Trip to Barcelona

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Barcelona and I have always wanted to visit it, although it wasn’t particularly high on my list of priorities. My trip to Barcelona started rather unexpectedly, I just wanted to get a Schengen visa and I was advised to pick Spain as a country of first entrance to Schengen area because Spain usually gives the longest visas and I also want to go to Europe at least one more time during the next year so getting a longer visa was an ideal option for me.

Book Review: The Road to Serfdom

Recently I came across the 1994 interview with Milton Friedman where he spoke about his collaboration with Friedrich Hayek and how he come to write an introduction to one of Hayek’s most popular books: The Road to Serfdom. That video reminded me that I had this book on my to-do list for a few years already so I decided that it was time to finally read it.

Installing Ubuntu 18.04 on a MacBook Pro A1398

It’s been a while since I used Ubuntu or any other Linux distribution outside of Docker containers so I’ve decided to give it a go and see if it’d be suitable for my everyday needs. The laptop I chose is my old MacBook Pro A1398 and I went with Ubuntu 18.

Trip to Samui and Pha Ngan

Ko Samui is an island on the east cost of Thailand and it’s a second biggest island in Thai kingdom. Pha Ngan is a much smaller island not far from Ko Samui and it’s mostly known for its Full Moon Party which is being hosted there once a month. I’d got a lot of positive feedback about those islands from my friends so I finally decided to visit Ko Samui and Pha Ngan for a few days.

Using GeoIP2 Databases With NGINX

I’ve been using Google Analytics for a while but I never liked the side effects of this way of collecting website usage data such as having to install Google’s tracking scripts on all of my web pages. Those scripts are bad for both user privacy and website performance so I’ve decided to get rid of them and find an alternative way to collect the data I’m interested in.

Book Review: The End of Power

Power is an umbrella term and it’s not that easy to describe what it means, let alone to have any meaningful discussion about the nature and evolution of power. Interestingly, that’s exactly the topic of the book “The End of Power” written by Moisés Naím, who himself was “in power” for quite a while working as a minister and than as an executive director of the World Bank.

The Yield Curve Has Inverted

The yield curve is an important thing to watch for if you are trying to understand what’s going to happen with the economy and the inverted yield curve usually means that we’re about a year from the next recession. Let’s dig a bit deeper in this subject in order to understand what it means for us and what can we do about it.

The Future of Payments

Payments are building blocks of our society and we started transacting value long before we were able to read or write. The early payment methods were inefficient but we kept improving our technologies and now we have payment cards that allow us to pay for goods and services from any place in the world.

Kotlin 1.3 Features: Coroutines

Coroutines have been available since Kotlin 1.1 but Kotlin 1.3 has lifted them out of experimental mode which means that Coroutines API is finalized and it’s ready to be used in production environments. There are many brave souls who’ve started using coroutines since the early days although the API has been changed with the release of Kotlin 1.

Cost of Living in Phuket

Thailand has been a popular destination for the remote workforce in the last decade, mostly because it can offer a good mix of warm weather, reasonable prices and welcoming culture. There are many countries with similar climate and cheaper prices but their infrastructure is usually pretty bad so they might not have well-equipped hospitals, big shopping malls, high-speed Internet connection and so on.