Ever since the release of Windows’ Virtual Desktops, I’ve found them very useful. I thought that compartmentalizing every single part of my PC workflow would be excellent using Virtual Desktops: I could have one desktop for development, one for my L.I.F.E Stack, one for my times when I simply relax (music, chat, et cetera) and that was pretty much it. Even after my switch from Windows to Linux, it was actually pretty good in order to stop my constant gliding between windows and procrastination, but it soon turned to this:

0.02 load? 200 MB RAM? Well, that’s just inefficient. For almost 3 years, I’ve owned a VPS online that’s been randomly used for a great many things. I’ve used it for my endeavors in ethical hacking, as a NAS, as a temporary server for my various side-projects, but I’ve never used it for a clear and defined purpose. This ended up being rather disconcerting, since the box itself was nothing to scoff at: it was a box of 4 GB RAM, 2 GHz box with 80 gigs of SSD space, which is overkill considering what I was using it for.

This is a verbatim copy of the article written for Stempathy, a STEM-oriented teen magazine, with the exact same title. Anything that might seem out of context is most likely explained by reading this article directly from the magazine itself. Hello everyone! I’m Matei Gardus, a programmer with a knack for side-projects and insane complications and min-maxing over every aspect of my life. I hope you enjoy this first issue of Stempathy.

Happy New Year to you all! I certainly hope you all have a great new year filled with productivity and good memories! Now of course, with the New Year, I always set up some new resolutions that I have always filled ever since I’ve started assigning them to myself 5 years ago. This year, I decided to make sure I’d ensure myself a way to always be able to reduce my procrastination.

School has started to pick up fairly reasonably, what with all the exams and homework and whatnot, and since work hasn’t been slowing down either, I’ve found myself with a very sudden need to relax with something other than Reddit and whatever other time-wasting activity I could find on the web. So guess what? I replaced those with yet another time-wasting activity. Except this one is at least slightly more useful (but still pretty useless in the long run).

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And trust me, you’d code it worse without me!” -Chad, a fellow coder I’ve coded a decent amount of things in my life, and to be honest, it’s been fun. The freedom and the feeling you get when you code a program to do your bidding is addicting. It feels as if you’re a blacksmith, smelting the raw ore of standard libraries and algorithms and casting it into a mold of your design, to create a tool or weapon for the task at hand.