dejv

During my 15 years as a freelancer I've tried many things: coworking, working from coffee shops, libraries, private office, sharing office with one another freelancer and working from home (both corner in bedroom and dedicated home office).

Coworking for me is the worst from both private world (home office or private office) and public world (like coffee shop. In coworking I am easily distracted by people walking around and am not really comfortable just talking myself loud or pacing around. Something I really like to do when designing new systems or trying to debug some complicated case.

Everybody is different, but for me and my line of work I like to work in my dedicated home office and then, maybe once a week, go out to my local coffee shop for a hour where I do planning, reading or some admin work. When I have to do a lot of thinking/planning I usually take a tram to downtown area and just spend day walking and visiting various coffee shops.

I am sure it is not for everybody and there is very little social time during my days, but I have enough social time outside of work.

True. It is called priming: your mind is preparing itself for something special and it makes you enjoying the thing more.

Each kid is different, you might just get lucky. Our first born was heavy cryer till her sixth month, then she was sleeping nicely. Second did sleep very well till 6th month, then teething started and he is just crazy.

I was born in wine making region and basically everybody there have/had small vineyard and winery. I was living abroad at that time and was visiting familly over Christmas. As it goes we went to cellar of my uncle and then second and third and I got a "bit" drunk when they started talking about some land that one of their friend is going to sell as he is too old to continue working on it. It sounded like amazing idea so I told them that I am going to buy it.

Next day was a bit of a blur and then I went back to SE Asia where I was living at that time. In about two or three months later I've got message "So we finalized papers, you still want to buy that land, right?" It took me a while to understand about what he was talking about, but I was actually ready to get back home after 5 years of traveling around and I was burned out of startups and projects that went nowhere.

I was thinking about making it my only source of income, but after two years I realised that if I want to make it I will have to work minimum wage job for quite a few years and I decided to get back to programming instead. I decided to scale down my ambition and I am having semi-pro winery at the moment. I work there for one or two days a week, wines are successful and sold out easily but to get it to next level will require quite a lot of money and a lot of unpaid labor. Maybe some day.

I have 9 month old boy and I wake up at 2am, also 3, 4, 5, 5:30, 5:45... Joking aside, it is just hard to keep any schedule with kids that young. Brace yourself, in few months your sleep situation is going to get better.

I was product manager for fast growing product, but I was waking up at 5am every morning, just so I can do some coding before work and then do another coding session after I get back from work.

That managerial job was ok and it paid well, but still my morning/evening coding sessions is what I was looking for all day. One day I was like "Cmon somebody will always pay me to write a code." I had some savings, didn't have kids or mortgage, next day I resigned.

It turned out well, I find maintenance contract doing programming job nobody wanted to touch (writing internal application in Delphi) that lasted for decade. I haven't made that much money, but I was able to travel the world few times over, failed few startups, read a ton, play a music and even bought a farm (dont ask).

I am in my 30s, having two small kids, mortgage and that farm. Everything is going well and I am still happy to code everyday and when money get low I go and consult for startups or something. If I stayed at that job I am sure I will have some career going on and more stable live, but I am still glad I did jumped the ship.

Lazarus is great, I just hope they create full support for MacOS. Curent state is more or less broken and not really usable.

I can speak about turbidimeters as this is instrument I've designed few of (as in 2 commercial products). Getting into 30 USD would be hard if you want any performance out of it.

Just source of light is going to be some kind of NIR laser, VCSELs are getting cheaper, but it is still nowhere cheap as LEDs. Then you are going to need some form of amplification for your light sensor and most probably two of those. Then some ADC chip and related circuitry, power section and so on.

But thats just a board, you will need enclosure and you want something better than just a generic box as you are going to deal with stray light. Also add some vials so users have something to put the liquid in.

We are talking about DIY builds now, but if you want to sell those: you need to budget for packaging and sending products. But there are also going to be problems: some devices are not going to work or die soon, you will get returns, some products will get lost and you will have to pay for it.

It is dollar here, few cents there but those will add up quickly.

I wonder what kind of experiments/projects you will do with given instrument.

My company tried to sell "cheap" (as in ~1000/1500 USD) VIS/NIR spectrometers, but it was very hard to actually find some viable market.

You can actually find modules[0] that will give you quite a good performance for given price. Electronics needed to run those devices are quite complex, but I even seen some open hardware boards available that might be half decent. Still, you are going to be in territory of 500 USD even in fully DIY build.

[0] https://www.hamamatsu.com/eu/en/product/photometry-systems/m...

I finally take a time to study more of a deep learning (Tensorflow, Keras) and openCV. Up until now I was working mostly with text and tabular data so I was safe with random forests.

It was hard to utilise all those cores. I am sure game architectures evolved during the years, but back then we didn't know how to split the code to optimally utilise all available resources.

For games you usually want smaller number of high performant cores than many lesser performant. Haven't done much game programming in recent years, but I still remmember the terror of programming PS3 Cell CPU.

Also the GPU is usually lacking in typical industrial PC. I am using TX2 for this exact reasons: small form factor and good performance for gpu enabled code (running openCV and ML models). Plus you can easily add your own hardware and it act as kind of a RaspberryPI on steroids.

Havent tried Xavier yet, but I am using TX2 in my work (which is previous generation of this type of device) and CPU is very weak to allow any serious gaming.

No, he left before I was hired as a consultant. I had never get chance to talk to him in any form. I am the single person who ever touched the source code for past 10 years. I don't know why he left or where he went.

Well, maybe. Biggest problem is using database from 80s, which is used in a way that sometimes it acts like database, sometimes it is used by copying files (one file per table) around random directories with custom locking mechanism.

App consist of maybe 20 different codebases that generate around 30 executables, kind of randomly, fetching source files from different codebases as programmer find a fit + random "fixes" of system modules/component make it all very very hard to do much groundbreaking work.

Probably fall from roof few times or was not really handy with hammer or something.

The company is quite fascinating, they started around 1945 and during the years they've became small conglomerate. There are three or even four generations workign together and once they like you as a person they will find something for you to do.

It is impressive indeed. The coding started just in time when Windows 95 were released. There was no Stackoverflow and they don't even really have internet back then. The programmer (as far as I know) didn't even speak English so he has access to book or two in German language and code snipets in help section of Delphi. At the same time creating applications with UI just started, so there was very little experience available, espcially in rural Austria.

Company did tried to migrate to other software few times, but the software is just too specific for given industry and legislation of small country that the companies who tried to create similar software usually went bankrupt soon.

Oh yeah it might be commedy where two people argue about spaces vs tabs and there come our function of 20k lines in single block of code that never heard about using any of those... nor about moving repeated code to own function.

Sure if this was my job, then I would do it but I am just contractor with set amount of hours devoted to the project. First few years was spend fighting fires as the company needed this very specific software to function, currently it is just about keeping eyes on having it run and occasional fix some report or update data pipelines.

I would say that rewrite would cost about 2 millions of euros. Which is really big price tag for company that use this system as a backoffice tool.

I don't know. The company is based in rural Austria and so it took company quite some time to find another engineer that will took on this project (me). I have never met him or have any other contact with him.

I am maintaining one application in construction industry space. That application was created 25 years ago by construction worker that never wrote single line of code before, but because he caused a lot of problems on construction site they give him Programming 101 book and let him build it.

15 years later the app was close to half milion lines long of huge bowl of spaghetti code. Only comments in whole codebase were timestamps. I don't know why he dated his code, but I find it fascinating: he never deleted basically anything so you can find different timeframes of when he discovered various concepts. There is use-exception-instead-of-if period, there is time when he discovered design patterns, there is time before he learnt SQL so all the database queries was done by iterating over whole tables and such. I am sure I will find commented Hello world somewhere in the code someday.

I am working on this codebase for 10 years. Code quality improved and major issues get fixed, but there is not enough budget to actually rewrote whole system, so after all it is more or less huge spaghetti monster and I get used to it.

Thats actually good question. People do get trained to enjoy more complicated wines (they don't need to be more expensive, but they usually are).

I would use analogy with pop music and classical music or modern jazz. For a lots and lots of people your club-night-out pop music will give more pleasure than sitting in auditorium listening to Rachmaninoff.

Drinking wine and spending time learning to appreciate the wine are two very different paths. Whenever it is worth it is another question. But there are differences between cheap-industrial-pop wines and fine wines.

I see it more to be case of palate: people without wine training prefer cheaper wines, because they are build around primary aromas and might include some sugar or sweet tanins. It is like giving people tea with sugar or not. Most will prefer sugared version, producers of those cheap wines are aware of it and create their wines this way.

Expensive wine are usually more complicated and don't give you those basic pleasures, especially true for Old World Wines. It takes a while to people to build appreciation of those wines as there is huge culture component behind it.

You might see wine as pleasure giving beverage, in this case you are better with some nice fruit driven bottles which are usually cheaper.

I am hearing about lab-made wine for decade or two. There was famous experiment by some university in Japan that took Domain de Romanee Conti, which is one of the most expensive wine, analyze it on HPLC machine and then took precisely same compounds in same quantities and created another wine. After they mixed it they realised it was not good at all and doesn't really tasted as a wine.

The thing with wine is that it is structural: the taste and smells are created by letting compounds build into complex structures, those structures are build during growing as well as during fermentation. Just by examining some potentionaly compound(s) that are present in good wines and adding them to solution doesn't make a better wine.

Sure you might be able to use some cheap base wine and enhance it with flavouring to create bit better wine, but creating wine from scratch would be very difficult process. On the other hand, most of the industrial wines (those cheap wines in grocery shops) are created this way.

Guitar amps are very different beasts. If you want to build something simple there is "1 watt guitar amp" project[1] with many different variations.

[1] https://www.electrosmash.com/1wamp

O2 is great and it is quite simple to build. There is even simpler amp called CMoy[1] which is simple enough to be first project for somebody just starting out.

I would start by taking look on some oss version[2] and order PCB from OSH Park[3]. I've built this version few years ago and it works well.

[1] https://tangentsoft.net/audio/cmoy/ [2] https://github.com/akafugu/cmoy [3] https://oshpark.com/shared_projects/dRKK4dgN

We will see, pirate party here is growing up and this is their first important role. It might end up great or they might get eaten by old school mafia type business people.

Peaks of each chemical is unique so you can scan database of known chemicals and compare.

You can even measure the amounts of various chemicals in solution, but that would require complex calibration. In this case you are basically writing ML system that is trying to fit various peak heights/areas to amount of compound.

It might work for qualitative measurement (what is the solution you are measuring), but this kind of instrument will not be performant enough to do qualitative analysis. Once you want to measure amounts the FTIR is probably the only way to go, especially with more complex solutions.