martinrue

Lots of my friends are Esperanto speakers and we use only Esperanto to communicate. I learned it to fluency in around 2 years. It’s incredibly easy to learn, super fun to use, and unique in that it bridges so many other languages that one can really experience a lot of different culture through the language.

I learned Esperanto because it was geeky and super easy to learn, and now I use it almost every day. I've made friends all over the world via the language, and can find people wherever I am to hang out and chat with. It's awesome. In fact, 6 weeks ago I moved from the UK to Spain and so far I've spent about 80% of my time using only Esperanto, with a combination of broken English and Spanish the rest of the time. I wrote a post a while back (that did pretty well here on HN) summing up why I love the language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

Mi lernis Esperanton pro la nerdeco kaj pro tio, ke ĝi estas tre facile lernebla kaj amuza. 3 jarojn poste kaj mi uzas la lingvon ĉiutage kun amikoj de la tuta mondo. Kie ajn mi troviĝas, preskaŭ ĉiam mi povas trovi amikon (saluton!) kaj vagadi, babili, kaj nur Esperantumi kune. Fakte, antaŭ 6 semajnoj mi transloĝiĝis al hispanio kaj ĝis nun Esperanton mi uzis 80% de la tempo, kaj miksaĵon de la angla kaj mia rompita hispana krom Esperanto la ceteran. Jen artikolo, kiun mi skribis (anglalingve) por klarigi tial, kial mi tre ĝuas la lingvon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18688619

For anyone craving more C64 nostalgia, I wrote about my first coding experience on the wonderful old beast: https://martinrue.com/give-yourself-more-playtime/

Is the name inspired by the imperative Esperanto verb by any chance? Se jes, saluton, bona elekto :)

Sure: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLcWlBThjQPyrDDy3UIW8...

I work on a few other Esperanto projects in my spare time. If anyone's curious: https://martinrue.com/projects/

I created a YouTube series teaching entry-level programming in JS, in Esperanto. Because why the hell not.

I wrote a couple more, both about amusing early programming experiences:

C network programming: https://martinrue.com/zzuy-a-lesson-in-perseverance

Commodore 64 & BASIC programming: https://martinrue.com/give-yourself-more-playtime

Awesome... small world :)

Thanks, really glad to hear you enjoyed them!

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, I first got into the C64 in 97. College was 5 years afterwards, so in 2002 for me. I link to another story, “Give yourself more playtime”, at the bottom of the post. You may enjoy that – it’s the story of how I securely wrote password programs to all my favourite game cassettes :)

Between podcasts, international friends on Facebook/Twitter, and voice chats (Telegram is good for this, as lots of Esperanto speakers use it: see https://telegramo.org) I find a way to regularly use Esperanto in my daily life. I also attend a few annual events that run for a week in which 200+ people get together and use only Esperanto, so that obviously helps a lot. When I first started learning and it was only an academic pursuit for me, I lost interest a few times. But having made a bunch of friends through the language at this point, I now use it the same way I would any other language (and Esperanto has definitely been significantly easier to reach a useful level of fluency than my efforts to learn Hebrew and German). There are a few other posts on my blog about my experiences with the language, in the event those are interesting.

Early in my programming “career”, when I was about 15/16, I started writing network programs in C. I was fascinated by the idea that one program could send and receive data with another far far away. One particular story was a great lesson for me (I eventually ended up naming my company after it), and also pretty amusing. It’s not about undefined behaviour, but about not properly understanding C strings. If you’re curious, the story is here: https://martinrue.com/zzuy-a-lesson-in-perseverance

Instruu al ŝia familio Esperanton - eble tio pli facilus :)

As well as https://kern.punkto.info, which covers lots of diverse subjects, including many technical ones.

All the stuff behind Parol is OSS (https://git.io/fjb5n), do bonvolu senti sin libera Esperantigi aferojn :)

Thanks for the useful links Derek. I still remember your email to me, telling me you had started learning the language. I'd love to read a future blog post about your experience :)

Oops... I guess I was thinking about the future too much :)

Thank you for the appreciation, I appreciate it :) Please feel free to take it and create some cool Alexa thing with it... that'd be awesome.

I can assure you, it's Esperanto :)

Glad you enjoyed it! Originally I read about it on Wikipedia, and studied it just because it was super geeky and cool to me. Later I started attending events and met people, and at this point I have lots of international friends through the language. I wrote a bit more about this on my blog, which you may find interesting: https://martinrue.com/zamenhofa-tago-18

I'm surprised there's no mention of Dash in the comments yet. Having spent some time researching different crypto currency technologies with regards to becoming a better, decentralised payment network, Dash is (in my opinion) a far better Bitcoin.

It's also the first example of a functioning DAO. The organisation is funded entirely by the blockchain (new blocks reward the miner, the master nodes, and fund a treasury). It has a second network of 'master nodes', which are collateralised and incentivised to provide security and additional features to the network, including Instant Send (really fast confirmations).

The most impressive thing is that it's already positioned to make decisions about future changes by way of master node voting, so it doesn't suffer from the same issues Bitcoin does currently, where proposed changes have no means to be agreed and actioned quickly.

I'm really impressed with Dash and I hope it gets more attention.

Art & Fear

Of all the books I've read, this one resonated with me the most. It discusses the process of art making, both the personal process of finding your work and learning how to get better, as well as the issues with being judged through your work. If you treat your projects/code more like art than science, I think this book will be an enjoyable and provoking read.

For people using Node/Express, Helmet is a useful little library that lets you add these security headers and CSP pretty easily: https://github.com/helmetjs/helmet

For anyone interested in learning a little more about Esperanto, Duolingo just put their Esperanto course into public beta and there's a good amount of learning content already: https://www.duolingo.com/course/eo/en/Learn-Esperanto-Online.

There's also http://lernu.net, probably the most well-known source of Esperanto news, lessons and other stuff.

Amuziĝu!

If people are looking for similar things, there's also http://calm.com from Alex Tew of Million Dollar Homepage fame.

I wrote my thoughts up on this subject a while ago here: http://martinrue.com/posts/6/what-is-the-zone-anyway. I make the case for 'the zone' being a state that comes from really thinking about what you're doing and simply knowing how to start (and continue).

Apologies for the poor design, I'm working on improving it. The posts are Markdown and can be read directly on GitHub if you're struggling with my awesome design.

https://github.com/martinrue/martinrue.com/blob/master/posts...

Thanks, I'll try to make it a bit more readable.

Came here to make the same comment :)

The key here for me is the emphasis on ensuring that code that carries risk (i.e. business logic) must be protected from regression – and that testing is a good way to achieve that, rather than preaching for a particular approach such as TDD/BDD/XDD.

In reality I see quite a few successful approaches of reaching the goal of protecting code from regression and giving us the confidence to change it.