Meet Firas, our charismatic son. He is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. He is not your typical “good boy” and definitely not a teacher’s pet, he is merely an above-average student with extreme honesty and an insane sense of humour (ahem, no DNA test required).
One day he came out after school, sad. “I was told off and was asked to sit on the floor” he said. I asked what he did, he said he couldn’t stop laughing remembering something, that’s it.
I, along with my family, spent a few days in Antalya, Turkey, from New Year’s Eve 2026. There is this amazing vintage bazaar in Old Town, Antalya. We stopped by a street food vendor and bought some freshly made potato chips that a young lad was selling. He was very quiet and very young, probably had come out of education recently. While he was making another fresh skewer for us, I asked my wife: “Can I check that other shop real quick?” and I left for a few minutes.
I was in my school Year 6, my teacher gave me a life lesson in disguise. He was just teaching boring economics and its rules.
“We can’t create anything, we can’t destroy anything. We can only change forms.” he said. I asked, “We can’t even destroy?”. He said, “Okay, how will you destroy this pen? Burn it, and it will turn into gases and ashes, but it will be there.”
You have a Django app. You want to push updates to the browser in realtime. You look it up and immediately get hit with: install Django Channels, set up Redis, add a routing layer, write consumers, handle WebSocket connections, manage reconnections…
All that for a toast notification that says “Your export is ready”?
I’ve been there. I built a realtime platform years ago called Socketize. It was a full-blown startup. I perfected it for a year and a half. It worked, but the market wasn’t ready. Life threw some curveballs, and I shut it down.
As you may already know me, you know how I built Canvify. What you may not know is, Canvify went wild.
I quit my day job and started working on Canvify full-time. It now supports my family and a team. A dream come true!
I thought, why not diversify a little bit and build one more app? But what should I build?
I started looking at Shopify stores as a customer. I even purchased a few things, beef jerky to candies. One thing was quite obvious: they all looked like, well, Shopify stores. They all looked the same, not in a good way, but in a boring way.
I was playing with retail business, in custom perfumes niche. Selling online in Shopify. Obviously I didn’t have the time to manage the store, so I outsourced it to a freelancer.
He used Canva to design images and videos for the store. I was impressed with the quality of the designs.
Things were going well, but I wanted to launch a marketing campaign. I needed a very catchy landing page. I asked the freelancer to design a landing page for me. And the first time I saw him struggling to come up with something.
I was once working on a project that involved working with analytical stuff— charts and so on. It was like Google analytics on steroids, and I worked on this project for three months. I imported data from several places and designed the database using my back-end code. It was a one-man show where I did everything on the project, from top to bottom.
Three months had passed, but I could not show much progress. I told my team that I was working on the project, so I just prepared a demo chart to cover up my failure to show my work. I just presented the database, and it turned out fine, fortunately. But I never realized I could do better until they decided to design the front end for this project one day. That day of realization started when Joseph came on board.
Today I will give you practical, pragmatic ideas to sell your code— no fuss, no caveat (except that, I lied: there is just one caveat). I will show you two ways of making money out of your code: one is Direct Sales, and another is Indirect Sales.
Now, please, please don’t ignore the Indirect stuff. You might exclaim, “Oh, I know this. These are indirect. These don’t make money at all.” But if you do follow the indirect ways, you will nurture a fan base— a community that will buy your direct sales. So this is not just marketing. You’re building a client base who will pay you back, not to mention that it will indirectly make you money.
I know I am not active in my blog these days, I can make lots of “excuses”, but I am just gonna provide two reasons:
Well it doesn’t mean the blog is gone, in fact I am writing this post to assure you that I will keep writing.
Instead of telling you what I am doing on YouTube (well, you can see it there, no point in writing) I will tell you what I have learnt so far on my short YouTube journey. I can’t say that I am successful in YouTube but I am growing, very slowly though.
One of the things I love about Go is its powerful collection of standard libraries, one of those is
the image library. I’ll show you how you can have a fun exercise or a weekend project in Go,
that’ll convert an image to grayscale (or kinda black and white). This tutorial will help
you learn standard image library or if you’re new to Go it’ll teach you some basic concepts of Go.