niklas-e

Syntax highlighting in less

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 12:00:00 +0000

If you have had to read text based files in Linux environment, you most likely have stumbled upon a tool called less. It’s very powerful tool, but I quite often wish there’d some level of syntax highlighting when viewing e.g. shell scripts or something similar.

Today I decided to research the topic a bit and found out it is indeed possible to use different styles with less. The most feasible option for me was to use external tool called pygmentize. It is a generic syntax highlighter created with Python.

Here’s how I made less to use syntax highlighting offered by pygmentize always when I use less.

Install pygmentize by running sudo apt install python3-pygments
Select your favorite theme from the built-in themes (you could also download or create your own). For this post I’ll use my favorite: one-dark
Add export LESSOPEN="|pygmentize -P style=one-dark -g %s and export LESS="-R" to your shell profile file (e.g. for bash: ~/.bashrc)
To use in your current shell session, remember to run source <shell profile file>, for example on bash source ~/.bashrc - instead of this you could also just restart your terminal
Open a file with less - it should have syntax highlighting now!

Your browser does not support the video tag.

After finding out it is this simple, I wish I had searched for this much earlier since this is a really good improvement 😅

Thanks for reading and enjoy your more colorful less!

Satoshi Nakamoto potentially solved the crypto trilemma

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 16:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: At the time of writing this piece Satoshi Nakamoto is officially an unknown entity, but there has been quite a few speculations about the identity behind the pseudonym. Might be a single person, might be a group of people.

In this post, we delve into the intriguing possibility that Yonatan Sompolinsky, a pioneer in the field of cryptocurrency, might be Satoshi Nakamoto. We explore how his work, particularly on improving the Nakamoto consensus and creating new protocols, has the potential to address the long-standing challenge of the crypto trilemma. Without further ado, let’s examine the evidence and see if Yonatan could be the person behind the pseudonym that revolutionized digital currency.

1. Timing

Satoshi disappeared from Bitcoin Talk forum, on December 2010. Bitcoin Talk was the main social space for Bitcoin at the time.
Yonatan joined Twitter on December 2010.

Is it possible that Satoshi believed it would be in Bitcoin’s best interest for people not to associate him with it, prompting him to abandon his pseudonym? Perhaps, after leaving the forum, he chose to embrace his true identity and join the world of social media on the then-emerging platform, Twitter, to continue his work in the field. This shift in his online presence could have been a strategic decision to maintain a low profile while still contributing to the cryptocurrency community.

2. Crypto pioneer

Yonatan was there at the cryptos inception. He also authored GHOST protocol with Aviv Zohar on 2013, which later was referenced by Vitalik Buterin in Ethereum whitepaper. Because GHOST was published only four years after Bitcoin’s birth, I’d think Yonatan had to be working on the same concepts when Bitcoin was born.

3. Nakamoto consensus

The Nakamoto consensus is the underlying mechanism used by Bitcoin to maintain agreement among participants in the network. It relies on a process called Proof of Work, where miners compete to solve complex mathematical problems, ensuring the security and integrity of the blockchain. In order to improve the Nakamoto consensus in such a way as Yonatan has done, you must have a deep understanding of the consensus mechanism and its intricacies. Yonatan’s expertise in this area is so extensive that one might wonder if he was at least partly involved in creating the original consensus.

At this point I have to give first mention to Kaspa for this to make more sense. Kaspa is a cryptocurrency (layer 1) released in November 2021. Its current protocol, PHANTOM GHOSTDAG, is a scalable generalization of Nakamoto consensus. Next up in relatively near future of Kaspa the DAG KNIGHT protocol will be adopted. Both of these protocols have their roots in the Bitcoin whitepaper and the GHOST protocol, which Yonatan co-authored.

I’d say these are not trivial academic research papers, but see for yourself.

2013 GHOST: https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf
2016 SPECTRE: https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf
2018 PHANTOM: https://eprint.iacr.org/archive/2018/104/1517346667.pdf
2021 PHANTOM GHOSTDAG: https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/104.pdf
2022 DAG KNIGHT: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1494.pdf (released exactly 14 years (to the day) after Bitcoin)

So what if Yonatan’s contributions to crypto industry starts with Bitcoin and then continues with iterative improvements on Nakamoto consensus over the following years reaching its full potential in DAG KNIGHT protocol? Wouldn’t it make sense for Satoshi to keep on working on the issues of the initial version? Could it be we should add 2008 Nakamoto consensus to the list above?

4. Pseudonym from an anagram

This might feel a bit far fetched, but it’s not rare to create a pseudonym with help of an anagram. So what would be the anagram in this case?

Yonatan Sompolinsky -> Onny Satosi Nakamoto

So Yonatan is from Israel and they speak Hebrew in there. If you pronounce ‘Onny’ in English it will sound like אני in Hebrew. אני means ‘I am’ in hebrew. Try with e.g. Google Translator: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=iw&text=I%20am&op=translate

5. Birthday

Yonatan’s birthday is the same as Satoshi (April 5th) had in their profile on e.g. P2P Foundation forum (one of the first places where Bitcoin was announced).

However it’s good to note the leading theory for Satoshi’s birthday. April 5th is a very significant date in U.S. monetary history. It is the date of Executive Order 6102 by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Private ownership or “hoarding” of gold coin, bullion and certificates were outlawed by the order. Only small amounts (valued under $100) were allowed, for use in industrial trades, or a few other exceptions. Americans were also required to cede any significant amount of gold to the Federal Reserve in exchange for dollars. Roosevelt then devalued those dollars to make it easier to repay the huge debt that had built up during the Great Depression.

Why would Satoshi pick that date from monetary history? It’s known Satoshi was concerned about the power of individuals to preserve their wealth and keep it safe from state intervention.

6. Personality

Yonatan’s personality fits with Satoshi

Yonatan is a humble human being and overall very likeable in interviews. He seems to not want to be in the spotlight, even though he has done a lot of groundbreaking work…

…just like Satoshi who hid behind the pseudonym.

7. The crypto trilemma

The crypto trilemma is a concept that addresses the challenges faced by decentralized digital currencies, such as Bitcoin. At its core, the trilemma highlights the difficulty of simultaneously achieving three essential properties for a blockchain-based system: decentralization, security, and scalability. In simple terms, it’s challenging to design a cryptocurrency that is fully decentralized, highly secure, and can efficiently handle a large number of transactions without compromising any of these key aspects.

Very plausible solution for the crypto trilemma has already been published, as you probably realised while reading that DAG KNIGHT publication above. Yep, it indeed could be a way to address the trilemma and therefore it is really groundbreaking. Many have spent countless hours on finding a way to overcome the trilemma and Yonatan Sompolinsky and Michael Sutton are the first ones to propose a complete solution backed up by academic research.

8. Miscellaneous

Yonatan: “I am not taking it lightly to build another coin” during an interview section related to Bitcoin LunarCrush Live with Kaspa! at 20:38
- Could have been just a reference to oversaturated industry or maybe a slip of tongue because he had built a coin before (Bitcoin)
Yonatan replies to a couple of tweets pointed/related to Satoshi he wasn’t mentioned in
- Thank you Satoshi
- Satoshi has been dead for many years
Kaspa has a hebrew message in its genesis (first-ever) block mentioning Silver and Gold, which is quite clear reference to Kaspa and Bitcoin.
- In case you didn’t know, Bitcoin is referred as digital gold and Kaspa means literally silver in Ancient Aramaic
Oh by the way, did you notice it from the Twitter screenshot? He had “a real imposter” in his bio. Indeed, Satoshi Nakamoto is one of the best imposters of the century.

Okay, maybe that is enough. I know it is just speculation and it might be time to tighten up the tinfoil hat, but it’s still fun once in a while to play the guessing game.

Conclusion

While we may never know for certain if Yonatan Sompolinsky is the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto, the evidence presented in this article provides a compelling case for considering him as a strong candidate. His deep understanding of the Nakamoto consensus, his continuous contributions to the field, and his work on groundbreaking protocols all point to someone who has the knowledge and drive to tackle the crypto trilemma.

The DAG KNIGHT protocol, in particular, stands out as a potential solution to the long-standing challenge of achieving decentralization, security, and scalability simultaneously. If Yonatan is indeed Satoshi, it would make sense for him to continue refining and improving upon the initial concepts introduced with Bitcoin, working tirelessly to overcome the limitations of the original design.

Regardless of whether Yonatan is Satoshi Nakamoto or not, his work has undeniably played a significant role in advancing the field of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. His efforts to address the crypto trilemma have the potential to shape the future of digital currencies and pave the way for a new era of secure, decentralized, and scalable financial systems.

Thank you for reading and leave a comment on what you think!

This post was very much inspired by a Twitter thread from @crypto_nic47

Help! I forgot my WSL password

Mon, 19 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Ok, I’m pretty sure I am not the only one who has set up their WSL (Windows Subsystem Linux) password and thought something like “yeah, I’ll surely remember this, it’s so simple and easy to remember”. Just to notice a couple weeks later you indeed forgot the password, because you didn’t use it actively. Also maybe because it was so easy (and at the same time different from other passwords?). Before judging me completely, I have to say that I do use credentials manager to keep my credentials in a good place. Then again, there’s times when you just think “meh, I don’t need to save this, it’s so simple” or simply forget to save it. Okay, okay, enough of rambling; let’s get to the point 😅

Notice! There’s also short video guides at the end of the post

Changing your WSL password for default distribution (or when you only have one distribution installed)

Open Command Prompt (Hit Windows key on your keyboard and type in cmd) - following steps are executed in the Command Prompt
Run wsl whoami to get your WSL username
Run wsl --user root
Run passwd <your-username> and enter a new password for your user
Run logout or hit Ctrl+D (will log out as root)
Now your password has been changed

In case you have multiple WSL distros installed

Open Command Prompt (Hit Windows key on your keyboard and type in cmd and launch Command Prompt by hitting Enter) - following steps are executed in the Command Prompt
Run wsl --list to get your WSL distribution name - the list shows distribution names in Ubuntu-22.04 format, but for the next steps you have to transform it into e.g. ubuntu2204 (replace <your-distro-name> with this)
Run <your-distro-name> run whoami to get your WSL username
Run <your-distro-name> run --user root
Run passwd <your-username> and enter a new password for your user
Run logout or hit Ctrl+D (will log out as root)
Now your password has been changed

And here’s a recap in form of short videos

Reset sudo password in WSL:

Reset sudo password in WSL when you have multiple Linux distributions installed:

Why my Bash script ran in yarn/npm is throwing errors?

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 11:30:00 +0000

I’ve encountered this error a few times in different projects. Unfortunately I usually tend to forget why this is happening, because it’s not such frequent error. Now I decided to write it down, at least as a note for myself. Hopefully it helps someone else too!

Without further ado, when running a script via yarn, I get something like this:

./scripts/my-script.sh: 24: [[: not found

But when running in my terminal, the error does not occur. Pretty peculiar indeed. This is usually due to yarn script defined as "domagic": "sh ./scripts/my-script.sh". What that does is, it is forcing the script to be run with sh interpreter. Since I’m using Linux Mint, this means it will be ran in Dash (Debian Almquist Shell) instead of Bash, even though the script file has a shebang #!/bin/bash. So what is Dash and why it is set as a default shell in Linux Mint? Here’s a writing in ubuntu wiki which also applies to Linux Mint, because it uses ubuntu as a base.

How can I see what shell my Linux distro is using? It’s rather easy with readlink and which. readlink is used to read symbolic links and which locates a command, thus by running readlink $(which sh) you’ll get the interpreter used for sh. For me it outputs dash.

Due diligence: Beaxy

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 13:30:00 +0000

This article has been updated after the initial publication. The edit notes are at the end of the article.

Hello there, you most likely don’t know me. That’s already a great reason to do your own research, but hear me out. You might get some insight on US based cryptocurrency exchange called Beaxy Exchange and its utility token Beaxy (BXY). I also wanted to do a write-up of this because some of my friends have been asking about cryptocurrencies and my take on it. Which is not too surprising given the ongoing bull market. I think the cryptocurrencies are going to be a big thing, bigger than they are now. However it’s pretty difficult to place your bets on the best projects, although at this point BTC and ETH are quite solid options. But the thing is, if cryptocurrencies are going to go on, where will the markets be? Yep, (cryptocurrency) exchanges. What if there would be a potential exchange which is built for retail and institutional level of trading and it is possible to get a percentual slice of their revenue? And to add to that, it’s relatively cheap to secure your position currently. This could be Beaxy Exchange - if that sounds good, keep on reading.

Before going into details I want to point out that the beef of this all is the utility token BXY. I’ll just go through the highlights of Beaxy Exchange to give you a better understanding what it is about. Please note everything is based on public information which can be rather limited from time to time when dealing with private companies. Anyhow, here it is, my due diligence or a research of Beaxy.

Founding

Beaxy Exchange was founded in 2017. They had planned a 24 month development phase before the initial launch. I didn’t find good sources for total funding and backers, but it looks like by the launch in 2019 they had secured around $8 million in funding. That could be via ICO (Initial Coin Offering) of Beaxy Token held in 2019, which resulted in pretty much the same amount in total.

Beginning, Beaxy 1.0

When Beaxy was first released it was built on huge hype as The Binance Killer. There were tens of thousands preregistered accounts before the actual release date in 2019. After all, the exchange was going to go live in 43 states in the U.S. and 185 countries.

After the initial launch in 2019 the exchange struggled with multiple issues, mainly due to a lack of experience from the management. For example their strategy with market making - they trusted the hype will bring enough people who build the markets, but unfortunately that’s not how it works. You have to be more organized and ensure there will be liquidity through market making. Due to this and other issues, there were discussions about Beaxy’s solvency.

As things started to look bad, Artak Hamazaspyan the CEO of Beaxy disappeared from publicity, missing some PR events and such. There was a period of few weeks not hearing anything about him. Meanwhile the exchange trading volume and BXY token price plummeted. Token price fell more than 50% in a week - and much more later on.

Rebrand, Beaxy 2.0

Shortly after the events described above, ownership changed. There was a very large independent investor who took over Beaxy from the previous management team. The ownership moved from Beaxy Digital Ltd to Windy Inc. Primarily this meant the management was replaced.

They announced version 2.0 and the initial goal was to address the missteps made earlier. Including these highlighted features:

Improved UI and brand design
Enhanced back-end technology
Easy-to-use mobile applications
Healthy order books and a usable exchange design

> Read more

Basics

Here’s some notable things about the exchange

Beaxy Exchange is FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) Registered Money Services Business
Based in Chicago and they are offering crypto trading to Americans who have been shut off from major exchanges like Binance and Kucoin (because of regulations)
Built for institutional level of activity
Next level transparency by integrating to Dragonchain (soon completed in production). Every single pending, rejected, filled, replaced, expired, suspended, canceled, and executed order will be recorded on chain
Safety via Curv - This custody service is the same used by top financial institutions around the world
Free and easy to use AI-powered technical analysis signals (provided by Autochartist, a third-party who are experts in the field, unaffiliated with Beaxy)
Innovative and unique mobile app feature Trender, which is basically Tinder for trading. It is built on the aforementioned signals and makes them even easier to use, if possible.
Soon to be released wide support for fiat: USD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CAD and AUD

Integrations

In addition to basic trading functionalities they are working on integrating trading bots. In practice this means robust APIs, which could be used for other purposes too. Bots are mainly used by advanced traders and institutions. I think these are integral part of increasing and maintaining trading volume and healthy liquidity. This far they have announced they will support Gunbot, Hummingbot and Autonio. The integrations are in the state of polishing; almost ready for production use.

The aforementioned APIs are regular web APIs - basically REST and websockets. In addition to those, they have announced an integration with MetaTrader 5 (MT5) forex platform. This integration will not be using the regular APIs, but instead a FIX (Financial Information eXchange) API. FIX is a protocol which enables low latency communication and is used widely for example in NASDAQ. As Cooper, Beaxy’s Head of Customer Service, described in the latest AMA in terms of internet connections “REST and websocket APIs are like your cable connection and the FIX API is the trunk line your ISP is using to connect to the larger system”. Anyhow, the integration will be quite exciting businesswise, because Beaxy will be the only cryptocurrency exchange integrated into MetaTrader platform. This will give pretty nice exposure to Beaxy and helps in bringing trading volume to the exchange.

Beaxy Black

Beaxy Black is the VIP program for traders to incentivize trading via perks. Most notable perks are the rewards. You can receive up to 30% back from your trading fees and in addition based on your leaderboard position you can receive BXY.

So basically you could think those rewards as lowered trading fees.

Beaxy Token (BXY)

Basics

Max total supply 500 million tokens
Estimated circulating supply 100-200 million (locked up tokens held by employees, the treasury, etc. are not counted)
- Unfortunately cannot find public announcement or post about this, but this has been commented somewhere by the team. They’ve also said they are not planning to release all of the 500 million tokens (for example because of the burns)
Lowered trading fees
- based on your trading volume and/or how much you have BXY in your balance
- if you enable “Pay with BXY” feature - your trading fees will be paid with BXY at lowered rate
- Read more about fee structure
Possible circular economy: people buy BXY -> people pay trading fees with BXY -> used tokens end up back to market after Beaxy sells them
- Though some of the used BXY will most likely end up as rewards for Sapphire tier (more info below)

The new team (Beaxy 2.0) has also expressed desire to lower the token supply. One of the programs related to this was called Beaxy Blaze, where they will burn 250,000 BXY tokens when average daily volume surpasses 2.5 million USD across the exchange. However, unfortunately, this program was cancelled because of too low volume.

Loyalty program (STK)

So in addition to lowered trading fees you can join the loyalty program by staking (locking up) your BXY. Why would you do that? Well, now we are getting to the main part of this whole write-up. Because the Diamond Tier is epic. But before jumping into that, let’s take a look at Sapphire Tier.

Sapphire tier (released) - you can stake 30,000 - 999,999 BXY and gain 1-12% annual interest rate, based on the time you are staking (1-12 months). Related to this, few days ago they tweeted “63,671,142 $BXY tokens are locked in STK, with 49,875,838 locked for 12 months”

Diamond tier (coming soon) - when you stake 1,000,000 BXY or more you will gain a percentual slice from their revenue. Holy crap! They will pool up 7% of their revenue from trade fees and distribute that between the members of Diamond tier. Daily. There is pretty much always an amazing potential if you have a chance to get percentual slice of revenue; when the revenue grows, so does your slice.

Ok let’s do some math here. Please keep in mind this is completely theoretical… Let’s say you’ll get to the diamond club by accumulating exactly one million BXY. For simplicity’s sake let’s use average trading volume of 10,000,000 and average trading fee percentage of 0.15. This would yield a daily rewards pool of $1050. I’ll add couple of scenarios here based on the aforementioned values. Obviously all of this is just guessing and throwing in rough estimates. I’m not quite sure what would be a realistic amount of staked tokens in Diamond tier, but it’s pretty safe to say there will not be over 200 million (which is already way too high to be realistic in my opinion).

Total stake in Diamond tier	Avg. daily volume	Your BXY stake	Your daily slice
100m BXY	$10m	1,000,000	$10.5
75m BXY	$10m	1,000,000	$14
50m BXY	$10m	1,000,000	$21
25m BXY	$10m	1,000,000	$42

Here’s an official writing about the loyalty programs: https://beaxy.com/blog/revolutionizing-crypto-loyalties-and-rewards-the-stk-standard/

note that holding the tokens is not same as holding shares of the company. You will not get any slice of the actual company.

Growing userbase

Growing the userbase is of course a crucial part to get things rolling. Especially attracting active traders. They’ve of course been working on their SEO and overall marketing and they’ve discussed it in their AMA sessions and other channels. From the things mentioned before, trading incentives and bot integrations are a good way to lure new traders.

Beaxy also has a very nice referral program to help to grow their userbase. You will receive 30% of trading commissions from your referrals. For lifetime. I think that is rather lucrative deal to get your friends and acquaintances on board. So without further ado, only for you my friend - here’s my Beaxy referral link ;)

Summary and takeaways

There’s a lot of stuff coming up from the exchange. For example the transparency through the Dragonchain integration - Beaxy will be the most transparent financial service in the world, it will bring nice publicity. I’m also looking forward to bot integrations and more details about the forex integration. These will be a good base for consistent trade volume and new traders. I guess I have to add, because some people think bots are evil and magical money making machines, but the reality is they are just tools of human traders. If you don’t know how to trade, you shouldn’t use bots - also bots are not something to frown upon. Oh, almost forgot to highlight all the mentioned trading incentives, which will be really nice combined with the bots.

Beaxy is following regulations and acting upon them (FinCEN registered company), which is a good thing in my opinion, because this industry will be more regulated. Some people have been surprised by this and were crying about it when they got caught on e.g. market manipulation. Also, there will not be additional expenses and development time when the regulations kick in. They are ahead on this.

The price of the token has been pushed down heavily by the negativity gained through the initial launch and negligible trading volume. Even if comparing to other utility tokens is not wise and realistic it could give some guidelines on what’s possible. Here’s comparison to the leaders:

Beaxy Token (BXY), total max supply 500 million, current price $0.012 (Exchange launched in 2019, current ADV $0.1-0.2 million)
Binance Coin (BNB), total max supply around 170 million, current price $130 (Exchange launched in 2017, current ADV $27 billion)
Huobi Token (HT), total max supply 500 million, current price $12.9 (Exchange launched in 2013, current ADV $8 billion)
KuCoin Token (KCS), total max supply around 170 million, current price $2.7 (Exchange launched in 2017, current ADV $800 million)

Before you get too excited of this hidden gem, I have to say this is a HIGH RISK investment. Do not ever invest more than you are willing to lose. Yes, you probably have heard that before, but this really is HIGH RISK. We can take a look at the people who invested in the ICO of Beaxy Token with price being $0.041 - when Beaxy hit the bottom, it was $0.00152 - a whopping -96.3% decrease…

…but then again things look quite promising from here. Most of the startups (all industries) fail during the first year, Beaxy has been around longer. Development is consistent, new features and partnerships have been coming in. They have also mentioned the success of the exchange is not dependent on the token price, which is quite obvious at this point, but important to note they have enough funding and cash flow. Also I think the trading volume will increase and be much more consistent when the bot integrations are completed. By the way, the highest peaks of ADV during this year have been $17-21 million (?).

In case you are interested in hopping on Beaxy, please consider using my referral link: https://click.beaxy.com/goto/track/?affiliateid=15505. Yeah, referral links are still there and I think it’s a great way to grow the userbase. If you do plan to get BXY and hold, remember that you can help its success by participating in trading on the exchange. Trading volume is the most important indicator of exchange’s success. Even if the success of the exchange is not dependent on token price, the token price is dependent on the success of the exchange.

At this point you probably know I’m bullish about this exchange and the utility token. As a user I know everything is not perfect, but they are working hard and doing the right things. What’s your thoughts, did I miss something or is there flaws in this writing? I’d like to hear.

Disclaimer if you are going to trade on low volume markets:

Some people have tried using stop loss and OUO for risk management on low volume markets. This is something you should consider twice before using in low volume markets. They can be triggered when market makers are reorganizing their orders because there might not be other resting orders in the books on expected levels.

Edit notes

2021-03-22
- Added more information on MetaTrader 5 integration
- Added “Growing userbase” section
- Added a disclaimer regarding low volume markets

Climbing, my hobby

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 16:30:00 +0000

Many have asked me why did you start climbing, isn’t it a bit too extreme? Yes and no. It can be very dangerous, especially if you are careless. Before delving into that, I’ll tell you a little bit of my background.

I have been aware and paid attention to my health and fitness pretty much always. However I’ve never found a fitting hobby which truly motivates me and makes me want to exercise beyond the point of maintaining (and maybe improving) my overall condition. In addition to being in shape physically, I’ve been interested in mental wellbeing and maintaining it. Yes, you may argue they’re intertwined, but I think it is not that simple. Anyhow, this is the baseline. I might briefly add that one of the things which intrigue me is problem solving, which is also one of my strengths.

So how does these things relate to climbing? I pondered how to put it in words, but then came to realisation - that is climbing, literally. It is all about physical fitness, mentality and problem solving. First one is rather obvious, physicality is needed for pulling, moving and twisting your body. Generally speaking, while it mainly targets upper body muscles, you still get a full body workout out of it and flexibility is an advantage, so stretching is encouraged. Mental side is not just about dealing with heights, but also committing to the moves you are going to execute - “will my hands be wrecked if I fail; or will I tumble down?” Also a great thing on this side is that you basically have to focus your thoughts on what you are doing, thus it forces you to shift out of whatever your mind would be occupied with otherwise. What about problem solving? Well, it’s not always straightforward to get to the top of the route. Often you’ll have to pause to think “and how I’m supposed to move from here to there?” In fact that’s something you have to do quite much with a little bit harder routes.

To add to the problem solving part. I mainly do bouldering, which is a subgenre of climbing. It is climbing without a rope and harness - or any other equipment. Commonly the height of a boulder is around 5-7 meters and at the bottom you have pads where you can fall. Well, anyways, what I wanted to add is that actually in bouldering you don’t call “the routes” routes, but Boulder Problems. Often they are more difficult to figure out and top than the routes where the length of the route is a major factor.

All of that would be enough for me to keep myself motivated, but there’s more! I do like games a lot and sure enough I find a relation between climbing and gaming. There is a level/experience system built in to climbing! All of the routes and problems are graded by difficulty, which means the higher the grade, the more experience is required. How neat is that? You can see your progress without even tracking it and you can level up. Now you’d think that’s all. But nope. In addition to all of this, I very much like being in nature and where else you’d do outdoors climbing - yep, exactly. I guess I have to mention though, most of the time I spend climbing, it’s in indoors gyms; partially because of the weather conditions in Finland.

Getting back to where we started, yes, you’ll most likely eventually get some level of injuries. Although if you are even somewhat careful on what you are doing, you can probably avoid major injuries. Minor damage is inevitable, such as torn skin (fingers) and small bruises. Maybe even mild wrist sprain or something similar, but that’s usually due to lack of proper technique.

As of writing this, I have had climbing as a hobby for one and a half years. Therefore it’s relatively new thing for me, but as you can tell by reading this post, I will most definitely continue climbing for years to come. For you, I recommend to try it if you haven’t already :)

Becoming a Youtube content creator

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 16:30:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to create content for quite some time. Not only as blog writings, but videos too. In other words today that would mean Youtube. Well, to be honest, I have actually created some content earlier for my homebrewery stuff. However what I mean is I want to create more techy videos. Something more related to my long-term passion. Though I’m pretty sure pure tech stuff wouldn’t gather too much audience so I’ve been thinking of mixing entertainment and “internet culture” into the content. You might be wondering whether that’s in line what I said about passion. Yes, it is, I don’t think it will cause distractions on the end-goals. Also I think it’s better to reach wider audience to expose the topics to more people. Especially because I don’t see any downside in doing so.

Now I can say pieces are falling into place. I did some research and decided on a low-budget Youtube studio setup. I even purchased the initial stuff, including lighting and a rig for all the equipment. Luckily I already own a camera, thanks to my photography hobby. Otherwise the budget would be a tad higher. Now you might wonder what’s holding me back. The answer is rather simple - nothing. I already completed and published couple of videos.

This far it has been very interesting journey. I have already learned tons of things, such as lighting, audio, editing, overall video shooting, etc… One of the most important things for me, initially, is to improve my presentation skills. I’ve never been much into keeping presentations and that is primarily the reason I’ve never paid much attention to those skills. Now I see it more problematic, because I need to keep all kinds of presentations (not public though). This is mostly due to my current work role as a software architect and consultant. And let’s be honest, presentation skills are really good and important thing in life… Anyhow, that being said - you probably have guessed the first videos were quite difficult for me in terms of presenting. You are absolutely right, the first couple tries of shooting I actually just discarded the material. Too awkward stuff. Finally I managed to shoot good enough material, though I had to spend quite much time on editing and cutting. I’d call the end result and editing method “brute force cutting”. The end result wasn’t even close to my vision. But hey, I had to start from somewhere and I thought it’s better to get more practice later on rather than polishing the first video for months. I guess at this point I cannot skip sharing the video - here it is: Which one is BEST for $$$? - Bitcoin vs Ethereum

The process of making the first videos has made me respect even more the pro youtubers. It takes so much time, skill and creativity to create a high quality video which is just 5-10 minutes long. Not to mention the longer ones. Though I’m pretty sure the biggest youtubers have people working for them, but there’s still bunch of youtubers who create quality content by themselves. Hats off.

Here’s my Youtube channel: niklas-e on Youtube - check it out and subscribe! :)

Setting up this blog

Sat, 05 Dec 2020 10:00:00 +0000

I had thought of setting up a blog where I could share things I encounter at work and in my home projects. And while I’d be at that, why not share all other interesting stuff and insights. There were just these common problems like finding the time to think about it and making the initial content. Also what platform and so on…

One day I noticed a post in Reddit and thought I’ll give a short answer. After scribbling for a while I noticed the short answer had grown to a little more. When I hit the send button I thought, well, that is already good enough for a short blog post. Sure enough, a little bit later I had this blog up and running. I decided it’s better to just set it up and see if I’ll get any writings done or not. I could certainly say at this point, I won’t get them done by waiting for the right time - it has been several years since the first time I thought about setting up a blog.

So, time to get sh*t done! I wanted something super simple, no tricky platform setup and ideally markdown based content. By quick searching I was already checking prerequisites for Jekyll and GitHub Pages. I had pretty much all in place, because I’m using GH and I’ve done bunch of web dev stuff on my Linux Mint machine.

Here’s the workflow:

Check and install missing prerequisites from Jekyll docs
Create a new site with Jekyll command jekyll new niklas-e.github.io
Download and extract a cool theme from one of the sites listed in Jekyll resources
Copy the theme into the Jekyll site folder created in step #2
Tweak the site configuration file in the folder
Create a GH repository with name niklas-e.github.io and commit & push the site into that repo

Now I had the platform setup up and running at https://niklas-e.github.io - great!

Everything was falling into place and only missing thing was the content. Thus I wrote a short intro on the frontpage and my first blog post based on that Reddit answer. I was pretty happy at this point, this setup didn’t take much of my time and the writing process was just as simple as I wanted.

Though one thing bugged me, and you might guess what it was. It just didn’t feel as personal as it should with that out-of-the-box GH pages URL. Therefore I configured a custom domain for my blog, which was actually delightfully easy to do and did not require any paid plan to do so.

Have you thought about setting up a blog; or have you already done it and have you enjoyed it?

From software developer to a software architect

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 17:30:00 +0000

I stumbled upon a Reddit post in /r/softwarearchitecture asking for insight on moving from being a software engineer to a software architect. “What would you consider to be the essential things to become a software architect?”. My intention was to answer with short bulleted list, but then it escalated. This post is based on my answer on Reddit.

tldr; being able and know how to work on the big picture, and doing so by collaborating with other people (business and tech). Ideally based on experience.

I’ve worked as a hands-on software architect for a few years. Used to work as a full stack developer who was often involved in architectural stuff. Total experience around 10 years.

Another side question was about building a good app which is scalable and efficient. But in the end that is just the culmination of you knowing your stuff. Also it is dependent on so many things that it’s not answerable as is. So here’s a more general level answer of becoming a software architect. Few things I think are essential and appreciated traits in a software architect. Not so surprisingly, this is based on my experience.

Experience. This is of course individual as people are different. But I’d say it would be good to have 5-8 years of experience working with variety of projects. You should know how tech things work in real life and also in general know how businesses work. After all you’ll usually be the piece between tech and business.
Versatility. You should be able to work on all aspects of the system and its dependencies. Note, this does not mean you should already know everything about everything. Just being able to handle the big picture and work with it. This includes different techs and architectural patterns.
Collaboration. You should be good at working with others. Business and tech. Otherwise it’s likely your plans and designs fall short.
Passion to learn new things. Not to say you should jump into new flashy stuff all the time, but you should be aware what could be possible. This way you can be better at choosing the right tools for your scenario. This is not just for architects, but often they are the ones who have to make final decision and the base & plan.

Those are the first things I thought of. In my opinion the most essential is experience. Other things often grow on you while gaining that experience. If you want to specifically try to learn something, you probably should study architectural designs and patterns. It’s also a good thing if you know your coding stuff and can justify things you do on that level too. One thing which has helped me a lot is to always ask why I’m doing something.

Here’s a few books to read if you’re into that kind of stuff:

A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout
Clean Architecture: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design by Robert C. Martin
Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans

You should also note that some of the books are a little bit older and might include practices which are considered deprecated at present. Though, in my opinion, you should always process and think about the statements and content, whatever the book or data source is. No matter is it old or fresh.

What are your thoughts on this matter?

...ja hommahan eskaloitui

Tue, 26 Feb 2019 17:30:00 +0000

Tämä kirjoitus on alunperin julkaistu digilouhija.fi blogissa, josta siirsin sen tähän henkilökohtaiseen blogiini.

Vähään aikaan en ole kirjoitellut tänne, mutta se ei suinkaan tarkoita sitä, että olisin jättänyt nämä asiat taakseni. Melkeinpä päinvastoin. Paljon on tapahtunut. Näin ollen kirjoitan pienen yhteenvedon, jonka jälkeen (toivottavasti) voin palata jatkamaan siitä mihin edellinen kirjoitus jäi.

Louhintaa kotosalla

Mobiililouhinnasta päätin tosiaan jatkaa oikean louhinnan pariin. Lähdin tutkimaan minkälaisella kokoonpanolla voisin testailla mahdollisimman monipuolisesti eri kryptovaluuttoja. Päädyin hankkimaan komponentit, joilla sain kasattua louhijan. Päävarusteena oli kolme näytönohjainta. Haastavin osuus oli hankkia sopiva kotelo, koska perustietokoneisiin ei yleensä mahdu kolme näytönohjainta. Myös lämpötilat saattaisivat nousta turhan paljon. Mikä ratkaisuksi? No, kyhäilin telineen, johon sain komponentit aseteltua.

Ensimmäinen versio kryptolouhijasta

Tuohon aikaan piti tietenkin päättää, mitä kryptovaluuttaa lähden louhimaan. Valitsin ensimmäiseksi Ethereumin, jonka jälkeen kokeilin myös louhia samanaikaisesti PascalCoinia. Myöhemmin siirryin kokeilemaan SmartCash, Pirl ja SagaCoin nimisiä kolikoita. Halusin poimia hieman menestyneempiä sekä niitä, joissa vaikutti olevan potentiaalia kasvaa isoksi.

Pikkuhiljaa ostin lisää näytönohjaimia laajentaakseni louhijaa. Ensin nostin määrän kuuteen, yhdeksään ja lopulta kahteentoista. Kuuden näyttiksen jälkeen pitikin suunnitella ja rakentaa isompi teline/kotelo. Melko isohan tuosta tuli, kun tarkoitus oli saada mahtumaan 12 näytönohjainta ja tietenkin muut koneen komponentit.

Kryptovaluuttalouhijan toinen tuleminen - kotelo

Kryptovaluuttalouhija versio 2 - näytönohjaimien mallailua

Lisäaiheita kirjoituksiin?

Päätin myös lähteä seuraamaan yhtä näistä projekteista tarkemmalla tasolla. Valitsin tähän tarkoitukseen nuorimman, mutta lupaavan projektin. Tarkoituksena oli seurata miten kryptoprojekti kasvaa ja kehittyy alkuvaiheista sekä kirjoittaa siitä tänne. Seuraamisen ohella osallistuin keskusteluihin ja pikkuhiljaa intouduin itselle ominaiseen tapaan antamaan panokseni kehitystöiden saralla. Aluksi tein pieniä parannuksia ja yhtenäistin webbilompakon ulkoasua projektin brändiin sopivammaksi. Sen jälkeen nappasin yhteisön ehdottaman idean reaaliaikaisesta näkymästä tämän kryptovaluutan rahapolitiikkaan. Tästähän seurasi lisää keskustelua tiimin kanssa ja päädyin osallistumaan projektin nettisivujen kehittämiseen. Tässä samalla kuitenkin aloimme pohtia, josko liittyisin tiimiin virallisesti, koska selvästikin pystyisin auttamaan asioiden edistämisessä. Näin ollen tovin kuluttua päädyin osallistumaan Pirl –projektin tiimiin sovelluskehittäjänä.

Linkkejä yllä mainittuihin palveluihin: