Leaving the quantum indistry, for a bit
Last year I left my job at IQM. It’s been 3.7 years, and was probably the most interesting job I ever had.
IQM is a Finnish manufacturer of superconducting quantum computers. They fabricate their own chips and control electronics, and develop a full stack of software, from low-level drivers to high-level quantum computing libraries. I’ve been working on the design and implementation of that stack.
It was also my first proper job after running own businesses for 8+ years. So it was quite a change.
I also wrote a book about this field: Quantum Computing for Software Engineers. You can get it for free, or pay any price you want. And I’ve re-uploaded my PyCon talk about this topic, since the original conference channel has been deleted from youtube for some reason.
(Btw, see my other books on Leanpub.)
So now I’m thinking about the future. The world seems on fire, so it’s not a good time to change careers. I still love programming, and still do it, regardless of jobs, regularly, but somehow the entirety of software engineering feels… listless? No, not because of AI. If anything, AI made it easier to ignore some of the boring parts. But since it’s based on what people do, not on what is ought to be done, coding AI systems tend to be building extremely, painfully mediocre and uninspiring things.
Minifeed is still growing
I’ve been working on Minifeed, a directory and search engine for personal blogs, for a while now. The first changelog entry dates 20.12.2023. It was a slow hobby project, but it’s been growing non-stop. Today it tracks over ~1500 feeds, 150k+ posts and has a few hundred registered users, a few of which a paid subscribers.
But the paid subscription is more of a “support the dev” kind of thing. I’m wondering how should I evolve the project further.
Making a business out of any B2C SaaS is as hard as ever, it seems.
Exotext is still in alpha
I haven’t worked on Exotext, a minimalistic blogging platform, for a while now. Lots of poeple had signed up for the waiting list, but I don’t feel ready yeat. The only blog up there is mine, and the only way people had learned about exotext is by reading some of my blog posts. I’m surprised about the waiting list though, because there are so many good blogging solutions already (both managed and self-hosted), and the market is overall quite small. So I’m not sure if this is going to work out.
A few recent blog posts went somewhat viral, and I’m happy to see that Exotext had 100% uptime and sub 100ms response time, every time! Here are some of the “bangers”:
Let’s see what tomorrow brings
I don’t know man… It’s so weird and exciting and scary. Shit’s crazy.
For a few months this year I worked with Verda, a European GPU hyperscaler. It was strange becaues their business is booming like crazy, but I still don’t understand who are these companies that pay enormous amounts of money for GPUs.
As an end user of software, I am yet to notice any benefit of the AI boom. I don’t mean the AI features, I mean the other stuff that LLMs should’ve improved by now. The software I use daily is as buggy and slow as ever. What are all those agents doing?
I am inclined to do more quantum stuff, so let’s see what tomorrow brings.
P.S. I’ve been enjoying videogames lately:
Arc Raiders is the first and the only multiplayer game that I like. Have been playing it since launch and am pretty excited about its future.
No Man’s Sky is fascinating, but even though I’d put close to 100 hours in it, I feel… nothing. It’s a strange experience. Perhaps it suits a certain mood.
I bought a Nintendo Switch about 5 years ago, got a copy of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and simply couldn’t enjoy it. Somehow, this year I got the Switch 2 edition and it finally clicked. Haven’t finished it yet though.
Speaking of Switch 2: Splatoon Raiders is a lot of fun. It’s also the first game where I am enjoying gyro aiming. I always considered that to be a gimmick.
When I want to turn off my brain, these help: Brotato, Grindstone, Tetris Effect: Connected, Dorf Romantik.
I have a few good couch co-op recommendations, but will share them next time ;-)