Patience – this generation’s rarest resource

We start our life depending on others. We pretend to be adults in our playing. We pretend we are married, that we have children. We can’t wait for this to be real.

Then we start going to school. We observe that there are a lot of things to be learned and it seems that even if we do our best, there is still a lot to learn. We can’t wait to know it all.

In the meantime, we start to fantasize about being with somebody way to early for our age. Time goes by and more and more of our energy goes towards finding someone suitable for us. We can’t wait to find that special someone.

Then we find that special someone and we are thrilled. For a second.

We get married and we have children. The childhood “pretend” becomes real. They are lovely, especially when they’re sleeping. But then they start with demands, with their own opinions and wants. We try to educate them, to teach them what is right, to make them understand. We can’t wait for them to understand.

Meanwhile, the needs of the family grow bigger and bigger, so we have to keep up with our career. We read, we watch tutorials, we try different projects. We can’t wait to be experts in our field.

This is our life now. We struggle everyday to become better, to earn more, to reach the next step, to teach our kids the values in life and for a small second of two weeks a year, we take a vacation from it all and we breathe.

Is this our life now? Why don’t we have patience with our spouse, our children, our coworkers, with ourselves? Why are we in such a hurry to be the next “me”, when we didn’t enjoy our current self? Time is limited and it’s going fast.

Are you at the beginning of your career? Enjoy the learning and don’t stress about it.

Are you at the beginning at your family? Enjoy the present things now, because they will never be the same again.

It’s not a race, it’s a journey.

Dieter F. Uchtdorf

You know the quote, it has become a cliché. We like to say it, but we don’t like to make it our own.

We don’t become patient until tragedy strikes. Then, nothing else matters than to be with our loved ones, to be near friends and family that we love. To hold our spouse, to kiss our children, to hug our friends.

Please, for the love of God, don’t wait for tragedy.

Have patience now!

AMiCUS Coding Days 2019

We completed the 4th edition of this event! ???

For those of you who don’t know what AMiCUS Coding Days is, let me explain.

AMiCUS Coding Days is an event where people from 14+ learn new technologies and build something with what they’re learning. The event was in August for 5 days and was held near Brasov, Romania.

Every year we have different projects on different technologies. Here are the ones from this edition:

Introduction in programming with Python 3.0

This was a first for us because we didn’t have a project for those who are absolute beginners in programming. This was a huge success (the project with the most students) and the class was held by Vicențiu Petreacă.

They learned the basic of programming, at first with pseudo-code and then with Python 3.0.

App 4 Health

This project was a continuation of last year’s project and the team added new features to an Android app using Android studio with Java. They stepped up their game using a brain reading helmet (Emotiv) with which they could control the app. This project was mentored by Phd. Nicolae Goga.

CV Online

This project went from creating a domain, using git, using Netlify (to do continuous deployment) to creating a CV using Angular 7. This project was led by me and I had a blast with these young developers.

Arduino Smart Home

These guys learned in 5 days more than I learned at the University ? (it’s because I didn’t go to classes). They learned how to use circuits, Arduino boards and different sensors to emulate a smart house. This project was mentored by Aurel Nicolae Floca.

Exploring Libra Blockchain

Raphael Stroe led this project starting with understanding and using Libra Blockchain and then going to Ethereum and developing an voting application on it. In my opinion, this project was the most complex and the most interesting of all.

Extra activities

Besides learning and working, we did a bunch of activities, seminars, board games and of course, a trip to the mountains.

Everyone is welcomed to come and if you want to lead a project, we always need more mentors.

Until then you can follow us on facebook.

Backblaze – unlimited online backup and its problems

Who doesn’t love free backup? But nothing in this life is free. If a backup service with unlimited or large space is free, you have to wonder how do you pay for it? Ads, privacy?

The next best thing is cheap backup.

Backblaze is a backup service that allows you to backup your entire computer with all the drives connected to it for 6 US $ (besides that, you will have to pay the VAT corresponding to your country).

If you sign up for this service, pay attention where you set your upload server. If you’re from Europe and you set your upload server to US, it will take a very long time.

Here is my PROs list:

  • It’s cheap
  • Unlimited storage
  • It’s easy to use (mostly)
  • You can filter out different types of file you don’t want to backup

All of this sounds good, but are there any problems in using Backblaze? Here we go:

  • In Romania we have good speeds for internet and if you leave the upload settings as recommended, it will finish uploading in 100 years. You have to tweak the upload threads by trial and error (because I haven’t seen a good explanation on how those work exactly) until you reach a decent speed for upload.
  • Not sure why, but if you don’t update your backup at least every 6 months, the backup files will be erased. This is a big NO-NO in my head. As long as I’m paying for the service, why won’t you keep my files more than 6 months?
  • You can’t easily select what files to upload and what not. You have to add to a specific list in Settings, what you don’t want to upload.
  • You can’t select the priority of files you want to upload. From what I noticed, smaller files go first and larger files go last. That’s fine per general, but what if I need something to be backed up first?

Nevertheless, I’ve been using this service for three years now, and I’m recommending it to people, but if a service would come without those problems, I would easily switch.