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Heylow!

Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe.

I'm very excited to welcome you to the first edition of what I hope to make a weekly newsletter. I'll summarize what I published on the blog, shares interesting things I found on the great interweb, and generally talk about some behind-the-scenes stuff. Say a prayer for regular publication, would you?

This was a hectic week. 

I started a new series of articles called "For the Layman" which focusses on explaining frequently encountered and often complicated software engineering concepts in as simple words as I can manage. The first episode tries to explain "distributed systems" by imgining what a "distributed" car might look like. It also features hand drawn diagrams by your truly for the first time. Check it out!

In other big news, I have moved kislayverma.com from Wix hosting to self-hosted Wordpress. Creating the site on Wix was convenient, but the lock-in this created had been grating on me for a while. Wix has not option for me to export my data, and not having full control on my data is not something I want to live with now. I thought about using Substack, Ghost, and some other platforms, but "owning" everything, for me, eventually meant owning it ground up. So I got a server on Digital Ocean and set up setting up Wordpress.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably seen some tweets around this. It has taken 4 days (and counting) to shift all the content, fix all the links, and verify that everything looks fine. I'm still working on fixing email related issues, and setting up Paypal. If you find any broken links or any other problems, just give a holler and I'll fix things right up.

In other interesting stuff on the internet, I have been digging into on the technology behind decentralized identity and data management. But more than the tech, the deep questions this article raises around the very concept of identity gave me pause.

"The act of 'registration' implies that an administration process controlled by Society is required for "identity" to exist. This approach contrives Society as the owner of "identity", and the Individual as the outcome of socio-economic administration."

You should also read this super interesting article which covers a lot of historical ground on how identity management on the internet has evolved and what "self-sovereign identity" may look like. 

Until next week.

Cheers,

Kislay

	For the Layman (Ep. 1) – What is a Distributed System?
	Adios Uber, and ideas in the afterglow
	A Narrative Approach to Software Design
	Book Highlights: 97 things every software architect should know
	Design review checklist for Distributed Systems