Oh, hi. It’s been a while. I have mostly forgotten about the existence of this blog, but I do regularly get GitHub notifications about vulnerable modules, so I’ve been thinking about updating the generator (Hugo) and the build process.

But anyway, a couple of years have swooshed by since my last post and a lot has happened.

In June 2023, we packed our things and moved from Sydney to Melbourne. The main reason was the high cost of living in Sydney. I still think it was a terrible mistake. Melbourne has never felt like home to me. The summer is short and winter temperatures can drop to 0ºC. Most of the year, it’s quite cold, and the weather is often depressing – not too different to Southeast England, to be fair. Sometimes it’s sunny, but usually a grey cloud cover is blocking the sun. There’s pretty much always a cold wind blowing from the southwest and it’s dusty.

If the wind blows from the inland in the summer, it can be scorching hot, up to 40ºC. The pollen season is particularly bad, and thunderstorm asthma is a thing here. It’s quite dangerous actually if you have asthma. Many suffer from it because Melbourne is the allergy and asthma capital of Australia.

There’s graffiti everywhere in the part of the city where we live. The public transport could be better, and sometimes, especially in the western and northern parts of the city, it feels like all development stopped in the 1980s. Sorry Melburnians, but Sydney does it better.

I still have the same job I had two years ago, but we are not fully remote anymore. I need to go to the office three days a week. The trend is moving towards 100% in the office, which is not great. Flexibility is usually only offered for those who live very far away from the office. I love working from home, but I also need the social aspect of the office and a great tech community it can offer.

We want to buy our own home, but due to the insanely high cost of properties everywhere in Australia, we are mostly priced out of the good locations. We need to make compromises and either buy a smaller place, or move further away. The latter is not ideal because a long commute sucks, and in the suburbia you cannot get anywhere without a car. We’ll see where we end up. Maybe in the next post you’ll get an update.

Our baby boy is not a little baby anymore (“No, I’m a little boy!", he says). He’s now a toddler in the middle of the “Terrible Twos”, growing up fast, learning many new skills, and becoming quite a bossy character (“Daddy, come! Mummy, come! No, my do it!"). He constantly asks, “What’s this?" or “What’s that?" and we have to do our best to explain how everything works. Fascinating, but also so very tiring. I have no idea how single parents manage to get through all of this without losing their sanity.

I’m not even going to dive deeper into the political shit show happening in the world right now. You only need to open the news or social media feed and you get enough pain and misery from there.

Until the next post. Stay safe!

Hello, folks! It’s been a while since my last post. Those who know me in real life should know that our family grew from 2 to 3 in July 2022. Getting a baby boy has changed many things in our lives, and routines now revolve around the little one.

This hasn’t stopped us from going out every now and then, but we’re usually heading home relatively early. Babies must be in bed around 8 pm, and public places like restaurants become uncomfortably noisy very quickly when people have had a couple of drinks.

We also took one short road trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains and another longer one to Brisbane, driving 2,200 km within six days. For Christmas, we flew to Adelaide to see the in-laws. Travelling with our baby has been easy. He’s a good traveller and falls asleep as soon as the car starts moving, or the plane takes off. So I’m pretty confident about taking him on an intercontinental flight to introduce him to the other side of the family and friends in Europe.

Let’s talk about work a little bit

In work news, it’s been a frustrating and exhausting ride. I’m in my third job within one year, as the previous ones have not been great fits. Finding a job hasn’t been that hard but finding a job that would offer me an excellent foundation to maintain and grow my skills has been quite hard. The working culture in Australia is somewhat similar to the UK, but the management style seems more top-down than I’m comfortable with. I appreciate leading by example and building things together as a team, not being told what to do and then getting blamed for doing it wrong after the manager changed their mind. Micromanagement should have no place in modern software engineering.

The pay is good, though, and it’s been somewhat easy to find the same salary level I had in the UK. Senior software engineers are paid well in Australia, so if you’re looking for a change of scenery, why not consider moving Down Under?

The pandemic killed all the meet-ups, and some have slowly revived during the last six months. However, the offering is still way quieter than in London or Berlin. Sydney is a city of 5.25 million people, and I had assumed the tech communities would be more active.

Twitter has been the primary platform for keeping in touch with my tech buddies for years. It’s been my main source of information, the coolest new libraries, technologies and the general direction of web development. Now it’s been destroyed, and the communities have escaped to greener pastures elsewhere. Some fled to Mastodon, and some have put more effort into their personal websites and newsletters. Some have decided to stay in their bubbles. A considerable amount of information is also buried in Discord servers, out of reach of public search engines.

Sometimes I think I could do something entirely different for a living. I just haven’t yet figured out what that would possibly be. In my dreams, I want to write a book. I have already drafted a rough plot line, although it needs more work. With this pace, it might take years before I’m happy with the outcome. On the other hand, many famous authors wrote their first books in their 40s or even 50s, and I think it’s never really too late.

Projection to 2023

I have no idea what 2023 will bring. The Russian invasion in Ukraine is still ongoing. China is constantly testing the defence capabilities of its neighbours, increasing its influence in the Pacific, and its military is becoming stronger. Climate change has not been stopped, and to be honest, I don’t believe our generation can stop it. So things don’t look too promising, but that’s how it’s always been. When I was a child, Chernobyl blew up, the Cold War was at its peak, and the threat of nuclear war was always imminent.

We’ve been somewhat happy in Sydney, but the housing crisis with ever-increasing rents makes this city a very expensive place to live. Moving further away from the city is tempting, but we also want to live a social life and go to pubs, cafes, museums, concerts and festivals, which only happen in the city.

Three years of La Niña is ending, which reduces the amount of rain, but the opposite effect of El Niño is likely to take over. That means hotter and dryer weather, more drought and bushfires. Not exactly better. We already knew that when we decided to move to Australia, and we’re okay with it. I like the sunshine and the mild winters.

We’ll see what the future brings to us.

A while ago, many of us were eager to finally witness the end of the pandemic. To have the opportunity and privilege to travel again, to see the world, explore new cities and get immersed in new cultural experiences. And not just that, but to bring security to the world economy. Get the businesses booming and value of your investment portfolios increasing. To feel the future being a little bit more secure than it has been during the past 2 years.

How wrong we were. So wrong.

The events in Eastern Europe today echo the message of 1930s very loudly. It is so easy to compare Crimea of 2014 to Sudetenland in 1938 and Ukraine of 2022 to Poland in 1939. We are all horrified as no war of this scale has happened in Europe since 1945.

Even though it is said that history repeats itself, I think that in reality things are a little bit more complicated than that and we simply shouldn’t try to predict the next move based on only historical events.

Now, let me get one thing straight first. By saying Russia, I mean the Russian state controlled by Kremlin. Many ordinary Russian people are opposing this war as much as we are. They are equally shocked and horrified but they are also afraid of the consequences if they voice their discontent. Please don’t point your anger towards them. There is already enough hatred in the world.

A few years ago, I read a book called Prisoners of Geography, written by a former journalist and author Tim Marshall. This book gives some insights to the importance of geography in warfare and defense. The land from Northern Germany across Poland, Belarus and the Baltic States to St Petersburg and Moscow is mostly flat. There aren’t tall mountains, huge rivers or any impenetrable natural obstacles to slow down or stop the advance of invading armies. Same applies to Ukraine. It is very flat terrain from Black Sea all the way to Moscow. Who controls these lands, can simply drive their tanks to Moscow and make the Russian capital fall (probably easier said than done).

The only way for Moscow to stay secure is to have this territory under their own control — either directly or indirectly through loyal allies. When the enemy has to travel through thousands of kilometres of hostile territory to reach their targets, the service lines are simply far too long and vulnerable for their armies to survive the campaign. Add the brutal Russian winter in the mix and you may have a chance to save Moscow. Napoleon and Hitler learned this the hard way.

When the Soviet Union collapsed and Russia was weak, Poland and the Baltic States joined the EU and NATO as soon as they could. They knew from history that Russia cannot be trusted and the geography of their terrain also works for their own disadvantage by being hard to defend. Ukraine wanted to do the same, but Russia of today simply cannot allow it to happen. 20 years ago the situation might have been different.

I am quite certain that Kremlin knows NATO isn’t going to invade them today, this year or even next year, if ever. They just cannot know who is going to be leading the USA, France or Germany in the future. The situation might change and when it changes, it’s too late to fix it.

If you’ve read other books focussing on the current masters of Kremlin (e.g. by Luke Harding), you might know that it’s not just about protecting Russia, but about the wealth and the fortunes of the Kremlin cronies. Authoritarian states are often based on personality cults and kleptocracy where the elite hoards the fortunes of the businesses and people in their own coffers. Meanwhile they control the majority if not all of the media to create a polished image of themselves as benefactors, protectors and the saviours of the people and their country, while suppressing the critique. The world will never become any better place if we let people like this to gain power.

If these leaders lose their power, they also lose their wealth and in most cases, they will lose their heads. It is incredibly unlikely for a foreign enemy to invade and take over a country possessing a nuclear weapons arsenal and one of the strongest armies in the world. The real threat comes from within. People might turn against their leaders and start a revolution. Competing likeminded kleptocrats may want to take over and get rid of the old regime. While the Soviet Union was considered a global superpower, Russian economy is not really significant on a global scale, making Russia only a regional power if looked only from the GDP perspective. There is a lot of inequality and poverty, crumbling infrastructure and worsening conditions for the residents. Many freedoms have been gradually taken away during the past 10 years. Elections will mean nothing as their results are constantly manipulated. This will make the people angry and dissatisfied. Leaders know that if they become the targets of this contempt, the days of their reign are eventually numbered. That’s when the foreign enemy often steps into the picture as an attempt to show the power of the leaders and how only they can protect the country and its people.

I don’t believe western powers can do much to resolve this situation other than make the voices from within Russia grow louder and louder. It will mean that many innocent people will suffer but that is always the price of war and we all know who is the guilty one behind this war. I don’t believe there will be peace until Putin’s era comes to an end. Russian people will have to take over the streets and start a revolution to achieve that. The response from the regime will be brutal and merciless but it wouldn’t be the first Russian revolution.

That’s what Putin and his cronies are really afraid of.