Essay incoming

Making a software that, in essence, does distributed, automatically firewall-traversing, strongly encrypting, blending with white noise, data replication, so no data is ever lost. Think BitTorrent but for anything and everything – f.ex. you can tell that software “hey, I want to backup my home directory” and it just makes encrypted blocks of data and announces them to the world; and the software is of such kind that the network ends up automatically replicating it at least 5 times (or more).

That software should also be able to issue the announcement on the network that it’s no longer interested in the keeping blocks X, Y and Z and the nodes on the network can then proceed to delete and stop replicating those blocks (the default) or decide to hold on to them some more (what would state surveillance actors likely end up doing; hey, it’s their electricity, let them waste it trying to decrypt my stuff, I don’t mind).

And while we’re at all that, we should completely change how the internet works, and make new (or revive old, I don’t know, not informed enough) protocols that fix most of the past mistakes.

I don’t expect this to happen while I am alive, sadly. There’s no commercial interest in something like that so it’s doomed to remain an enthusiast’s journey. And until there’s some sort of an universal social safety net (like universal basic income) then many of us will give priority to their paid work and free time with family and loved ones. Oh well, it is what it is.

(But I would work on that for life if I didn’t have to think about money!)

Failing that… a statically and strongly typed BEAM language. Could be the next-gen Elixir, or the LISP-flavoured Erlang (LFE) with static typing. I really hope that efforts like Lumen succeed.

Something else I’d volunteer working on, and which is far more realistic than the other two – but still very difficult – is more Elixir tooling, written in really fast languages like Rust (or Go, or OCaml when it finally becomes multicore friendly), that manages Phoenix projects and is able to intelligently parse and understand project structure and then modify it. Say, it would be able to execute a command like “move this action from controller X to controller Y” without human interference. Or “upgrade the syntax of the OTP application structure of the app to the newer Elixir syntax” (introduced a while ago but many projects still use the legacy syntax).

Projects like semgrep can be the beginnings of such tooling. I lately found out that @hauleth is involved in tree-sitter, the library semgrep is stepping on, implementation for Elixir – really happy that you’re there, man!

IMO languages like Elixir, Ruby, PHP, Python, are gradually peaking and would start to decline if some sort of a game-changer isn’t introduced there. One such thing is that there are people who are working on making static executable binaries out of JS projects. Crazy stuff, but it does show you that people would do absolutely anything and everything to keep working with their favourite language; they don’t care of its deficiencies or how many dollars of damage it might incur, or how much it holds the entire IT area back – they want to work with it so they’ll just reach for the lower layers and make their dream come true.

And IMO those of us who love Elixir should do the same because Elixir – and the BEAM VM – do actually and in fact have several crushingly overwhelming advantages compared to most other dynamic languages (if not all of them even). Those advantages should be used and played to their strengths.

A messaging platform with extensions, themes and games built in. Think of it as the vscode of messaging platforms with games haha

Thought of it many times but truthfully, this would be a labour of love. Bringing any external financing to it will inevitably pressure you and put you on a schedule which will immediately and effectively destroy all my passion for it.

Plus I am not in a good situation finance-wise – no savings (although the job pays kinda sorta okay). So can’t really just stop working and go chase that dream.

Sadly, a lot of such good ideas get drowned and eventually killed by our needs for survival and stable home. My ideas will likely meet the same fate. At least it looks like that so far.