Iotas

Learning in Iotas

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  • Day 4

    Day 4

    I have learnt something about myself or discovered how I should live my unemployed life today which is fascinating. It may sound very obvious to others but ever since I decided to quit my job and start my own startup, I have box-ed my mind in thinking: I have to continue to work and try to swim as hard as I can until I have got my startup running. I have tried to use as much time as possible to learn new things, networking with people, connecting with old colleagues or connection and try my best so I have the best chance to get my startup up and running. However, that was actually not the original thought on day one that I have the thought of quitting. The reason I would like to stop what I am doing (aka working) is for more time for myself to do something I truly enjoy and something I want to spend my time on. It can be having my own startup, or starting a coffee shop, or become a professional gamer (long shot), or simply, just read and play games all day. Thanks to my past 9.5 years of work life and my low maintenance life style, I managed to save up enough to support myself not to work for a few years. If that is the case, why do I still need to force myself to live in such harsh life style that I may not breath properly. Having this thought in mind now makes me think what I should be doing all time. Things may not be as tight as I think and what is the point of starting up if that ends up not something I enjoy at the end of the day. And some founders shared that, giving yourself some time to get bored is very important in innovation and ideation. Possibly I need to train myself to get bore without having anxiety coming with it.

    Today I managed to go through some example tutorials for TLSnotary and had a good chat with MC. Tomorrow I am going to interview with an incubator although I am not too into them given that they asked for a price even if I decide to join them (Sigh).

    Life is good today and glad I think things through. Next thing I should try to do is to setup a timetable that I can control and stick with. Although given the amount of commitment I have, it is hard for me to control most of the morning and afternoon time. Hopefully start with the time after dinner (about 3/4 hours) and try to stick to the plan if possible.

    Journal:

    1. MVP work done for S
    2. Went through TLSNotary tutorial – tomorrow I may get back to SwiftUI tutorial as I really want to learn and write an app
    3. Some chat with MC
  • Day 3

    Day 3

    First working day where I am “unemployed”.

    Even though my official last day was last Friday, I promised my boss to handover the work properly and closing off some loose ends before I leave. And that promise ends up eating me quite a lot of time today :S. However, I get paid for those time anyway so I am not doing it for charity at the end of the day. The downside though was that I could not work on what I want to explore for most of the time today.

    Spent almost whole day interviewing and closing the integration page for my previous boss. Then after dinner, I finally got some chance to play with TLSNotary. It is indeed a pretty mature projects where I can see a lot of potential out of it. That makes me more interested in the idea on account verification with ZKP and how we can productise this offering.

    At night, I also looked into the chrome extension that (I tried) to write and try to debug it. It was written solely by Claude so it does take me some time to trace what maybe the bug. I tried my best but I think the fundamental issue lies in the browser js interpreter and some race condition happened. Anyway, I think I learnt the fundamentals of how to write the chrome extension hence I moved on to learning the TLSNotary today. I foresee I would spend some time on this this week and try to build some demo up. Ideally I may reach out to their community and see if I can get some help with their maintainers.

    Journal:

    1. Done a lot for P.AI
    2. Spent some time on learning the chrome extension that Claude wrote
    3. Started reading and learning on TLSNotary (<– full of potential :))
  • Day 2

    Day 2

    As the second day of the unemploy life, I am starting to explore some ideas with the help of Claude code. As a backend engineer in the last 9 years, I have not got much clue on how to write frontend code. Thank to Claude code and lovable, they excuse me from my embarassment on writing the UI compononents and I can just focus on the backend logic.

    One of the ideas that came to me was about leveraging Zero Knowledge Proof to carry out account verification/ authentication check. Basically every user (or Prover) that needs to show their account has certain balance or certain numbers of transaction; they can simply download a verifier schema from the entity (Verifier). They install a special chrome extension and upload their schema; then login to their website and we would be able to calculate the witness (signature) from the request response and create a proof. They just need to send back to proof to the entity (Verifier) and the entity would be able to match that against their internal verifier key to prove the user (Prover) has certain amount in their account. Sounds complicated and it is indeed complicated. But if we simplify the logic and cut some corners, there is still a nice MVP that can be built in a week to prove this work. I spent some time to learn and try to come up with the extension that works in this way (while I am learning js/ ts and writing chrome extension). Interesting idea and definitely see the business use in there (in combine with decentralised blockchain for the record).

    Another work that I already working on is to help a very early startup on consulting their technical architecture. Two founders (Ni and Ow) founded a business basically acquire a profitable, positive cashflow IT solution company with pre-AI era technology. Trying to implement AI solution and increase the profit margin and lower the customer acquisition cost (CAC) if possible while trying to upsell more AI solution to the clients too. Both of them are business people and they looking for a strong cofounder as CTO; as they are in the hunt of one and unfortunately I am not 100% interested in the mission yet, I promised to try out working on a project with them and hope to help them unblock some initial difficulties. Nice people and definitely very smart too.

    Lastly, I was cleaning up the work I had for my previous job (P.AI) and I foresee there are still some more work in the upcoming days too before I can leave that behind me (sigh) but for some quick $$.

    Looking forward to this weekend so I can finally move out from my parents house and have my own space. Hope that would help in getting more self-time and focus on my work. Exciting!

    Journal:

    • Finished more work for P.AI
    • Chat with Ow on the project
    • Started building first version of ZKverifier extension and learnt about ZKP
    • Watched some TV with my wife
  • Journey Begins

    Journey Begins

    Ever since I was in uni, I always dream of having my own startup/ company; my own team following my own vision to solve someone I found challenging and rewarding.

    After 9.5 years in the industry, I finally managed to take the leap and quit my job and start pursuing the journey. Some people, including my family, would question my decision; especially it means I need to quit a job that pays me well with a lot of power and my own autonomy and growth. But luckily, more people around me congratulates me and have faith in me and what I am doing next.

    Although I have not settled on one idea yet, I am still relatively confident in the decision of leaving my comfort zone and just do it. It isnt an easy decision, nor an easy thing to do but my life is full of challenge anyway and that is what makes life beautiful and remarkable.

    Today is 18 January, 2026 (Saturday). It is my first day of not having a job at all after almost 10 years of non-stop working. I am a software engineer in heart (although I have been working on high level engineer team management in the last 2 years :P). I never see myself to succeed in startup in first go; I expect it would be a hard and long journey with a lot of setback and pivoting. I hope I can write down as much as I can of my feelings during this process and what I learnt and what I flopped at the end of the day as this is what makes life beautiful.

    Life (or Time) is the dimension with only one direction and it is what makes everything, every moment unique and special.

    Journal:

    • Exploring works with O
    • Finishing some works for S
    • Carried out some family duty

    Day 1 ends