Today's the 11th of September — which is 11 days away from when I start university. To be fair, I've had too much free time on my hands this summer holiday, to the point where I've hoped uni would start earlier. All my friends and colleagues said they'd kill for one more month without school — naturally, they found my eagerness to return to university worthy of public stoning.
For the next 11 days, I'm just going to kick back and tell you about all the stuff I built in the past three months.
Let's start with the obvious — my website! I've been quietly building my own space on the internet for, I reckon, the past four years? Probably even more, but I've lost count of how many attempts I've made. It took much longer than I would have imagined, and that was because I never felt like it was a genuine reflection of me. I tried it all — templates, no-code builders, AI — but it always felt... hollow.
This version started somewhere around the beginning of July. Alex, a friend of mine, insisted that I should build at least a landing page for my team, neobit.gg. I'll be honest, I tried and gave up after two days. My teammates and I had just founded the team, so I felt it was way too early for any sort of promotional material. We had been to two hackathons and a conference by that point, sure, but we only had one project that we were working on. With just four people on board and no clear roadmap, I was worried we might not even go that far as a team.
Fast forward two weeks, while working on one of my projects, I had the awesome idea to try once again to build my own space on the internet! Hooray, let the back-pain marathon begin!
And so, for the next few days, I kept looking for inspiration in all the, er, decent places I knew — Dribbble, Behance, Twitter, and Threads too. But all I found, I swear to God, was the same overused "hey hey you need to hire me NOW!!!!1!" template with a different design. So, there was only one thing left for me to do: improvise. And improvise I did.
The next month, until somewhere around the middle of August, wasn't that interesting. It was just work, work, and more work until I finally polished up the layout and content for the core website. But once it was done, it felt just right. But I digress — moving on!
Two other projects were born this summer holiday — or should I say, two companions! That's right, we're getting to the interesting stuff now! Two names you need to keep in mind: Archie and Paz.
Let's start with what companions are. No, they're not some fancy LLM wrapper. They're not even related to LLMs. Well, at least until I get tired of hardcoding sass. But never mind that.
Companions are as simple as they sound — they tag along as you do your thing and keep you company. Every companion is unique and designed with specific goals in mind. Since each companion is special to me, they all get an animal persona and a cool name.
Meet Archibald, the Saint Bernard — though I call him Archie. He's my awesome sidekick for local development. Lab work gets messy fast, so I made Archie to assist me with the boring stuff and keep me company. He's got both offline and online capabilities, such as organising files, aggregating data, making short links and tunnelling local environments. Archie is modular, so I can upgrade him on the fly. I'm still working on new modules, so stay tuned.
Now, let's take a look at Pascal the Eurasian Lynx — nicknamed Paz. He's a fan of physics, just like me. Paz is still learning, but he's great at gathering quality entropy. I'm quite into cryptography, and entropy is a hot topic that I want to research. Paz is a "hive mind" of multiple entropy gates for all sorts of entropy, including that from quantum sources! Honestly, this is as experimental as it gets, but I'm looking at a pretty massive electronics order, so I'm really excited to get in the zone.
Oof, that was a lot of explaining... glad it's over for the time being. This is just scratching the surface. I'm currently working on building a knowledge base in place for all of my projects. That will take some time to polish, but it will be worth the wait, trust me.
And hey, if you're reading this and we study at the same university or you're in town, meet me on campus! Let's hang out!
That's all for now.
Signing out.