umarniz

Talking about staring at interfaces, I got my first Pentium computer when I was 7 in a village in Pakistan. I spent all day fooling around and accidently stumbled upon quick basic. Having nothing to do I learnt how to code because the help menu listed all the commands and the interpreter gave errors when I did something wrong.

With a clear feedback loop and the insane motivation of a child I learnt to make games/software on basic which ended up defining my life.

Sometimes we overthink it, all a child needs is a safe environment to fool around and letting them be obsessed about things.

I grew up in a city with temp reaching 48 Celsius in the summer

Of course this wasn’t very good for electronic devices and hence every console I bought died with a year of over heating.

For my PS2 I managed to extend the lifetime by placing big blocks of ice in a tray underneath it and the console sitting on top on a rack to avoid contact.

I had to replace the ice every hour but the system worked well enough till the console died eventually of water damage.

Self fulfilling prophecy.

It took several near burn-outs and tons of hours of my life lost due to frustrations before I truly understood this. The world is what you want it to be.

Hopeless because everyone in the world is so selfish? You create the world you live in. Live selfless and see the world transform around you.

Frustrated you have to constantly interfere to make someone good at their role? You have to yourself believe they are the best in that role and then see them flourish.

Afraid your relationship might not workout? The fear itself will make your worst thought a reality.

Your life becomes extremely easy once you truly understand the world is what you believe it to be.

Note: There are of-course strings attached to this concept, but understanding the power of this is life changing.

Want to point out how incredibly good the website phys.org is.

I was first introduced to it over 15 years ago and remember visiting it using dial-up internet from Pakistan as a teenager to learn about the latest developments in physics.

Gem of a resource that is still going strong.

Symbian was the era that trains you to never be afraid of debugging the hardest problems and understand how big of a blessing documentation is.

A few examples of my childhood experiences making a game for Symbian:

1) Debugging that one problem which would cause the whole OS to crash

The crash log didn't help cause it wouldn't flush the logs to disk in time. My under developed concepts of multi-threading didn't help much either not that I know much more today 10 years later.

2) Overriding OS memory safety to read accelerometer data from memory in phones that didn't have APIs for it

The patience and creative thinking you learn tackling with such high levels of uncertainty and painful problems is incredible.

I am not aware of how engineers learn engineering (I am self taught) but this kind of patience and endurance does shape a lot of my engineering skills today.

I love the execution of this!

Not comparing but I did a similar project 8 years ago at the peak of Israel / Palestine conflict to compare tweets from Palestine vs tweets from Israel.

Incredible difference when you see them side by side.

It would be great if someone would execute such an idea for more areas of conflict to bring awareness.

There are certain regulations that make it much harder to implement E2E.

The data in a therapy app can be considered part of a clients medical file and the medical file has various compliance regulations affecting it e.g the data has to be accessible for the organisation for 15+ years.

This has created a structure making E2E almost illegal in some healthcare domains as the policy ensures that the client data can be accessible to future therapists and accessible to the organisation under catastrophic scenarios.

Only the app being E2E enabled is half the picture, the regulation has to either change or the compliance to the regulation by the mental health organisation has to be creatively done to ensure a complaint E2E implementation.

This makes it a bigger, costlier problem than making therapy more effective and hence a ton of hesitation as unfortunately you don't 'need' to do it.