Building something that people use is really hard. Making someone find your product and convincing them to use it is a lot harder. I believe this is where the marketing and sales come in. I have built a few side projects like this one here and there. Hellokea is the one that I have spent the most of my time on a side-hustle. It’s complex. It has a few features that not many competitor products have in common. The hardest part for me is convincing people to use it. Of course, I still have to make the website richer and create videos for documentation. But, again, I am not sure whether it would make people use this product after hours of effort. I would consider myself to be a developer who doesn’t want to get involved in the marketing or sales side of a business. This is the part where most software developers or people trying to make a business fail. And, I am, for sure, in that group.

It’s hard to ignore the word ‘cloud’ these days. If you are in fields related to the IT industry, the chances are you keep hearing about it more regularly over the past few years. Companies are trying hard to move your software to the cloud to earn more money and promising to make your life convenient. Product Managers and people in C-level positions are making a move towards serverless. There are a few who don’t want to manage their hardware.

It’s without a doubt that Apple has a great eye for aesthetics. When you migrate from the Apple ecosystem to another platform, the first thing you notice is the font. Windows and Linux fonts are beautiful in their own ways, but if you are as picky as I am about certain fonts in your browser and shell, there is a way to handle this on Linux.

For the file manager, terminal, and editor, it’s not hard to change the font. If you are using GNOME or MATE, gnome-tweaks is a great application for choosing specific fonts for the interface and documents. I recommend downloading your favorite fonts to the ~/.fonts folder and running fc-cache -fv to let the system know about the new fonts. GNOME Tweaks is a fantastic tool for that. My go-to option, which is close to the ‘Helvetica’ font, is ‘Inter var’.

I have been using Ubuntu as my default desktop. I am quite comfortable with Linux, Windows, and MacOS. To get a general idea of what machine learning is, I assembled a PC with a graphics card - RTX 4090 and Intel i9-1400k CPU. This system is a beast, and I am loving it so far.

Instead of spending money on a Windows license, I thought I would make Ubuntu my home. It’s not like I am new to Linux. I started my career in computers because of Linux. My first distribution was Knoppix live CD, and I have been a Debian user ever since. I did try more than 40+ distros, but I can’t get rid of my first love. All my servers run Debian. It’s one of the communities and distributions to which I owe my career. You may wonder why Ubuntu now.

This marks my ninth attempt to manage my online presence through a blog. Yes, I have tried posting content in the form of long articles on different platforms. Most of the time, I failed not because of the platform but due to the challenge of posting articles regularly. I often get distracted, primarily by building and reading articles.

How will this attempt be different? I struggled to answer this question for quite some time before launching this blog. The primary reason will be my commitment to improving my writing. While I am confident in my English skills, writing something that others want to read is an entirely different challenge, and I am determined to conquer it.