Hi everyone, my name is Patrick you.
And for today's episode, we cover habits and how to get
better at them as well as decentralisation.
What value will it add? And how do we get there?
Joining me today is my friend and colleague Merlin Bogart.
Who's a software consultant over here Xavier, I'll put all of his
socials in the description below.
And with that being said, enjoy the episode.
A green screen sounds like a reasonable idea but I also
wonder at the same time. How long is it going to be until
the software she's capable of not eating or a green screen and
all anymore? Yeah, that's a good point.
I mean you have the functionality to add background
right? It's not that far off.
It seems like if you got rid of just a little bit yeah too slow
to really catch up with cutting you out properly.
Yeah. Especially for girls because all
the hair just Fades out and they look kind of weird dish had
wise. Yeah.
But what's that about a podcast. From was to do one.
Yeah. So she does yoga.
Hmm. A lot of different styles of
yoga and she has gone really in depth.
She's only recently started like a few years back.
Okay? That's you went from absolutely
doing. No movement at all to being
complete yoga phonetic. Oh, nice.
And yeah, when she goes for it to go to all out and she's being
reading like a maniac, our house is filled with yogurt.
A book can also tell a lot. She's also a lot of backgrounds
and she's a clinical psychologist.
Okay. And a creative therapist?
Yeah, so she has a lot of background that she can combine
with all of that she had. Lots of interesting things to
tell her. I told her you should do a
podcast. Yeah, that worked.
Well nice. Nice.
I thought it was going to be the YouTube but she also will
probably do that. Yeah.
To do to do actual educational videos.
Yeah, stuff. Good stuff.
Are you? Come on as a guest.
Are you a yoga yoga guys? Well, I do yoga with her.
Yeah, I wouldn't say that. I'm a yoga guy.
I'm not nearly flexible enough myself that.
Yeah, good stuff. I went to one of your XK is I
think it must have been like a year and a half maybe even two
years back and you read this book and it was asked about
starting to do something. And you told the story about I'm
a software engineer, but my skills of typing and not exactly
where I want it to be, as well as you did something about
Fitness and All that other stuff.
Are you still doing that? I still don't have.
Yeah, what was it like? 100-day plan is 100 a journal.
Okay, I would definitely recommend that too.
Yeah, anybody just if you even if you do it only once, I think
it's a really good habit to maintain.
Yeah, the bookshelf describes as lying being the one habits and
that you should maintain and I kind of agree with that.
So it's argument is that like 80% of your time in your life is
Habitual. Okay.
So spending time on optimizing, your habits is really based off
really well. Yeah.
And I mean, it's pretty sound argument.
I think yeah. Sounds all never really thought
of it that way, and it essentially says like it's a
kind of bootstrapping way of maintaining good habits, okay?
Because you have these four steps that you do every day.
Like sure, every morning you focus on a number of positive
assertions. Yeah, can be about your
environment can be about Elf. So that makes you just start
with the positive mood in the day.
Yeah. And sometimes it's things just
to be shirt that life is good and sometimes it's just to say
something positive about yourself, just to pump yourself
up to like I can do it. Yeah, can be simple like that
and then you maintain three goals.
That's the second step for the morning.
So you write down like, what would make this day as you cash,
whatever your Criterium of success.
Maybe. Yeah.
And that makes just that the end of the It can look back.
At least those three things were done.
So my day is good success. And then at the end of the day,
you reflects also on that. So you have what were the three
things that I really enjoyed today and shotguns?
What are the things that I learned to just?
Make sure that you go to bed with a feeling of happiness and
of satisfaction and therefore you get better sleep.
Yeah. And you also have a moment to
reflect on what you learn. So you heard also the most
important things inches that's that's a really good habit
because it also allows you to pick up like I want to work
towards developing the habit of doing more sport or eating
better. The fact that you do this and
monitor yourself, all of the time makes that you can do that
better than I could before. Yeah.
Now I eat better. I Sports bettor.
I support I decide that I do more Sports.
Yeah, and I've picked up things, simple things like a doing it.
I think, or something like that. Now, I can actually type
properly. It really wasn't that bad in
the, it wasn't great or remake. I think, I typed with six
fingers, multiple would mostly mostly due to the the inner
tube. Yeah.
And then I was reasonably. Okay but I made a lot of Errors.
I make significantly less errors and that really makes a
difference in like how you think?
Because you're more busy. Correcting your errors in
actually producing stuff. Yeah it's a context which every
time so yeah. Yeah, I really like that because
first of all I think it contributes to happiness.
I'm glad you said that and I think happiness is a skill that
you can and should get better at right being or having that
positive mindset. We just saying man, May today be
a happy day or actually, I'm feeling quite good.
I'm feeling quite happy. These are my challenges for the
day and then reflecting on and seeing how they went, you
wouldn't do that in a normal routine.
Go about your day. Everything is quite fast.
At least for me because I'm last It with a lot of things, I was
last minute here, and last minute for the train, everything
is, is go. Go go.
I live in Amsterdam. It's also the kind of vibe that
it's there but you get there. Yeah, exactly.
But I need a lot of conversations with different
people to help me reflect. That's usually what helps me
reflect in the first place. I don't have a moment where I
sit down and even I mean, it's kind of sounds like, journaling
as we enjoy. Yeah.
Seeing seeing how my day went, I don't do that, I think I should
yet. So what really holds.
Me back is my handwriting is horrible that I don't I don't
like writing stuff down. Well I've I'm not no longer
buying the 100-day journals where you actually?
Right? Yeah I do it now on the left
top. Yeah, I just have a kind of
template that I made that I just duplicate every day and my not
so super simple setup but it works for me.
Yeah. And I can type of my handwriting
is really terrible so this works.
Yeah. I should definitely do it.
Yeah you think so I'll try that. My I mean Ski and for those of
you that don't know what an XK is.
It's like a TV, a knowledge exchange where Merlin gave a
session on this thing and it was very inspirational.
I didn't say that back then because I don't know how long
ago it was but I knew your last great.
So maybe I should have just given you that feedback but it
was very inspirational of first of all the things that you did
and the things that you kind of challenge yourself with you were
like the get. These are the things I started
out and I think if I remember correctly, you didn't faint and
end up finishing. All of them.
Because you were like, I figured out that was actually quite a
lot of things to do. So then I focused on these
things. Yeah, you modify your goals
along the way as well. Yeah.
Like first you set yourself a goal and then you find out along
the way that perhaps that's not the best way of phrasing that
goal. Yeah.
And that's not really what I want.
So that's also a discovery process reprioritizing along the
way. And that's a good step.
Also, in the journal is like every 10 days you reflect on,
how are you progressing towards your goals?
What can you change? Charlie.
This is I mean agile. We are very familiar with this
kind of process. Yeah, but here you do it for
your life and make sense that you would do this.
It's worth it to make sense, right?
Because to me, it also makes sense, but then I haven't
actually gotten to the step where I started this thing.
Yeah. Did you are you the same like,
do you procrastinate or did you pick this up and you're like,
immediately, I'm going to start with this.
Of course, I freaking love that. Of course, vets.
I've got some better. Yeah because of this I've got
some definitely better. I actually had discussion with
thermodynamics a little bit back and he said also like if you can
do something in 2 minutes then just do it immediately.
Yeah, that's also the kind of rule that I stick to.
I just got to get rid of all of those small items because
otherwise they stick in your head and they just poison your
minds and you can, I find it disables me.
If a lot of things in my head even if they're small.
Yeah I just can't do anything anymore.
So I Tried to get rid of that. Yeah.
But yeah, you will never be perfect if you even if you
Journal that you will still procrastinate and be lazy
sometimes. Yeah.
That's also healthy. I think so.
But I like, I like the idea of getting better at getting stuff
done right. Getting better at being
effective. Whether it's a new thing that
you want to do a new habit, you want to pick up or an existing
one. You want to be even better at.
I think for myself, I don't do that often enough.
The one thing I would I keep getting better as hopefully
podcasting even though I don't get so far, so good so far, so
good, right? Yeah, exactly.
Because it is the one thing throughout, probably the last
year and a half that I've done consistently week over week,
that plus like creating YouTube, I'm like a YouTube side-channel
thing I do. Which means my video editing has
gotten a bit better but that wasn't like a conscious
decision. When I said yeah I want to do a
podcast. I didn't really think about.
Okay, what is this going to look like in two years?
So it kind of came through work, it wasn't really that much.
The conscious thing, and the only other thing I try to get
better as Sports just because I think healthy body healthy mind.
It helps me throughout the day, which is why I focus on that
consistently. I'm not saying I do every
morning. I try to and I'm not that harsh
on myself when it doesn't work. That's very important.
Yeah, don't don't blame yourself that helps nobody but I think
it's really good that you are able to maintain this pattern
and I mean making sure that you have a backlog, you are well
prepared. Cuz now you can go to New York
without any interruption in your schedule.
I think that's, that's impressive.
Yeah, that's the idea. I mean, I want to since everyone
can work remote, right? I want to work remote.
I've done that. I went to Barcelona for a month
in April, but to do that, I need to do a lot of things and set
everything up, right? I cancel my lease on my
apartment. I'm basically homeless.
Then I go to a different country, go to an Airbnb, stay
there for a month. We think about South Africa, for
two months and then I have to get back and I don't have an
apartment. So we need to scramble and get
one. And in Amsterdam is not easy to
do so. But since everything is from,
oh, I'm like it's now or never, right?
And I'm in a position where I don't own a house.
I have at least which I can cancel.
I don't have a lot of responsibilities yet.
No kid. Okay, they're our kid.
That's the biggest one. It makes a big giant.
Yeah, exactly. So I'm really trying to make use
of this kind of remote environment that were We're
trying to do this exact same in your position.
Yeah. I'll probably travel the world's
and settle at several places for like two three months and yeah
explore what's living like there?
Yeah while simultaneously working it sounds like a dream.
Yeah, Barcelona was awesome. It just went by way too quickly.
Because in the first week you're like okay how do we live here?
Where the supermarket supermarkets are not open on
Sunday? Oh, that's a thing.
Oh, yeah, yeah. So we were out of food.
But restaurants were. Yeah.
Restaurants are so weak. Vote.
But then you figure out the first two weeks how to live you
enjoy your other two weeks but I mean still remote working.
So you will work most of your time and then all of a sudden
it's over and you're like man that flew by.
Yeah. Yeah.
My brother, the same thing, he went to Portugal for a month.
Yeah. And yeah, just just a different
pace of life that you have there and you have in the Netherlands,
it made him really relaxed quite a lot.
Yeah. And I mean, that is balcony,
there's a apartments and the balcony that has a view of the
ocean and the harbor and beautiful their city.
So you just work from there, you know, you're in the Sun that on
itself is really good. Yeah.
You have the ocean that are from the ocean.
You have a beautiful view. Yeah.
What else is left? Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I went to Barcelona right around the corner was my
was, my beach like, literally 100 200 public somewhere in
between there. Was my beach and I could have
meetings there. I could sit and work there.
I could after work go for a walk in the mornings work out there
because they had beautiful stuff there as well.
It was just yeah, one of the more I think it's really cool.
That companies are like, uh, one of our benefits.
We don't pay the best salary but you can work from anywhere and I
like man that's a huge plus. Yeah for sure, I don't think if
your startup if you don't do that, you're definitely behind.
Now it's funny because one One of the things I asked you if
we're talking about kind of our ideal situation.
Anyway, is if you're working on something, if you're working on
a real passion, what would that be for you?
And you said, decentralized systems.
Yeah, I haven't heard that often.
I think that might be the first one I heard that.
But why is that a passion of yours?
So the Y is, I guess pretty big. I think I'm just in generally
attracted to emergent Behavior. I find this a very fascinating
thing when you have Very large multi-agent systems.
We have lots of moving components that somehow all of
this aggregate Behavior kind of makes sense and also has How do
you say this? It has a certain complexity to
it, but it also collectively is kind of efficient and making
that more efficient. This is what I think is really
interesting. Yeah.
So perhaps as a concrete concrete examples I find it very
fascinating to have bee colonies or termites.
Come on the colonies because you get this kind of stick, merging
behavior from all of this individual little ants or
termites. That collectively accomplish a
function even though individually, they're just very
People. Yeah and I think humans are the
same thing. Humans are definitely more
complex. Yeah but yeah you also see
stiff, emergent behavior and that's collectively.
We accomplished a lot more than we could ever do on our own.
Yeah we're like a more advanced beehive yeah we're more advanced
bi. Yeah in the things we create are
like cities and I mean even if you look at the internet and the
things we've created on there or the communities we cultivate
it's crazy. It seems fine.
Yeah, if you see the kind of products that have come to
fruition because of just people sitting together and said, like
a, let's build this one thing and then certainly it exists.
I find this. Yeah, I find it quite magical.
Yeah, that people can come together and build stuff.
Like, for example, I've always been fascinated by Wikipedia,
like, both the creation, the hosting and the maintaining of
all of this data. Yeah, sure that it has a High
level of consistency and truth to it.
So, they had some criticism at some point, like, Wikipedia has
been reliable compared to like this and this includes
encyclopedia it's, it has default, and that fault.
But yeah. Within the day, all of those
folks were gone. Yeah.
And then Angela PD. I do we take another revision
which might take a few years to come about.
So I find this very interesting. Yeah.
But Wikipedia, I mean, it's Pained by, I don't know exactly.
But I'm assuming like a group of people and the whole operation
has a price tag as well. I don't know what the profit
model is but that's kind of the problem.
Everything needs to have a profit model and then needs to
be a company behind it. Either banking it or making a
profit. Yeah that's that's correct.
I find that. It's my biggest jerk.
I think with our current infrastructure of the Internet,
it's really aimed at like, it it really facilitated well.
When companies that have a profit motive want to deliver
service that has some public utility.
Yeah for them it's easy. But you need that business model
you need to get some money out of it somehow and and this is
also need what got me into all part of what gets me into
decentralization is. I think we can do much better in
terms of housing. Yeah, so we see nowadays
blockchain as a way of running applications and hosting some
data. I've I mean that's just the
beginning and I think we can take it much further than that.
Having all of our power, perhaps not all, but a lot of our Public
Services don't have that. Don't need a public or don't
need a, a business motive. They just are there.
Like, we need electricity, we need water.
We also need social networks. We also need to communicate and
exchange information, they shouldn't come with all your
data is being hijacked or Um, you have to pay for the service.
Like they're certain basic Primitives.
That should just be in place. It's weird, right?
Because I mean, you said Social Services, I'm assuming you mean
like Social Media stuff, right? Yeah, yeah.
Your data is a commodity apparently.
Yeah, the time and that's scary. We just accepted most of the
time. Yeah.
Because you want to use that service and it's also not all
necessarily bad because we like to describe that as evil.
Yeah. But there's a lot of utility
that can come from such data like having it somewhere.
But then I'm like, why only that one party can have this Monopoly
on this data? When we I could do much more
with it because that day is on itself.
Also has a public function And that's just a missed
opportunity. So if we can have this kind of
infrastructure where this data is open, to the extent that we
wanted to be open and anybody could use this data for building
a new service. On top of it, that that would be
insane, will be marvelous. Yeah, at the thing that scares
me is that, I mean, I went through, I have a tick tock
account. I'll because I post like Little
Snips of the podcast, which I think is cool, but then I would
go through their service terms and it's Man, they have a lot of
data on me. They go through my phone and
they can even check file names and they know, or at least it's
very vaguely phrase that through my network.
They can see, what are the devices I have and they can
check those files on those devices.
So that I'm like, scary that that sounds really scary Tick,
Tock with this. It does.
And I don't know. The thing is, it's not
transparent with, they do with the data, right, or why they
would need it in the first place.
They say to enhance some some services and probably some
advertising things, but I don't want to be so sure.
We engineered into buying things because that is kind of their
marketing thing. But that is their profit model
without that, they would have no advertisements.
And I think that's the biggest part of the business model and
through that they can pay the content creators.
Yeah. And that's definitely space.
We're really only in the beginning.
Yeah. Like, exploring, what is
socially desirable because indeed, at some point you can
make commercial so effective that you that our brains are
just not optimized for dealing with this kind of aggressive.
Marketing campaign, that really lures you into doing things that
are just not rational or not desirable.
Yeah. And I should be limits to that
and we don't know yet what that was Ruby.
But yeah, so part of India's going to do centralization is it
might provide the opportunity to have this conversation and to
make sure that the show for every run on top of the data is
following certain laws, the law that we collectively want
implies because they're healthy for us.
So, yeah. That's that's a nutshell I
guess, for why decentralization? I like it's a, it's a huge
thing, but if you said, can you do a lot of stuff without
Googling without Wikipedia? Even like, man, a lot of a lot
of Google searches I do we compete as the first thing that
pops up. So if that were to disappear, do
I trust them? The other services that we are
going to take its place? That's kind of a scary thought.
We rely on the infrastructure we've put into place and Frozen.
We need that assignment Q&A website.
So I mean Steve, First, we use that old off the x axis, a car
for flow is a frequent Source. Yeah, she'd also never
disappear. I mean, never shoot.
At least there should always be a function like that to have
Q&A. Yeah.
To ask a question and get some answers raid out.
Answers. Take into account The
credibility of those who answer. Yeah.
And then the archiving function like you can find back that
question and see all of the best answers that that's super
useful. Yeah.
And there's no particular reason, I think technically
anyway. Why that needs to be a service
with commercials on top of it? Yeah, well the cost though
someone needs to pay that price tag the end of the day that bill
that's monthly recurring. Yeah exactly.
So the centralized data would help you there so it's not that
the cost completely go away of course.
Yeah. But Centrally hosting it.
Make sure that you have a lot of costs, okay?
If you have instead a model where you only share data that
you are personally interested in, then you you're already.
How do you say this? Will it cut down costs in that
way? Well, I mean you're only
consuming a small fragment? Yeah, the internet a very tiny
fragments. I mean you're already getting
that to your machine anyway. Yeah.
Because you need to see it. So if all you do is then just
also making sure that that data continues to exist for other
people who were interested. That's a relatively small cost
exactly. And it's really distributed over
everybody who participates in the network, so it doesn't make
the cost entirely go away. It just puts it with the People
doesn't have already stake in that part of the internet
anyway. Yeah and it just makes it more
efficient and also in terms of storage caching I did thinking
in terms of systems that exist where your local machine is part
of the system. Yeah, I was too.
Everything is kind of a back-end application and you have front
and she'll in front of it. Just making your computer part
of the whole thing. Makes it the data is locally
available on you. You can compute in terms of that
and visualize in terms of, let's just lower the latency and
immediately is also offline available.
So, I think there's a lot of future in having developing with
a local first mindset. Yeah.
Sounds like, I mean, when you said reducing cost of like, how
you're going to do that, but in the indeed, if your stress on
kind of the main machine is not there.
It's decentralized. And everyone's machine is doing
their own kind of compute in that way.
Also storage with regards to the data that you need.
And you significantly reduce the amount of data that goes over
the line, and that you actually require to do, for example, a
Q&A, which is talking about text in that way, shouldn't be that
much. Then exactly the cost will go
down. Probably drastically thing is
how do we get there? Because and everything is
centralized right now, blockchain is kind of the new
thing, and there's a huge bubble and hide behind it with regards
to currencies and whole crypto Market in and of its own, but
the technology seems pretty good to have.
In place we just slowly trending towards that.
I think you're right. Blockchain is one part of it.
It's also very particular part. I don't think that necessarily
the biggest component. Yeah.
In the beginning, it's more about, I think two, main
problems are being able to host data.
The ability to ensure that you have integrity of this data.
Yeah, that you can have a degree of autonomy.
Sorry, autonomy, anonymity. Yes, you can house a date.
Also Anonymous but then beyond data, you also need to think
about compute. So you want to probably run
computations as well. So part of it might be just,
everything is local. You do love your own computation
but that's also not necessarily efficient.
Yeah so you'll probably end up its You want to have the data
and have decentralized applications as well that return
you data. And this data also needs to be,
have integrity. And that's that's actually very
tricky. And that's why what I try to
show for example, with with with Ledger's.
But they're not entirely there. That's because that entails a
lot of complexity, a lot of overheads, optimize a lot there.
I can imagine, I mean even if you're talking about the
security behind it, right? If you're saying I'm running
something something's happening on my local machine.
Someone somehow gets hold of that either with regard to the
data and they can see way more than they need to be.
What they can run. Whatever they want on my
machine. Yeah it sounds very scary
starter. That's definitely a.
Parse don't want to just have a trojan horse.
Machine a form of decentralized over.
But the other part of it is, do I trust your machine to run the
computation and give me the same output as if I were running
running it locally? Yeah, if you say like yeah, I
computed this result and really we did a election and I've
counted it and this is the visuals.
Do I? Trust your results.
Yeah, that's, that's a tricky one.
We don't have a choice right now.
It's just like, okay, that's it. Yeah, it's the Rica or something
else popped out. Ok.
So the nice thing about public. I thought everybody could run of
course. Did we count if they wanted to?
Yeah. It's also the principal.
I think behind a lot of this, stop making this reliable and
general. Yeah.
But there are also some other techniques that are going way
over my head but they're using cryptography to and very limited
set of operations like addition and multiplication to be able to
run on an encrypted data. Yeah, not understanding.
What is encrypted data is on the left, changing the data and from
the output, Not understanding what the input is already output
because all three output is encrypted.
They don't understand what's happening, but they've
calculated the actual output as if you were running it locally
as well. Interesting, that's really cool.
Yeah. And that those are the kind of
building blocks we are looking for.
Exactly. It does.
A lot of them, there's a lot more but that's, that's one of
those building blocks. That's really important to go to
the point where we can make commodity service on top of the
centralized infrastructure. Really.
Yeah, I mean we if you're talking about political stuff
and in data that needs to have a certain amount of Integrity,
it's good that that's publicly available, right?
And then you can do your own calculations if need be.
So you build that trust, right? It's not that you don't trust
the right now it's that you have the option to go through it
yourself and figure out if it's actually valid and truthful in
that way. There's a lot of stuff.
We just have to take for a face value, right?
I can look up if I have a little mark on my my leg, it can either
be good. I can either be bad, it can
either be symptomatic. Disease or have no clue, depends
on my Google search. If I wanted to be bad, it is
going to be bad, which is a really weird thing.
One of the reasons I didn't have social media.
I have more social media now is because I never saw the value of
it, right? I never saw it.
Maybe you have social media. I never wanted to see the best
version of you all the time online and engage with that
person. I like talking to people, like
calling people a lot more, but now and I've had this
realization more recent. It's a way to engage with
Community. Right?
And that we should never get rid of because that is a very big
part of what we've created now with the internet, and the whole
digitalization is a way to engage with a certain Community,
it can be a book club, it can be talking about movies, it can be
reviewing software, it can be anything, but the world because
of that has become a lot smaller if those things become
Commodities and available to everyone.
I think that would be very beneficial to a lot of people
that don't have it. Yeah, yeah.
The same. I think.
So, I have Facebook, I still have the account.
I don't know why. I guess I was too lazy to log in
and just completely cancel the account, because I'm not using
that anymore either. Indeed what you said.
Like, I don't want to see only the Instagram pictures, like
everybody posturing as though their life is perfect.
Exactly. Like, I know you we're all
human, we all have our own struggles.
Nothing is ever completely. Bright and that's okay.
Yeah. So yeah, I relate to that and
what you said also like I think you need, that's the thing.
It's about interest groups, people finding each other being
able to indeed get value out of their interaction.
Like I also find this really cool is the crowdfunding.
Yeah, if you want to come to something you go with a group of
people together and you found it.
I think that's also A big part of our future for software
engineering as well, is where we are thinking.
In terms of that's developed a system.
In a decentralized fashion, we just write down problems as
tickets and then we're going to crowd fund until the someone is
eager enough to pick up that ticket for that money.
And of course then there's lots of Interesting problems to solve
like how to verify that the solution was was in line of the
requirements and make sure that people don't go away with money.
Plenty of problems but I think that's that's a very interesting
future for software engineering as well.
Yeah crowd funding for for software development.
I've never thought of it that way, all crowdfunding things.
I've seen is a physical product at the end of the day, sometimes
a digital product, but never the ACT.
Of creating things and adding value to an overarching system.
Yeah. And that's a way of kind of
decentralized funding crowdfunding.
That's exactly what it is. That's really cool.
Yeah, I think that will be awesome to have.
I mean we have so many software developers around the world if
you can just dig into that pool of talents and And have
everybody like make it open for involvement.
People can get involved into the systems.
They would like to contribute to.
Yeah, for me, I think that would be great if this will be more
our way of working that systems are open for contribution in
general and you can get paid for that as well.
It doesn't only have to be your own voluntary time because
that's most of the open source world right now is voluntary.
It's almost all of it. Yeah.
And wow I don't know the percentage of like The most
useful versus enterprise software.
Everett it's a pretty big part. Of our world is open source over
somewhere. So it serves also to be rewarded
appropriately and let's see if we can make it with the business
model. Make it more productive for
everybody because there is a big gap sometimes between open
source software and enterprise software.
We're just a quality is a little bit better.
Yeah, it's a fewer bugs because the bugs are also picked up
because you know password nobody wants to pick them up.
Exactly Enterprise they're forced to or their pay to so
that it provides an additional motivation for quality and
that's important. Yeah.
I mean the reason why sometimes the quality is not there, it's
because it's really cool that everyone can create an open
source project, right? But that also comes with a
downside, everyone can create an open source project.
Yeah, I sometimes look for solutions that I can build
myself but that I like, I just want to fast on.
Let's see if there's an open source package there several,
and then it's hard to pick from and some are more established.
Less than others. And some have more bugs than
others, but it becomes an integral part of your software.
Yeah. And like you said, like, if you
have seven of those packages, why did those seven people not
work together to make one package?
Yeah, it's better for like that wouldn't have any of the bugs
that. And I mean, that's not a to
blame any of those persons because the infrastructure is
just not. And I'm talking about the social
infrastructure. Yeah.
It's just not in place for us to do that effectively.
Yeah, I think we could do better there.
I like that because if we were to join forces, right?
We I already don't like Reinventing the same thing.
Reinventing the wheel on this way that's why we have packages
of software that do exactly what we want, right?
That's those open source contributions.
But then why don't we centralize those open sources or make it
1-1 bigger system? One wheel that would solve this
problem and does it better than all those things distributed?
Yeah. Yeah.
Although I have to say that if there are practical side to it
as well. Yes, I like we don't like to
invent the wheel but as soon as a new language comes out reveals
the whole internet with the new Great stuff.
Yeah that's mean you have a Reinventing the wheel and kind
of innovating in what you do. Right.
Sure. It's a it's continuous and I
think we are improving what I like seeing and that's more of a
like thing. I see in companies and I think
the thing I see in the people that buy things is that we don't
really buy a product, we buy sometimes into an idea, but we
also care about what the company does behind it, right?
A lot of companies are like, okay, if you buy whatever
product were selling, will plant the tree somewhere in and where
it needs to And that's the thing.
They also do and that kind of Trends was less towards a
capitalistic mindset less towards actually earning all the
money that we can make but also giving back right?
And companies in software they do that by contributing back to
open source contributions is that contributing back to open
source code through. Its making sure people can do
their open source stuff. If they want to actually fund
open source projects that have a big stake in their Enterprise
software, right? So way to engage with the
community and also a way to give Back and I like that, we're
focusing a lot more on giving back.
Yeah, I think that's a really good thing and I think it can be
a model that works in certain industries.
I've also seen for example, that book was a good example of
thing. Here, is they had an open source
map. Yeah, really.
Good. JavaScript library?
I think a lot of people enjoyed working with this one, but then
they kind of made it not free to use anymore.
Yeah. And I think we are part of the
source are also closed. Hmm.
Google Maps was the same thing. Now you could Implement and all
of a sudden that was going to be a huge fee.
Yeah, that's just know. They told it said like, yeah,
everybody's having this awesome library but we're not making
money because of it. So we need to make it.
We need to change the way we operate.
Yeah. And that's also a realistic part
of it, but Yes, I said if you could contribute, if you could
pay the Developers for doing what they want to do, then you
would still have this incentive to develop this map project.
Yeah, yeah. Developing our social
infrastructure I think is a nice important one.
You, yeah. I like the thought that
commodity should be free a lot of essential Commodities,
because exactly. As you say, what the map example
is one thing. But even if I'm talking about
giving a training on a piece of software, there's so many free
videos on YouTube. Yet there's so many paid
courses, which probably do some where exactly the same thing.
I don't even know if the quality is higher or better because I've
never paid for those courses because on YouTube everything's
free or I can Google whatever I need right yet, those courses
still exist. So somewhere somehow someone was
like okay my content is this good, then I'm going to ask
money for it or they're like this is a business model and I
can ask money for it. Yeah.
There will be people that common Bay.
Yeah, exactly. But then there's the downside
right because that you always have that option.
It's never going to To be free. It's never going to have that
commodity, you're always going to have variants of the same
thing which vary in quality. And then if you're sitting from
the consumer side, you're like, man, let's say I want to start
out being a software engineer. I come from a completely
different background. If I Google won't think, I'm
going to get so many results. I'm going to so many biased
opinions. I'm going to get.
I'm going to dive into this world and I'm gonna have no clue
where to start. I'm not saying one thing, and
one track is the best way, but it's just a way too much
information right now as it is. Yeah.
Yeah actually did this touches upon something that scares me a
little bit in particular, for Education.
Yeah, because it's now, so easy for anybody to just publish
anything. Yeah, that's really good thing.
I think, in general, that we can all make our voice heard hurts.
We can all express ourselves. I think it's really valuable but
when it comes to education, I mean, if I look back at school
and University, you could Just literally have the best
professors in the world, on a particular subject, to best
educator record, a number of videos.
And you would, why would you ever retake those videos?
Yeah. Perhaps, because times have
changed but not very often. You would have to at some point.
What when do we need still need teachers like for for personal
counseling or so at the moment that you get into struggles, but
for significantly less Of the time.
I think I agree. And that's also a bit scary.
Yeah, where our educational industry that perhaps at some
point we end up with just a whole school.
Curriculum of the best videos of all the best Educators and we're
done with education. Yeah, just need the number of a
personal assistance to help you through some of the exercises
sometimes. Yeah, it's I kind of wonder
where that is going. Yeah, I mean already if I talk
to myself and when I was in, In kind of it's not kindergarten,
it's elementary school. That's the thing I was looking
for but I was going a bit faster than the rest of the class,
right? And what you do now is way
different than what you did back then, back then I would play
with clay and like, do other stuff read a book.
Now, you get like, an advanced thing on a tablet and you're
like, okay, you can do Advanced courses and you can already move
ahead. My little brother does that he's
10 years old right now and he's way better at math and he's
doing the the higher level math than he's supposed to because he
can and he has the option to He likes it, he likes being
challenged mentally, right? You don't want to do the boring
stuff in the middle card. You can do something else now.
Sure, there's something else is fun.
But yeah it's cool that it's that we have the option to do
so. Education is awesome, right?
Yeah. And this would be, I mean, I'm
talking about a lot of levels above that.
But yeah, if you can get the best content from the best
professors around, a lot of people going to lose their jobs
but the edit education system should be better because of it.
Yeah. And I me, I think that's also
the scary thought about that. In software, engineering, the
pool of software Engineers that's available.
Remote working. It's pretty big.
Yeah, the level of competition, therefore is also really, really
high. And how many systems do you
really need? Yeah.
How many different e-commerce packages do you need?
How many different hiccup areas and juvenile websites?
Do you need at some point especially if you start building
public functions and do it collectively?
You just need one of them. Exactly the best one, the best
one of the best ones all we need.
Yeah. Yeah.
We're all trying to make that best one, which means we all
have variance of the best one true.
And there's no incentive for us to join forces and cooperate,
which is quite sad. It's at.
So I don't think there's an incentive behind it, right?
A lot of thing is you need to make money and you can get money
from the people, but it doesn't mean that if you cooperate with
the same amount of people, you're going to get more money
because of it. I see what you mean.
Yeah, so you're talking really about different Enterprises not
wanting to cooperate in any way, I understand exactly
competition. Makes sure there's more money is
better to write. You have a little bit of a look
in. Yeah, get people in my system
and an amine. Also for the end, end consumer,
right? If there's a centralized system
and they're not building or they're not fixing your needs,
you're going to complain to that one entity.
That's kind of what we have in a political sense in a country.
If there's competition then people get better because of it
right there. Like all the competition is
doing that, we're going to innovate on this competition
breeds Innovation and if you don't have that competition
anymore, I don't I don't know if he becomes better of it.
Yeah, that's a good question as well.
I think that the way I look at it in the context of
decentralization is the idea that you can have data and
software completely open. Yeah, means also that you can
make your own variant of that software and tweak it to the
extent that you needed to be changed.
So it would be less in terms of each complete new package.
Like we need to complete new bit of software just because we want
to change this one thing. Yeah, take the base package and
change it for the one thing that you want to have.
And just so, you know, I think change will be more granular.
Because right now, it's often indeed, like it's an
encompassing solution that an Enterprise offers and at some
point other businesses have caught up with that and offer
the number of additional functions and your own package
is now too big and too slow too. Sluggish to change.
And therefore, we all migrated to this, you big thing, which
has the additional fuel functions.
Yeah, but that's a massive migrations.
Step, when we could really focus on.
Yeah. What's the core value of each of
these things? And make sure that that's well
established and build on top of that little chunks?
Yeah, I really like that example because that I mean you mean
both Consultants here, actually, Bia.
But that to me feels like what's happening continuously, right?
Yeah. Organization creates some
amalgamation of software. They're like ah, we're moving
too slow versus our competition. Now, we have this big budget of
doing it again and we do it again or we try to do it again.
It never works. And we go back to the old system
and improve that one. There's always this Loop of kind
of improving and becoming too slow and then like software kind
of sluggishly dying off in a way and it never goes away.
If we have Commodities, we have building blocks and that's
really the core of our system. And as free to everyone and we
can innovate on top of that, you had kind of The Best of Both
Worlds, right? You don't have this centralized
system which are trying to decentralize and no one has any
input. You have these Commodities and
data could be one of them. Hopefully.
Infrastructure is also one of them so that it's just available
for you to distribute it to the community and you can innovate
through that, right? You already have those building
blocks. Don't need to reinvent those.
And then fix actual consumer problems or customer problems or
add to the world just be beneficial somewhere.
Yeah. I mean, I'm not so idealistic
that I think will go to some place where we have exactly one
of every function. Yeah, of course, I will be
multiple instances and a little bit of competition, but it might
be, I think it could be a little bit more granular.
Yeah, bit more fine. And what we're trying to build
from scratch, every time there's a need like, yeah, we see that a
lot of clients that they built a whole Suite of things to help
the developers like have bought form teams that infant that
solve problems that have been solved in every company over and
over, and then build packages on top of each other.
That's do the same thing in essence.
Yeah. So sometimes it seems a bit
wasteful and I there's also value in re-exploring those
areas that that's not necessarily bad but we seem to
be doing to be too much. Yeah.
Way too much. Yeah.
And at some point like from a personal development point of
view, I like the new things right?
Yeah. But then I also love novelty, I
love naughty, right? That's what keeps us going, kind
of moving towards the unknown. Picking up unknown things making
stuff happen, right? It's very very tangible at the
end of the day, but if I've done that once twice, definitely a
third time, I'm not many things. Someone else Do this.
Now you're an expert. Yeah, you're Austin for the
yeah. The guy.
Yeah, exactly. You've become a problem that you
have to solve and the only way of solving it is like I don't
want to do this anymore which is sad, right?
If you if we're talking about a guy that fixes my dryer, my
washing machine, they're never going to be like, ah, let me
Google how I do this because I've done this like 10 years
ago. I've done this for the last 10
years, but I always have to Google how I do this.
I do have to do that sometimes while I'm creating software.
No, yeah, everyone, everyone Google stuff.
I'm writing a shell script, I have to Google my stuff again
that's just terrible for. Yeah, I just do it.
Just not enough to be able to just write it off out of my head
exactly. But if we're going back to the
mechanic, they will do that thing.
They're specialists in that thing, they take pride in
probably doing that thing for software Engineers.
I also take pride in the skills that I have, but my skills are
not my output, right? And if I'd have to do the same
output, if I have to build the same systems in the output that
I'm doing, yeah, I'm not going to be Be because those same
mental steps that I might be doing.
I want to apply them to other things as well.
I want to have different output. I want to add value in different
ways and it's a different from that.
What do you mean by output in different ways?
So, if I'm if I'm building an e-commerce website, it's always
going to be an e-commerce website.
Yeah, I'm not gonna, it's not a different domain.
Maybe domain is a better word. I want to explore different
domains. Yeah, I've done domains and
information systems in healthcare and stuff like that.
That's vastly different from an e-commerce website.
Nothing. Nothing against an e-commerce
website. I like doing it.
It's a cool thing. I've grown up in retail which
with regards to my professional career but you had some point
you look at retail and e-commerce, you've seen that you
want to explore different things and I don't think people that do
stuff physically if we're talking about a mechanic for
example, they don't have that, that's their domain and they're
happy with that, they become expert in that domain.
And I don't really feel like I need to move on.
I don't know there because you're not a mechanic.
It's also what I do know, is that actually we've asked
someone to check up on our boiler?
Yeah, and this guy also Googled our particular boiler, find the
instructions. Like how does this particular
version work? So, even if they know boilers in
general, they still look up things as well.
They don't know, every boiler by ahead.
Of course. So, and does it make you happy?
I don't know. Yeah, I think, I don't know.
I think it's fair. I mean, absolutely in software
engineering. I think it's fair in the world
that you're like, I don't know this.
Me let me find out but that's a skill that you need.
As a matter, if it's something physical or is definitely the
biggest Kill Ya, the thing is, if it's physical, I just is less
common. I feel like because you've done
this or you've seen this, there's not many variants of the
same thing. By the boiler does an upgrade
daily and software releases. Probably sometimes, daily Israel
is a big difference in the end. Cool man.
I'm gonna I'm gonna round it off here.
There's a lot of stuff to think about with regards to
decentralisation, I didn't know. It was this big of a rabbit
hole. I always thought it would be,
but man, if we have a lot of Commodities in place, I think it
will be really cool to build on top of that.
I would love that. Yeah, right.
And just, hopefully being paid in some way for them.
Ideally yeah, exactly. Right.
Time is the, is the biggest currency we have about, of
course, remote, tying it all back together.
I mean, time is the biggest currency we have, right?
And you want to spend it adding value something absolutely cool
merline Bogart. Everyone, I'm gonna get this
camera, I'm gonna put all his socials in the description
below. And with that being said, thanks
for listening. We'll see you on the next one.