Coding Notes

My PhD Journey Postmortem

In November 2023, I defended PhD thesis after long years of struggling to finish it. I am proud of this achievement, but it took me longer than expected. Let’s summarise this journey.

Ubuntu Mate 22.04 on Thinkpad T470

Time to celebrate, today Ubuntu 23.04 is officially available, so time for a blog entry. For Ubuntu Mate users, not much news, except for some cosmetics and AI-generated wallpapers. I am writing this while using Ubuntu Mate 22.04. Some issues I had on my Thinkpad T470 with dual-boot with Windows 10. In the end, some complaints about Linux in general.

Is string formatting in Python safe to use or not?

The mighty and powerful f-strings. Well, they are only a sugar syntax on string.format, but whatever. Here I will look at one of the usage scenarios that you should not commit - taking format string from the user. Well, I had to do it in my project, so…

Small advice to fellow engineers

I was working as an outsourced engineer for Big Corporation, or I could say I was in the “shadow workforce”. And as the initial challenge dust disappeared, I was flying on remaining knowledge, but up to a point. There is a moment when you need to cut yourself out of your comfort zone. And I know that it is really difficult for people, especially after crossing the magic “three-year” point.