DEV Community: Damir Franusic

The burning mind

Damir Franusic — Fri, 23 Aug 2019 06:41:11 +0000

Due to increasing number of articles related to burnout, a moment of inspiration struck.

The cryptic rot of incoherent symbols slowly starts to posses your dreams, heralding a rapidly approaching moment of clairvoyance.

A single glimpse of not so distant dystopia incites the confrontation with a screaming banshee, your future self.

The fading ember of ardour which once powered your existence is now departed, forever lost in the vast darkness of menacing apathy.

As you stand on the cusp of madness feeling shivers traversing down your spine, the elusive demon slowly ravages your mind until there is but a void.

A foreboding daydream or premonition of the past, the lunacy has set in and shackled your intellect with perpetual doubt, your bespoke abyss.

You have become your dungeon, a cell with no lock, lost forever in the emptiness of muddled intellect which once stood as the pivotal point of your vanity.

Your truly,
Vimmer9

The event horizon of consciousness

Damir Franusic — Sun, 18 Aug 2019 09:15:04 +0000

"I know that I know nothing"
— Socrates

"I know that I know less than nothing"
— Yours truly

Time

Time as we know it is a construct created by us humans to organize our lives and make sense of things. It is perceived as an imaginary straight line that can only advance in forward momentum. To an average person time is nothing more than a set of numbers; the numbers which play a tremendous role in their tiny blink of existence.

Within our short lifespans, we perform a simple arithmetic operation, adding +1 to one of those life-sustaining numbers with every successive rotation of our planet around the Sun. We are the only species that is governed by their own perception of time, unlike other local life forms who rely exclusively on the position of stars, Earth's magnetism, and probably variety of other still undiscovered processes.

The accepted reality that we know more about the Moon than our own oceans, should raise some eyebrows and stoke the ember of skepticism to remind us of the everlasting turmoil in scientific community. Facts rarely remain facts for too long, they either get refuted or changed in accordance with some potentially plausible future theories.

Space

Space, the final frontier. These are the lingering words of perpetual reverberation, occurring in the minds of every Sci-Fi connoisseur, or likes thereof. The passage of time, accompanied by diverse breakthroughs, has had a profound effect on the definition of space. In this context, space portrays the prolific expanse engulfing the Earth, and not the three-dimensional Euclidean coordinate system. Outer space, although perceived as hard vacuum devoid of any form of matter, is all but an empty wasteland. Aristotle suggested that vacuum is in direct contradiction with laws of nature, stating that the existence of void space is therefore unthinkable.

As science advances, new types of matter, particles, and waves are constantly being added to that so-called empty space. Among others, yet to be discovered aberrations, space is filled with hydrogen plasma, helium, electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, neutrinos, dust, and cosmic rays.

The line which loosely marks the border between our pretty skies and atrocious abundance of horrors fatal to our existence, the Karman line, is set at an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level. This relatively small area is the only safe place for our fragile bodies, our blue proverbial home, confined as it may be.

Space-time

Albert Einstein, who published his theory of general relativity in 1915, was determined that objects of great mass cause a distortion in space-time, therefore causing a phenomenon known as gravity. The theory of special relativity, also written by Einstein, expounds that all non-accelerating observers are governed by the same laws of physics. Backed by the mathematical equations, he stated that the speed of light is constant in a vacuum, unrelated to the speed of the observer. As a direct result of this observation, Einstein made a logical deduction that both space and time were closely interwoven into a single continuum, known to this day as space-time.

Although it might be laborious or even impossible to comprehend Einstein's work, he postulated events occurring at the same time for one observer, could occur at different times for another. Time passes slower for faster moving objects than it does for a stationary, or slower ones. Although sounding like an expression from a domain of Sci-Fi, the term time dilation is used to depict this phenomenon. An average person, myself included, could barely understand the math behind Einstein's theories or even begin to understand the workings of the universe. There is, however, experimental evidence that should change the prefix of Einstein's work from theory to fact. A quite common visualization of this mind twister is the trampoline experiment. Setting a large body in the center of a trampoline would cause it to press down on the fabric, and create a dimple. If you rolled a smaller body, a marble if you will, around the edge of the large body, it would spiral inward and get pulled much in the same way a planet would exert its pull on the surrounding objects in space.

Modern realization of time has changed dramatically due to esteemed bright minds and advances in science and technology. Abundant processing power and bleeding-edge human-to-machine interfaces have contributed to placing theories under even more scrutiny. Unlike our past perception of time as being a straight line unrelated to space, we can now say, with high probability, that time and space are one interlinked continuum, with potential time travel and premonitions fitting right into this perspective. Fascinating and strenuous as it may be, we can almost grasp a tiny sliver of wisdom by observing the apparent relative acceleration of time with every passing year.

Metaphysical perspective

Assuming that space-time really is a symbiotic entity of sort, indivisible but malleable, it is therefore entirely plausible to infer that our perceived flow of time varies substantially. It is but a projection of our brains which steer the existence and maintain focus towards the comprehensible, only to shield us from gaining higher dimensional knowledge. The sheer amount of potentially infinite amount of data could be detrimental to the theorized limited capacity of the human brain.

Quantum brain

Quantum mechanics and quantum computing have been evolving constantly. The not so far fetched assumption would imply that we are headed towards another technological revolution; computers will undergo a drastic change and a well-known process of minimization. The current architectural model set by John von Neumann might cease to exist in its entirety, in the years to come. The binary calculators, which we call computers, will be replaced by quantum machines which are already here, being a part of our reality. The actuality is that quantum computers, although existing only in science labs, are still in their infancy. There will come a moment, as it was with the current copper-based binary units when evolution of quantum hardware will experience rapid growth and completely replace the current understanding of hardware and programming altogether.

If quantum theories are taken into consideration, it would seem that our brains should not be deemed feeble and limited as per the initial assumption. They serve the purpose of being our own biological computers which are, most likely, orders of magnitude more advanced and misunderstood that we ever imagined. There have been many attempts to get us closer to understanding how consciousness works, or what it actually is. Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer, a professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands published an article in the September 2017 edition of NeuroQuantology that reviews and expands upon the current theories of consciousness that arise from the meeting of neuroscience and quantum physics.

“Our brain is not a ‘stand alone’ information processing organ: it acts as a central part of our integral nervous system with recurrent information exchange with the entire organism and the cosmos. In this study, the brain is conceived to be embedded in a holographic structured field that interacts with resonant sensitive structures in the various cell types in our body.” — Dr. Dirk K.F. Meijer

The idea proposed here is an arduous journey of comprehension resembling some hard to follow Sci-Fi story. Although, the term mind over matter really shines when observed in the context of multidimensional brain. Quantum entanglement has become quite a buzzword, and it describes a phenomenon in which particles appear to be connected over vast distances, existing in multiple locations at the same time. The proponents of quantum brain theories believe in a field extending far beyond the physical brain, the field of consciousness that is interlinked on a quantum level with the cosmos itself.

Esoteric network

The implications of this are enormous, the physical brain becomes a transceiver or conduit for consciousness, with inherent ability to interlink with other brains and connect to a universal esoteric network of knowledge. The logical inference based on the summary of quantum brain theories shifts the notions of remote conveyance of thoughts and analogous abilities into the realm of feasible.

The conclusion

This article should not be considered a point of reference for anything; these are my thoughts inspired by various Sci-Fi stories and my curiosity about science and technology. I am not a scientist, nor I pretend to understand the hard math behind the popular theories mentioned in this article. I am just a software developer with a curious mind, trying to comprehend the unthinkable fringes of science. The conveyor belt, which by mind feels like at times, won't stop contemplating about questions which still cannot be answered.

Maybe we should just be grateful to Douglas Adams for giving us the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything; the number 42.

“Don't Panic.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Why working remotely is a double-edged sword

Damir Franusic — Sat, 17 Aug 2019 18:21:50 +0000

Originally published at blog.soshace.com on Aug 09, 2019 ・8 min read

The beginning of everything

My name is Damir, Croatian born and raised, currently living in Zagreb. I have always kept my distance from politics, never felt any form of attachment to national symbols, political parties or anything along the lines of patriotism. My loyalties have always been with computers and technology in general. The very beginning and my first confrontation with what was then considered the pinnacle of engineering was this:

I was obsessed with this device, but was too young to do anything other than just play games and watch in awe as those cassettes were being magically transformed to moving images on my small TV set. For the younger generations, you can find more info about ZX Spectrum on Wikipedia.

As time went by, my curiosity grew more and more and I slowly started learning about programming languages so I could finally solve the ever growing mystery of imaginary animated characters residing in my analog cassettes, somehow being conjured to life by the unbearable screeching noise made by those same cassettes when played in my Walkman. From that moment on, technology and software totally consumed my mind and have been obsessing it ever since.

My second greatest device ever was Atari ST and there are no words to describe the feeling I had when I switched it on and had to change those 3.5" floppy disks all the time. Oh Yeah, no more cassettes and I skipped the 5.25" era and went straight to 3.5" magic. It was all still mostly about games, but unlike most of my generation who were playing Shoot-em-all type of games, I was always somehow glued to the screen playing adventures games, the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island which was probably (and still is) one of my favorite games ever.

The progression of curiosity

After the Atari ST era, everything started speeding up, and there I was, worked my way from 286 to Pentium and Windows 95. At that time, I was already heavily engaged in programing, and my language of choice was Pascal. I spent quite some time doing all sorts of useful and useless coding to build up experience and when I landed my 3rd job, half of the people in my department were running Linux, mostly Fedora. Since the job was all about PHP which was running on Linux servers, it seemed logical to try and use it as a Client OS. That was the best decision I have ever made, and was also a bit lucky to have had a wonderful knowledgeable tutor who was never short of advice and guided me in the right direction every step of the way. Needles to say, I stayed with Linux to this day, I only switched to Gentoo as my distro of choice. During all those years I have tried many different languages, scripts and frameworks and from what I can remember, here's the list:

Pascal
Delphi
PHP
ASP
Scala
Java
C++
C
Nvidia CUDA
LUA
eBPF (C with restrictions)
JavaScript
ActionScript
HTML/CSS (no scripting)
React.js
Node.js
Bootstrap
SCSS
XML/XSLT

The dystopian present

From all these various technologies I somehow observed that regular C is my favorite. It is well defined, simple and fast, and since I use it for system and socket programming, it's a perfect fit. I have also discovered my niche; it seems that creating parsers (Bison/Flex) and implementing protocol dissectors (Wireshark) is my hidden talent. It's a strange kind of pull and satisfaction I feel when immersed in these sorts of projects.

In contrast to the golden age of playing with Atari ST, my current setup look more like this (stepped over to the dark side):

The not so social network

One of my ever lasting problems is maintaining private relationships and having issues with self-esteem. During the last 8 years or so, I decided to try and build up a company of my own, a startup if you will, and see what becomes of if. I was expecting it would be a lot of work, long hours and ever lasting battle with other competitors on the market (Telecom related business). To cut the long story short, due to some wrong decisions and volatile relationships between people I trusted, everything ended in, well, a disaster.

The point I'm trying to make here is that the zeal that sparks the initial idea and usually sustains it for quite some time, can only be stretched so far. Once your enthusiasm starts to plummet, it feels like you're having withdrawal symptoms from coming of some imaginary high tech drug that kept you going for all those years. Only then, your vision becomes unclouded and masks come off. Unfortunately, this moment is also a herald of imminent out of control spiral that was probably over due, and just lurking and waiting to make its presence known.

In my bespoke opinion, it is the people that are the sole pillars of startups, not the fancy tech, products, programming languages, web sites, etc. I know that now, and I have also came to understand some terms like not-invented-here syndrome, unicorn developer, team-work and some new ones like 10xEngineer. In retrospect, I seemed to have done everything opposite of what I should have done, working basically against myself, my well-being and have completely disregarded the consequences.

The damage is done and my life has been in turmoil ever since. Maybe I'm just a person with weak personality and hyper sensitive reactions, it's difficult to say. I am slowly accepting that categorizing my state as burn-out could be quite accurate.

The double-edged sword, aka WFH

WFH is an acronym for Working From Home (totally invented by yours truly)

Software developers and people in IT industry seem to be obsessed with
WFH, the modern phenomenon made possible by advances in communication technologies. I have read an article the other day, stating that a person experiencing remote work for even a small amount of time, tends to look back at regular office work with disdain.

I disagree with this statement, not by saying that it's statistically inaccurate, but trying to point out that it's unhealthy. Humans are social animals and don't work in a binary 0 || 1 way; we should all abide by the inherent balance our lives so desperately desire, that grey area between 0 and 1.

When someone uses the term "working from home", it usually creates a mental image of something along the lines of this:

Maybe there are fortunate ones whose jobs really are a picture perfect postcard, but for the rest of us who experienced the dreadful WFH, it usually boils down to this:

The physical part

I am no spring chicken, in a manner so speaking, and time really is relative as it seems to be speeding up 🤔. I am almost 38 and will probably never disembark the coding train.

There is an observable tendency in the coding community to strive for management positions; some see it as a wage increase opportunity, while others just realize that coding is not for them, and can't see themselves engaged in that sort of work in years to come.

Age is not an issue at all but there are some inevitable changes that everyone will have to come to terms with.

You will need to get more rest
Exercise should be much higher on your TODO list
Don't take it too seriously when younger developers don't agree with you just because they are obsessed with some latest framework, let them play with their toys

Exercise is vital, whether it's jogging, walking, running, hitting the gym or anything that will get you out of the chair. Personally, I opted for Yoga (the physical sweaty part). That's me and my little helper, trying to stay fit:

Everyone tries to keep up with latest developments in IT sector as much as humanly possible, but due to exponential increase in the frequency of these changes, you need the capacity of a super human to be able to follow.

These days everything is about Web and Javascript and this is how programming is perceived, for the most part. Younger developers are taught web related technologies as their starting point in the world of programming, which is vastly different than the path of most older developers which usually comprised Pascal, C, COBOL, even ASM.

I would like to conclude this section by recommending the older developers to stick to what they know and even try to perfect it. I am doing the same, and even though the preconceived notion of companies hiring only web proficient developers is somewhat true, there is plenty of work for developers working with low level languages like C and VHDL, just to name a few.

Maybe I'm lucky, but every time I disclose my love for C and low level programming, I somehow get offered a job. Oh, one more thing. When I said earlier to stick to what you know, I didn't mean to do it exclusively. It is a good idea to devote some time to learning new web technologies just to stay in the loop, not to become an expert or anything. Although, maybe there are cases of 40 year old developers becoming experts in bleeding edge technologies; maybe they needed a challenge, a change, who knows, it is not unheard of.

Experience will always be valued, and every company needs both younger less experienced developers who get less fatigued by working long hours, and older more experienced ones who, like it or not, have some age induced limits.

The conclusion

I have worked from home for the last 8 years, and at first I thought it was awesome, but I have eventually developed social anxiety and myriad of other issues. Having a place of work, being surrounded by actual people and not exclusively using Slack or some other chat tool is essential, in my humble opinion. I am currently unemployed, still working from home without my pants and confirming the stereotype.

After careful consideration and being advised by professionals, my conclusion is this: the best setup for a software developer or anyone spending most of their time in front of the screen is to balance the office and WFH, and strive for the 50/50 ratio. This might not work for everybody, but it's something to contemplate about.

My story is not unique. I'm sure there's plenty of similar ones, and one of the reasons that sparked this article is my desire to share the experience, and convey my thoughts to people in similar positions. Being an introvert myself, writing comes more naturally to me than verbal communication. The quest I'm currently embarking on is the one of self reflection and self-criticism; I am trying to get out of my comfort zone and accept a job position which would force me to socialize with real humans, and spend some time in an actual office. I was also given an option to work from home or organize my place of work to my liking. Difficult as it already is, I am not going down the path of 100% WFH, so I will try starting with 3 days in the office and 2 days at home, but honestly, I don't know what to expect.

Thank You for reading this article. Writing also serves a purpose of being a stress mitigation activity; I've just discovered this now in my 30s and am immensely grateful for the realization that there is one more activity which efficiently stimulates my brain to reward me with dopamine rush, resulting in a sense of fulfillment.

Autotools vs Cmake

Damir Franusic — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 17:21:12 +0000

I have used autotools since I started programming on Linux and got used to the whole process. When you first encounter autotools, you are bombarded by numerous scripts and files and can get intimidated very quickly. When you manage to get yourself together, you begin to realize that there are only TWO files that need editing; configure.ac and Makefile.am.

Cmake has always managed to irritate me and cause an overall feeling of disgust. I know that many famous open source projects use Cmake and would like to know your opinion whether I should start using Cmake for my next C project, or continue with well known autotools. I don't plan to support any other platform but Linux (x86 and ARM embedded systems).

Thank You,
Comment away ;)

The evolution of a programmer

Damir Franusic — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 10:23:38 +0000

NOTE: This article has been superseded by the following one, which was originally published on Soshace's blog.

Why working remotely is a double-edged sword

Damir Franusic ・ Aug 17 '19

#blogging #mentalhealth #career #productivity

DISCLAIMER: Keep in mind that I have just recently joined this community and due to my current state of mind, I felt compelled to metaphorically spill my guts out. You can stop reading at any point if you find this post along the lines of boring and/or irrelevant.

The what now ?

This is my first post here and probably the first blog like article I have ever written. I have recently come to a point in life that feels strange and unlike anything I encountered before, and the feeling of being a complete stranger to myself is quite weird or better yet, perplexing.

The background

My name is Damir, Croatian born and raised (unfortunately), currently living in Zagreb. I used the word unfortunately which will probably cause a torrent of negativity in boiling stew of nationalism, which most of Croatia really is, but that is none of my concern. I have always kept my distance from politics, never felt any form of attachment to national symbols, political parties or anything along the lines of patriotism. My loyalties have always been with computers and technology in general. The very beginning and my first confrontation with what was then considered a pinnacle of engineering was this:

My second greatest device ever was Atari ST and there are no words to describe the feeling I had when I switched it on and had to change those 3.5" floppy disks all the time. Oh Yeah, no more cassettes and I skipped the 5.25" era and went straight to 3.5" magic. It was all still mostly about games, but unlike most of my generation who were playing Kill-em-all type of games, I was always somehow glued to the screen playing adventures games, the likes of The Secret of Monkey Island which was probably (and still is) one of my favorite games ever. The images shown below are of Atari ST computer and my favorite game's screenshot. I played it on a monochrome 12" Atari screen, and it was AWESOME.

Atari ST and The Secret of Monkey Island

After the Atari ST era, everything started speeding up and there I was, worked my way from 286 to Pentium and Windows 95. At that time, I was already heavily engaged in programing, and my language of choice was Pascal. I spent quite some time doing all sorts of useful and useless coding to build up experience and when I landed my 3rd job, 50% of people in my department were running Linux, mostly Fedora. Since the job was all about php which was running on Linux servers, it seemed logical to try and use it as a Client OS. That was the best decision I have ever made, and was also a bit lucky to have had a wonderful knowledgeable tutor who was never short of advice and guided me in the right direction every step of the way. Needles to say, I stayed with Linux to this day, I only switched to Gentoo as my distro of choice. During all those years I have tried many different languages, scripts and frameworks and from what I can remember, here's the list:

Pascal
Delphi
PHP
ASP
Scala
Java
C++
C
Nvidia CUDA
LUA
eBPF (C with restrictions)
JavaScript
ActionScript
HTML/CSS (no scripting)
React.js
Node.js
Bootstrap
SCSS
XML/XSLT

The now

The trend these days is to keep adding more and more higher layers to make programming languages simpler and make learning curve less steep. I prefer the lower level languages and am not trying to devalue this new trend, not by a long shot. I would only be slapping myself, given that a great deal of my engagement was also in doing projects with React.js, Node.js and Android (Java).
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In contrast to the golden age of playing with Atari ST, my current setup look more like this:
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The people

Keep in mind that I have just recently joined this community and due to my current state of mind, I felt compelled to metaphorically spill my guts out. You can stop reading at any point if you find this post along the lines of boring and/or irrelevant or you're simply having enough of your own issues to listen to some random guy's spaghetti ramblings.

Anyway, what I wanted to talk about is my ever lasting problem, which is maintaining private relationships and having issues with self-esteem. During the last 8 years or so, I decided to try and build up a company of my own, a startup if you will, and see what becomes of if. I was expecting it would be a lot of work, long hours and ever lasting battle with other competitors on the market (Telecom related business). To cut the long story short, due to some wrong decisions and volatile relationship with my co-founder, everything ended in, well, a disaster.

In my bespoke opinion, it is the people that are the sole pillars of startups, not the fancy tech, products, programming languages, web sites, etc. I know that now and I also came to understand some terms like not-invented-here syndrome, unicorn developer, team-work and some new ones like 10xEngineer. In retrospect, I seemed to have done everything opposite of what I should have done, working basically against myself, my well-being and have completely disregarded the consequences.

The future

The moment we've all been waiting for, the ending of this nonsense. I have started working again on another project and have reached a point when I am again feeling that burn-out and can only stare at the screen hoping that it would somehow start writing the code itself. I am quite certain that all of this stems from the fact that during the last 8 years I got so used to working alone, sometimes 12 hours a day, that the very idea of joining a company and working in a team causes anxiety and deepens that feeling of incompetence and low self-esteem.

The reason for posting this article is maybe my subconscious telling me to vent out and do something to facilitate the much needed change. I also wanted to share my jumbled up and hard to follow thoughts, and see if there are other people with similar experience or issues. I am not asking a "there there" speech or pep talk, just other people's experiences if they're willing to share.

Thank You for reading and if you managed to digest all of this, I applaud You.

My favorite quote

People talk about premonition as if it's something strange. It's not. It's just remembering in the wrong direction." --DoctorWho.