If you’ve visited this blog in the past, you may have noticed that we are two guys writing about very different topics. Dugi usually writes about his C++ expertise, while I used to do more general-oriented posts, distro reviews mostly. I also haven’t been feeling like writing much in the past two years, as I was getting burned out both by trying to start a career as a freelancer, while finishing up my PhD and starting the process of building a house. Fortunately, since then I was able to finish my degree, get the house construction on the way (now in the final finishing touches phase) and since the beginning of this year, get a nice and cozy job as a Java backend developer. As I obviously do not like the feeling of boredom, I decided to try and resurrect this dreaming blog of ours by both starting my distro-hopping once again, writing longer, more involved reviews of both hardware and software that I daily drive and also write a few words here and there about Java and quite possibly some other languages that I started learning in the mean time.

So other than becoming a Pretty Huge Dick and a landowner, what else is new? I’ve bitten the bullet and bought an M1 MacBook Air (long-term review incoming), switching my wings of freedom for a nice gilded cage. I still use Ubuntu for most of my work and leisure, but now I also have the window into the consumer-oriented world of Apple ecosystem and access to a select few proprietary applications that I grew to rely on (Adobe suite, mostly). I also, like almost everybody I know, started to use LLMs in my daily life, using Github Copilot as a more powerful, but sometimes very stupid Intellisense. I think Copilot is a bit of a misnomer, as the code generation features are undercooked at best at the moment. I also play around the incredibly hyped ChatGPT 4, which I must admit does save me a lot of headaches and time. This I would describe as having a very eager intern, who can perform incredible feats, but needs to be guided and offered precise feedback. Due to this growing interest in ML technologies, I plan on working on some models I have in mind, once I am fully moved into my new house. Of course, it might also be a topic of a new series on this blog.

So let’s summarise – I’m restarting my engagement in this blog. We have some articles in mind that I would like to work on in a near future and a lot of plans for further topics that might be quite interesting for our current and future readers. What are some topics you can expect in the future?

• Old-school Linux distributions reviews
• Long-term hardware reviews
• Java software development (mostly Spring) posts
• My thoughts on Swift, Flutter/Dart, and other sexy languages that I might pick up
• Summaries and stories from various Linux-related events
• “AI”-related posts
• Geeky home-improvement

Stay tuned… My next post will hopefully go online this week. In the meantime, here are some outputs for the prompt I used to generate the featured image of this post.

30 year old man with dark brown hair and thin red beard typing on a laptop with Ubuntu, Java, Swift and other tech-related stickers. Patrick Nagel style.