Some Pure and Unadulterated Thoughts About Starting Things

The truth is, that I rarely ever finish things that I start. Obviously that’s a me problem and it’s starting to look me right in the face as I type this. Unfortunately, that’s going to be the same deal for invara and drin. More specifically, drin in this case isn’t going to come to fruition, it’s just something that I don’t have a ton of passion for currently and can’t see myself writing something that someone might use at some point.

With that said, there are a lot of things that I plan on doing with invara in the future that I just don’t know yet. I’m going to continue to use the invara branding and release things, but I’m not entirely sure where that’s going to lead me. Recently, I’ve read a post from GeoHot on his blog Get Out of Technology that has made me reconsider a lot of things that I’ve been doing myself.

Currently I work in Cyber, and it’s become painfully obvious and evident that the industry is going to have a rough few years going forward. Entry level positions are leaving in a hurry, people are starting to understand that for the most part analysis can be done without a human touch besides at the end (for now). Arguably though, most importantly, for a lot of people this was a way to enrich themselves without having to learn much. I’ve sort of faced that reality and realized that for myself, this isn’t working and have strived to at the very least learn.

Plans for the Future of invara

invara will continue to release things, but they won’t have anything to do with package management unless I feel like that’s useful to both me and other people. I have now decided that I’m going to write things that I enjoy writing without the idea of a consumer in mind. Hopefully, the tech is good enough that the consumers will follow, but even if that’s not the case, at the very least it’s something that I will take interest in playing with.

That brings me to some very interesting points that I’ve recently been thinking about:

  • I’ve considered building things for the defense industry, but why do that when Anduril is already doing a great job there
  • I’ve considered building things in ML infra, but why do that when there are tons of other larger companies doing that and have already captured consumers
  • I’ve considered building something in relation to Cyber, but why do that when largely the industry is taking to AI/ML quite nicely and having a lot of work already be outsourced to it

So I’ve thought of all of these things, and have finally come to this conclusion:

There are certain people out there (namely, one that I follow being Victor Taelin) working on really cool projects that are progressive in the sense that they are only there to serve the purpose of making technology better (take a look at HigherOrderCompany on Github). And although I believe that they’re doing the right thing, they are having a tough time gaining traction because ultimately it’s the incredible technology that they are shooting for without the distribution.

At this point though, I think this is the correct way to build things. So that’s what invara will do… I’m not quite sure what industry invara will target or what technology will be released, but, at the very least, I will think it’s interesting and hopefully consumerism follows that.

Confusion

So, I’m confused with the state of things currently and I’m not even sure where to start. Which also means that I certainly don’t know where it will end. And because typically I don’t finish things that I’ve started, I’m not sure there will ever be an end. But, at the very least, I’m going to take invara and work towards something and FINISH it.

Ultimately, this is the most important thing to me is to make software or hardware that I find interesting and then allow people to consume it in a way that makes sense to them.

Thanks.