully get started.
One of the biggest challenges I'm facing at aquarc is keeping the team culture strong and problem-solving oriented. I have to work with about 10 people which isn't a problem in any way, but I'm going to be out for almost the entire winter break and I can't be there to fix every inconvenience. Most of the people on aquarc's tech team only understand frontend; that forces me to fill in for features like the log-in feature with email verification codes (using raw smtp, of course) or the blog post backend for aquarc. Neither of these are complicated, just that they don't understand the backend enough and don't want to poke around because it seems difficult. But a lot of tasks going forward are going to get more difficult.
To counteract this problem, I want to have my team solve a USACO problem together every week. Seems a little bit odd for a web development team but if I can get them thinking then I've done my job. Let's see what happens.
The problems should lead to better problem solving which should mitigate the second problem, the inability to fit time into their schedules. Our team is composed almost entirely of high schoolers and undergrads and with exams around almost every corner, finding time is difficult. But I'm hoping if I can help them think a little bit they can learn to make ends meet. Not to say they can't "think", just that they need to broaden their perspective MORE. I had the same problem last year with my petition, when I refused to use proprietary services to spread the word. Smart in theory because it is about privacy rights, but in practice it won't work.
That's also partially why I came back to this blog. This entire site is a reflection of my inner minimalism and desire to have the lightest online footprint possible. I've started pruning my old unnecessary accounts from my experimentation phase like Figma, Locofy, or Liberapay. None of those are necessary for my startup now and I understand what I need to keep things moving smoothly.
In the meantime, my tutoring initiative started to take off. CodeAbode's site was updated just today and we have about 15+ leads on our first paying customer. Still a bit sluggish, but the library classes helped a lot. Now that I constructed a team for CodeAbode as well, things should move smoothly.
I've learned a lot about team management. It is really hard, and I have a pile of books on psychology and remote work on my desk. But with practice comes experience and it can only help me in the long run.
The last thing I need to kick into full gear would be my research work at AIOS. Since it's just me working on the current paper, things feel reallly sluggish and progress feels slow. However, once I force myself to move along a little bit things should get much better.
I also want to say that now I will repurpose this blog. I don't expect anyone to find any useful information on here now, instead it will just consist of a random bunch of my thoughts. I am curious as to who's gonna look at this blog, so I might put Google Analytics on here in the future. If you truly love FOSS like I do, you'll have an adblocker and probably be reading through w3m.
Tags: reflection