Privacy-preserving payment systems, goals for 2025, and a new side project
Happy New Year all! I hope you had a great holiday break and a wonderful start to the year.
I enjoyed some much needed rest and got a chance to read a lot of books I've been meaning to get to.
One of them was a novella called By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño and I've never seen writing quite like it before - the whole book was a single paragraph. On top of being a good read, the format made it hard to put down because there was never a good stopping point.
Things I'm musing about
Privacy-preserving payment systems
Our purchases can paint an extremely detailed picture of our lives and the amount of information that we give the third-parties that facilitate card-based or digital payments when we pay for a purchase using a card or a digital wallet like Google Pay and Apple Pay is mind-boggling when you think about it.
So I was really intrigued when I learned about Taler, a "privacy-preserving payment system", as I was randomly exploring projects funded by the NLnet Foundation.
Based on my understanding of it, Taler aims to provide the anonymity that paying with cash provides to consumers while keeping the convenience of digital payments, and also reduce the risk of tax evasion and money laundering on the part of the merchants that comes with accepting cash as a form of payment.
You can read more about its design here, and an overview of why systems like this matter in the bigger picture of things on their NLnet page, but it's cool that a project like this exists in the fintech space that aims to be privacy-focused, yet convenient for users.
I'm curious to see if it becomes more widely adopted in the years to come.
Goals for 2025
On New Year's Eve, I spent some time thinking of various goals I'd like to have in the coming year.
It's a tradition I started in 2020/2021 during one of the pandemic lockdowns, but something I've really enjoyed and have found valuable to continue doing in the years since.
The goals are less like typical resolutions and more like activities that I want to do a little bit more of in my life, and are relatively easy to start adopting.
Last year I was really proud to hit my goal of writing a blog post at least once a month. I plan on trying to continue that, but this year the big goal I want to try and aim for is to build more side projects that incorporate a "green software" mindset from the get-go.
I'm hoping that by doing so, I can learn how to incorporate more environmentally sustainable practices as a software developer in a more effective way and make it something I just do rather than have to think about.
Fun things I've been up to
Working on "My Local Grocer"
Speaking of side projects, I've been talking with folks in my social circle about working a project to try and find all the independent, "mom-and-pop" grocers in my area and make it easy to find the closest ones to me.
The goals of the project were:
- refresh my existing knowledge and further improve skills building applications with the Go programming language;
- learn how to build a geospatial application using a Postgres database;
- learn how to try and bake in sustainability into the application right from the beginning while I continue to read Building Green Software and learn about various best practices; and
- learn about cool new places in my city.
I've been learning so much as I've been building it, and I plan on writing about the major things I've learned along the way once I've completed the initial version.
But one thing I'm happy to share sooner rather than later is learning about Testcontainers.
It's a package that allows you to easily set up various dependencies like a Postgres database, Redis, etc. for your tests.
I've been using it to set up a PostGIS database with seed data for the unit tests in my project, and it's been working like a dream once I got past the initial configuration hurdles that I tend to run into when trying a new tool.
Trying out digital sketching
Back during the pandemic I had wanted to try and learn how to sketch. I did a few things, none of them particularly good, but I had fun with it.
Recently, I've been wanting to try again as a result of working on the upcoming 3rd issue of The 418 zine with my friend (and co-founder) Christina Burger.
Christina has been the main driving force behind a significant amount of the art on our zine, and I wanted to see if I could help contribute a few sketches.
This brought me to one of the Digital Innovation Hubs at the Toronto Public Library, where they have Wacom drawing tablets available for folks to use while visiting one of these hubs (side note: public libraries are the best ❤️).
I spent about an hour learning how to navigate the tablet and Adobe Illustrator so I could do a couple of sketches, and it didn't turn out too bad if I may say so myself:
I had so much fun I decided to borrow a "learn to draw" book from the library so I can keep messing around with it. Depending on how it goes, you might start to see my sketches on the blog 😄
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