AI

Well, technically it’s not real Artificial Intelligence but it’s good enough.

When I was around 8 years old in the early 90s, can’t remember if it was from a television show or movie where I got fascinated with computers.

A machine which you can casually chat with and ask questions.

I would fantasise about building my own small little room with cardboard boxes and then make a computer, also with cardboard boxes, that I could chat with.

And now in 2025, that dream has come true with the advancement of Large Language Models.

Whenever I have a question about something, I would type it into google’s gemini and get an answer.

The next few years will be exciting.

Looking back on the past 5 years

Last day of 2024.

The past 5 years has been great.

Found a good match on a dating app. We dated for about a year and then got married.

Found a good company to work at.

Son was born this year in March.

Of course these are my ups and there are some downs, but there’s no need to talk about those.

Things are going great for me ever since I moved into my own home. I often think that this home is bringing me all sorts of good luck, and I enjoy spending time alone at home.

Looking forward to the next few years to come.

My son

badreq

One of my pet projects is a webmail client that uses email sending services like Sendgrid to send and receive email. This would be cheaper, and perhaps free, than buying a mailbox account from services like Namecheap (USD 9 per year). Provided you don’t exceed their limits.

I would lose out on the IMAP features but I plan to implement discord notifications via webhooks. And maybe I can try implementing an IMAP server should I ever find a good library for it.

While working for this project, I wanted to know what data is being sent to my webhook but since this project is still under development, I didn’t want to setup the server for it yet.

This led me to build badreq.com that lets me create webhook URLs and view the data that gets sent to it.

Built in 2 days using the TALL stack: TailwindCSS, AlpineJS, Laravel, Livewire. The process has been enjoyable.

Another Chapter

Quit my full time job in March and started taking a break from full time work since the start of April.

The first week of April had me busy moving all the stuff in my room to my new home. The huge Ikea Galant table was the hardest, but I managed to move it over single handedly.

Managed to get the neccessary things moved over before the COVID-19 lockdown.

The next few weeks and months, I spent my time doing nothing productive. And because of the lockdown, I didn’t travel further than 200 metres away from home, and was comfortable with it.

In July, I began working on my own SaaS (Software as a Service) product whose details I won’t share much publicly until it’s done.

Every morning I wake up at 8am, make or buy breakfast. Take a shower and with a cup of hot coffee, I sit down in front of my computer and begin working while listening to music from my old yet wonderful Klipsch Promedia GMX 2.1 speakers.

Being someone who enjoys staying at home, I don’t feel affected much by COVID-19. Perhaps I will when I begin searching for a job if my SaaS product doesn’t take off.

But for now, it feels good to have a spacious and comfortable room to work in.

What are you waiting for?

The phrase, “What are you waiting for?” is so overused in advertising. I wonder who the first advertiser is who used it.

Many years ago, a company that runs a huge anime convention every year in Singapore, made a facebook post to tell their fans that tickets are now up for sale.

As you suspect, they ended the post with the words “What are you waiting for?”

And so I left a comment in that post saying “Waiting for the price of the tickets to fall.”

My comment soon got deleted and I noticed they stopped using these words again in future posts.