estonia: year 2
Year 2
It has now been 2 years ever since I packed my stuff into my Volkswagen and embarked on a little adventure called “moving to Estonia”. Honestly, time has flown by so quick. I will go chronologically over all the events which remain in memory from this time stretch.
Roughly 3 weeks after I arrived, I had just found an appartment to live, Ukraine got invaded by Russia. I remember standing on the balcony, I might have been a little under the influence, I was looking out over a peaceful park dotted by apartment buildings, from tens of windows: a soft yellow light emitted, bearing witness to the many lives that were going on. It felt as if the peaceful sky above all this was somehow a deception and that it might burst at any moment, releasing some wave of insanity that would descend on these lives. It was not a very pleasent thought, and it reminded me how much I loved Europe and all it stood for. 2 years later, and I’m saddened to say this; but I don’t think it Europe has shown the necessary resolve to address this danger. I’m reading articles which talk about Russia out-producing artilery ammunition by a factor of 10 (in comparison to EU/USA). It’s clear that the terrifying example of Ukraine has not shocked Europeans into action.
My first year I have spent working at Unikie, a Finish concultancy company. To be completely honest, I took the job as a way to move to Estonia, so I shouldn’t complain, but the experience was not that great; since it just confirmed/reinforced what I honestly already knew: big companies are just insanely bureaucratic, and I honestly don’t understand how they manage to get done anything at all. In this case, the company I worked for was Qualcomm, a big fish from US of A. I thought, perhaps American companies are different from European ones? (my previous negative work experience was with Nokia). Turns out: no, they’re all the same, actually I think Qualcomm was considerably worse (at least the team I worked with), since it was completely overrun by Indians who honestly I wouldn’t trust with programming a traffic light (let alone critical telecom infrastructure).
Luckily, I didn’t move to Estonia without a “plan”. What might that be you might ask. Here it goes: naturally I’m not the most socially outgoing person, but after moving I put it in my head that I had to try to keep my “social entropy” as high as possible (especially that crucial first year). And honest to God - it kind of worked? I joined a co-working space, which was where I spent most of my Saturdays and Sundays (and eventually also working days, since I was so bored with the company office vibe). There I did meet some cool people, but unfortunately most of them were working on web development related stuff (or crypto) and that’s just not what I was looking for (as I’m more into embedded/electronics).
However, before I had moved I had done some research; I knew I wanted to meet some interesting people as fast as possible; and the coworking space which I eventually ended signing up for wasn’t the only place I had found which was (potentially) promising. I had also found K-Space: a hacker space. In the first month or so I had paid a visit to both; Lift99 (the coworking space) was pretty lively, had a table tennis table (heh), and was in a pretty cool/hipster-ish area. Visiting K-space went as follows: there was 1 guy (very friendly!) who gave me a tour, they had some pretty cool old computers and a working area for soldering/wood and so on; but it looked pretty empty as far as human activity goes. So I made my choice by signing up for Lift99. Fortunately, the guy that gave me the K-space tour also invited me to the Slack group, and so I could still keep tabs on that was going on there. A half year went by and I saw the following comment:
Interesting. Pavel Kirienko? Sounds Russian/Ukrainian. I decided to Google his name, and stumbled upon his Github. Then I saw this:
First thought: alright this guy is clearly one sick son-of-a-bitch workaholic, he’s probably interesting. So I sent him a PM, asking if I could visit to see what he was working on. The rest, as they say, is history.
In short: for 8 more months I would continue working at Unikie, grow gradually more frustrated. In the meantime, most of my free time would be spent working on OpenCyphal, an opensource project that is led by the previously mentioned Pavel. What happened at the end of those 8 months is actually a bit funny (and classic me, if I may say so).
After many frustrating discussions with my Qualcomm colleagues where I was trying to expound on the benefits of writing tests (there were none, I had written something that could be used as such, but was never going to get merged since it wasn’t something that was on their development roadmap). One fine morning, at standup with my colleagues from Unikie, I announced that I would like to be transferred to a different project, and that I wasn’t planning to work on anything Qualcomm-related going forward. My logic: “Worst case: they fire me, and that would be a blessing”. They fired me. Lucky for me: they gave me 3 months pay (if I remember correctly, might have been 2). Get this: all this time Pavel was telling me: don’t quit just yet, I can’t really hire you right now. I texted him telling what happened, next day I started to work at Zubax Robotics (for free). Fortunately, after a couple of months Pavel managed to come through and pay me a salary. All’s well that ends well.
I remember that once I was sitting on a bench in a park with my (then) girlfriend. She was applying for an Erasmus exchange program; and had to write a cover letter explaining why she felt compelled to go study abroad. She asked me to read her letter to check her grammar/spelling and give some feedback. Her letter ended with a quote:
The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course, being a sarcastic teenage boy, I made a bit of fun of this and said it was perhaps a bit too instagram-quoty. 10 years later, I’m ending this blog with the same quote.