HAHAH I’m way behind last minute before next year

• Drivers License
• Start Surfing
• Learn Portuguese this time for real
• Travel and see friends
• Go Sailing :))
• Start more projects
• Learn something I haven’t had in mind before

Poor 90s bands and a heartbroken self aside, I thought it would be nice to drop a quick hello.

I’ve been going through a lot lately, or at least more than anticipated. I’ve emotionally been at the bottom, and I’m slowly climbing out, though there are walls I’m hitting occasionally. Furthermore, I started loving sunset swims, it still takes a bit of courage to go to the beach after a short unproductive day at work - but for example today just felt wonderful. The beach wasn’t busy, it wasn’t too hot or windy, the water was not too cold and there were practically no waves. I swam a bit out, experimenting with different swimming methods. Later I’ve started diving, though without glasses, after sunset, it gets quite scary underwater quickly. I ended up just slowly swimming back and then just floating on my back for the last few minutes. Even though the sky was clear, because of the twilight...

Hi there!

I just wanted to give a quick status update on how things are going!

First of all, omg what a year so far. I had to leave my temporary apartment by end of February, with no job and no plan where to move next. After a sudden incredible price increase in any short-term offering I ended up renting something for just two weeks to get some extra time to figure things out and turns out - I actually did figure something out!

So in the heart of my New Year’s Resolutions I thought maybe I should already celebrate a bit of my successes.

First of all, I found a lovely apartment, completely unfurnished - which is of course a great challenge, but let me tell you now that I have my own bed, couch, desk, fridge, … it feels so good.

Besides fending a long-term rental, I started working at a new place in June. 100% remote with a super international team. Things are still very exciting and...

2021

Well! It has been a year, or actually a year and a month already.

So much happened, though little that was part of my previous resolutions.

For example, I’ve never started studying in 2021. This is because my shared apartment came to an unexpected end. Announced in June, the main tenant decided moving out, which resulted in all of us having to leave. Very sad 🥲indeed. But this also meant I wouldn’t live close to TU Berlin 🎓 anymore.

Anyway, what happens next is I decide to leave Berlin, leave Germany and get closer to the sea. I’m right now writing this close to the northern Atlantic ocean, namely Lisbon/Portugal. I figured I already know a bit of Spain, but Portugal I don’t at all. I’ve been here since October (with breaks). I could write an entire posting just on this topic itself. Currently I’m still at an airbnb, lets see what happens next.

I don’t exactly want to focus...

Well, here is something more personal and also something that has been kind of a tradition for me: publish my New Year’s Resolution on my blog.

I’ve spent the past couple of days occasionally thinking what my NYR’s could be… My incentive behind writing those down is that I’ve honestly had success in the past following them (in contrary to what many other people say about theirs) and also it helps me focusing on something I want in my life.

• start psychotherapy 😒
• read 12 books (spoiler I’ve only read one in 2020) 🤓
• start studying at a university (remote or in person, I live close to TU Berlin)
• get my driver’s license 🚗
• get my digital life organized 💽
• learn reading/playing piano notes 🎶
• become self-organized (calendar, ToDo, notes)
• more intimacy 💜
• stand up for myself 💪🏼
• get pierced 💎
• try contact lenses 👀
• finish three projects 🙈
• add more art in my life 🎨

Besides these 13 things I’m of...

One day thinking about privacy issues lead me to the idea applying of works councils, but just for users.

What is a Works Council

In some countries, a works council can be formed if a company has reached a certain amount of employees. These employees then get to vote for representatives that get stake within the company for representing worker rights. This was needed to counteract company interest over their employees basic needs.

How could this work for users?

Well, why shouldn’t we extend something like this for users?

The idea is basically, if a web company reaches a certain size (by users/countries/…) - users somehow magically get to initialize the process for electing a users council.

This council would then become more included within organizational structure, would get special insights/space within the organization (including seeing more what happens behind the curtains, …)...

I’ve been avoidant towards patreon for quite some time, partially because I don’t want to use their payment methods (PayPal and credit cards), partially because they are taking such a big share of the payments, partially because I’m not so happy with the platform itself.

Anyway, today out of a sudden I’ve decided to give patreon another go and logged in after many years of leaving my account in abundance.

For now I’ve started pledging:

• Professor Dave Explains
• Applied Science
• NurdRage
• Fran “FranLab” Blanche

I’m looking forward pledging many more channels, I was very close pledging highest tier for The Thought Emporium because I’m so super excited about his yeast projects recently and generally he got me very excited about bio topics in general, but I have to see if my finances allow it at the moment.

Another person I’m thinking about supporting is Explosions & Fire - but I’m quite...

I never gave participating Hacktoberfest much thought, first of all because reading “Hacktober” makes me think of “Oktoberfest”, one of the worst events German society is maintaining every year - but also because until now I couldn’t consider myself much of “capable” contributing to open source software projects.

This year was different, a coworker asked whether we are up to participate at Hacktoberfest, you’ll get free swag. Free swag?!? Well, I need more t-shirts anyway. Few moments later I’ve signed up somewhere with my e-mail address and read through the guidelines…

Next days I was trying to get an idea what/where I’d like to contribute, soon I’ve figured out I’d like to “Add HCL Templating to AWS Secret Engine of Vault Project”.

Sadly instead of starting this contribution, I’ve exclusively followed the (negative) “public discourse” on whether Digital Ocean should be allowed to...

Yo

What shall I say? Well, first of all: I’ve squatted this svbtle username some many years ago*, around that time I believe it was still unclear whether medium.com or svbtle is going to win the race and I have some bad news for everybody.

Anyhow. I was just greatly inspired by some shitty blogger that would randomly talk and fantasize about transgender people, I checked the other articles and turns out this person had been on a writing spree ever since. Which made me realize I should finally also put my hands onto a blogging platform and do brain dumps aka. finally losing my respect for writing and instead start publishing drafts.

I guess content is mostly centered around what puzzles me, so anything related to my life and struggles - in any aspect you could imagine.

Kiersten White tweeted Mar 13, 2019

Sometimes, as motivation, I reward myself before accomplishing a task. It’s...