Building technology to enable a global community to discover and share events, resources and projects for students.

Bridgespace

Remotely conduct technical interviews with a collaborative web IDE. Let your candidates compile their code in real-time. Make whiteboards a thing of the past.

Mergepad

Thoughts, stories, and ideas on rationality, culture, politics, science, and technology. Focused on diversity of ideas and the right to free expression.

Oculus Inventa


This is a continually updated collection of notes on Peter Thiel and his book _Zero to One_.

### Radical Contrarianism

- Many of Thiel's beliefs and visions have contrarian themes. This is driven by his views on human mimesis and imitation (more to be said about this later on).
- His legendary interview question, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”, is a good filtering mechanism for finding other contrarians.
  - This question is notoriously difficult to answer because of the courage needed to express something socially unpopular.
    - _If you have a good answer, apply for a job at Thiel Capital and become the next [Eric Weinstein](https://twitter.com/ericrweinstein)._
  - If your answer is something the interviewer agrees with you on, it's probably a bad answer. A good answer makes your interviewer uncomfortable.
  - Most good answers take the following form: “Most people believe in x, but the truth is the opposite of x.”
- Contrarians aren't always right, but when they are, they are really right.

### Technological Stagnation

- Contrary to popular belief, the rate of technological innovation is decelerating in the US.
  - Where is the cure for cancer? Where are the flying cars? Why aren't we on Mars? What happened to VR? Why is the iPhone not getting better?
  - Eric Weinstein's stagnation test: Get rid of the electronics in your room. How can you tell you aren't in the 1970s except for aspects of design?
- US manufacturing is in a steep decline due to globalization.
- Free trade is a scam.
  - The worse you are at negotiating free trade agreements, the better at it you think you are.
- We haven't had any great scientific discoveries in the fields of physics in the past 50 years. The last great discovery in the field of physics of relativity was done by Einstein 80 years ago. We've been spinning our wheels for decades. String theory is a scam.
  - Some claim all the low-bearing fruit has been discovered and it's now harder to make progress.
- The only industry which has significantly accelerated is information technology. Historically, inventors were not rewarded for their work. It's difficult to capture value in engineering and the sciences. Software is different because it allows you to capture a large portion of the value you create.
  - The Wright brothers invented the first airplane, but they didn't get rich.
  - Albert Einstein came up with relativity and transformed physics, but didn't even become a millionaire.
  - Jack Dorsey came up with a social media platform capped at 140 characters. He's now a billionaire.
  - Also see Jordan Peterson on [the curse of creativity](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocDli45faiw) on the struggles to monetize creative endeavours.
- > We wanted flying cars, instead, we got 140 characters - Peter Thiel
- We're in a battle between atoms and bits. Atoms have been regulated, bits have not. Changes in government regulations and culture have stagnated many industries such as biotech, pharma, and aerospace.
  - It now costs 1 billion dollars to get FDA approval. What happened?

### Innovation Moves from 0 to 1

- Technology and innovation take things from 0 to 1 while globalization takes things from 1 to n. Globalism is copying what works. Technology invents "what works".
  - From 1971 to now, our world has been engulfed by globalism (emphasis on the rise of China).
    - Also see "What Happened in 1971?".
  - This helps explains the technological stagnation we've experienced in the Western world over the last 40 years. Instead of developing new technologies, we are profiting by exporting them to other countries.
- The ability for the United States to innovate and produce 0 to 1 technologies is what made it so great. The US has cultural and economic factors that make it friendly for innovation.
  - Countries that copy the US, such as China, cannot innovate.
  - Culturally, the US tolerates the ambitious dreamers working on crazy ideas. Failure is not stigmatized.
    - Ambition is not considered cool in Europe.

### Think for Yourself (Mimetic Theory)

Stanford philosophy professor [René Girard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Girard)'s work on [Mimetic Theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory) influences a large part of Thiel's worldview. There's too much that can be said about Girard's work. I highly suggest you do more of your own research. I've linked related resources on mimetic theory at the bottom of this post.

- Mimetic theory proposes that every single desire, excluding our most basic needs, are imitated from others.
- Our basic needs are food, water, shelter, and sex. These desires are inherit to sustain human life.
- When Shakespeare was alive, the word "ape" also meant to imitate.
- > Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires. - René Girard

### Competition is for Losers

- > Competition makes us better at that which we're competing on, but it narrows our focus to beating the people around us. It distracts us from things that are more valuable or more important or more meaningful. - Peter Thiel
- Our world is obsessed with competition. School teaches us to aggressively compete with one another for academic accolades and prestige.

### Don't Copy Business Ideas

- There is no formula for building a great business. Each great moment in business happens only once.
  - > The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.
  - This also explains Thiel's negative view of business schools and MBAs.
- This is what makes going from 0 to 1 so difficult compared to 1 to n. Doing something familiar will always be easier.
- The ultimate question we're trying to answer is,
  - > What valuable company is nobody building?

### Monopolization as a Rational Bussiness Strategy

_When I first read Thiel's views on monopolies, it made me uncomfortable. I knew what he said was true, but I did not know it could be literally be taken as advice. This section was very eye-opening and controversal._

- Monopolies are good for monopolists but may not be good for society.
- In a rational, self-interested way of thinking, **if you're starting a company you should aim for monopoly.**
- Not all monopolies are bad for innovation or society. Being able to deploy large amounts of money, people, and energy gives the company the ability to work on moonshot projects.
  - Bell Labs researchers developed radio astronomy, transistors, the laser, solar panels, information theory, UNIX, C, C++ and won 9 Nobel prizes.
- Always start small and monopolize. Many large companies today started out being small experiments that solve one very specific problem.
  - Amazon sold books.
  - Microsoft made compiliers.
  - Apple made the Apple II.
  - PayPal found a niche market on eBay.
- Non-Monopolies claim they are not.

### Getting Back to Growth

- Growth is what sustains civilization. There cannot be a society without growth. Economic, social, political, spiritual.
- The growth in US GDP over the past 40 years is not enough to sustain society.

### Undeterministic Optimisim

- A useful theoretical framework to categorize visions of the future is to divide our ideologies into a 2x2 matrix. Let's put optimistic and pessimistic on the Y-axis, and determinate and indeterminate on the X-axis.
  - Determinate means to have a clear vision of the future. One where we know what we want to accomplish.
  - ![Peter Thiel framework](/uploads/thiel-2x2-future-matrix.png)
  - The US during the 1950s to 1960s was optimistic and determinate. Crazy infrastructure ideas were being flown around. Nixon declared war on cancer.
  - The US has now moved to a period of undeterministic optimism. We're still optimistic about our futures, but its lost sight on what it looks like.

### You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

- The way we look at luck has radically changed in the past few decades. Our modern-day vision of luck destroys our free will.
- Several people have started multiple unicorn companies. Would it be reasonable to say they were incredibly lucky many times?
  - Elon Musk (Zip2, PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX)
  - Peter Thiel (PayPal, Thiel Capital, Clarium Capital, Founders Fund, Palantir)
  - Steve Jobs (Next, Pixar, Apple)
  - Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square)

### The Education System and its Failures

- At its core, the education system is built to teach what is already known. For us to go from 0 to 1, we need to innovate, not copy.
- What is the actual purpose of the education system? It depends on who you talk to. The answer is unclear.

## Related Readings, Topics, and Links

- [Zero to One by Peter Thiel on Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296)
- [Competition is for Losers by Peter Thiel](https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536)
- [Mimetic Theory on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimetic_theory)


Notes on Peter Thiel's Worldview


On January 17th, 1994, an earthquake knowcked out power citywide in LA. [Residents called 911 and the local observatory](https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/business/31essay.html), confused of what they were seeing in the sky. It was the Milky Way.

Growing up in a suburban Toronto, I've never seen a starry night sky or the Milky Way in real life. I also don't think I'm the only 18-year-old who never has either. I never thought all that much about light pollution until now.

I just find this pretty weird. The Milky Way is always up there, I just can't see it. But that's okay. I accept that building a civilization requires sacrifices. I just don't want to forget about the universe above our heads.


The Milky Way is always up there, I just can't see it.

I Have Not Seen a Starry Night Sky


The more cold emails I write, the more I realize English class did more harm than good.

English professors and teachers want you to use fancy vocabulary that few people understand. If you use fancy vocabulary in real-life, no one understands what you want to say and you look like you're compensating.

In school, essays have word count requirements. In real-life, less is more. Each word you add to your cold email will lessen the likelihood your prospect is going to read it.

In school, these incentives get you in the bad habit of using meaningless fillers and crafting overcomplex sentences. I now try to reword sentences to their most simplest form but old habits die hard.


Unlearning English Class


I've used Heroku ever since I was a clueless teenager struggling to deploy my poorly written CRUD apps. Mainly because I didn't want to spend the time managing systems inside VPS'. Heroku also offers a free 2-year Hobby Dyno offering as part of the GitHub student pack which also meant I didn't have to bug my parents for their credit card.

Heroku led the PaaS infrastructure concept and is widely regarded as a revolutionary product. At its core, Heroku's platform runs on AWS EC2 machines and what is termed as Dynos, a proprietary containerization model extremely similar to that of Docker (developed before even Docker was created). Heroku also spearheaded the Git deploy architecture of rapid CI/CD.

Heroku's founding team and early hires were a tremendously talented group. [Yukihiro Matsumoto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukihiro_Matsumoto), Ruby's creator, famously joined the company in 2011.

However, anyone now familiar with Heroku understands that its development has stagnated. After its acquisition by Salesforce in 2012, things have been relatively unexciting. None of the founders are still at the company and one of them has admitted that the platform has a few obstacles.

**Pricing**

One of the largest complaints of Heroku is the prohibitively high pricing plans. The big cloud providers are almost always cheaper than Heroku. Non-hobby Heroku dynos cost upwards of $25/month for 512MB of RAM. An AWS t2.nano instance costs $4.75/month for the same amount of RAM. Throw in [Elastic Beanstalk](https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/) and you get your fully-featured Heroku clone. Google Cloud and Azure have similar competing products.

**Competition**

I wouldn't mind paying more for Heroku if it had a larger feature set than its competitors. However, the competition seems to be eating Heroku's cake. In recent years, many start-ups have been launched with the sole goal of replacing Heroku. Render, [winner](https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/04/and-the-winner-of-startup-battlefield-at-disrupt-sf-2019-is-render/) of the 2019 TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, calls themself "what Heroku could have been". Although it's not quite perfect, I quite enjoy using Render and I find it a much better product.

With all said, there are still many fans of Heroku for the exact reasons I outlined. As one user pointed out on Reddit,

> Another word for "stagnant" is "stable", IMO. I don't know that Heroku needs to jump on every new shiny thing to be useful.


Heroku's Great Stagnation


_Disclaimer: I orginally published this article in [Oculus Inventa](https://oculusinventa.com) and have reposted it here. You can find the original article at <https://oculusinventa.com/2020/09/02/passwords-suck-lets-go-passwordless/>_

In the 1960s [Fernando Corbató](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_J._Corbat%C3%B3) was the first person to incorporate password authentication in a computer system. He wanted to secure access to digital files at MIT and it was a perfectly reasonable choice for a pre-internet and digital society.

Fast forward to 2020, there haven't made any radical changes to how we approach authentication. Most modern internet platforms are still authenticating using a username and password-based approach and it's not that difficult to see why [Fernando Corbató calls it "kind of a nightmare"](https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-13-computer-password-inventor-fernando-corbato-dies.html) himself.

-   Data breaches of poorly maintained password databases and poor software engineering practices have become commonplace even for large corporate enterprises
-   Password reuse is everywhere, one leaked password gives you the gates to the entire empire
-   Users deliberately choose to use short and weak passwords because of the vast numbers of accounts they have to maintain
-   2FA is seen as a nuisance and many users don't bother to enable it

The consequences for poorly built and unmaintained authentication systems have become even higher as we have succumbed to the convenience of the internet. Many of our essential services such as banking and healthcare have been brought online and are at risks of cyberattacks. Fernando Corbató did not have millions of cybercriminals attempt to bypass his 1960 mainframe and he did not certainly consider the internet as a threat vector when he was designing it.

If we want to truly secure our systems, we need to centralize user identity. Ideally, there should be a single source of truth that authenticates users on a variety of different platforms. The purpose of doing this is to minimize the number of credentials a user needs to memorize and simplify the complexity of the authentication systems developers need to build.

I used to believe that centralizing identity was a terrible idea and it still is, but considering the number and passwords the user has today is [around 90](https://downloads.npass.app/documents/New_research_an_average_person_has_more_passwords_than_an_average_pop_song_has_words.pdf), it might just be a better idea.

In an ideal circumstance, we would expect that every user would use a unique password for each service and was protected with 2-factor authentication. Developers on the other hand would practice good software engineering techniques following industry standards. Bugs would be patched and software would be updated.

This dream is however far from reality.

The [number of Americans who use password managers is around 12%](https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/01/26/2-password-management-and-mobile-security/) and [86% of all passwords are insecure](https://www.troyhunt.com/86-of-passwords-are-terrible-and-other-statistics/). The most commonly used passwords in the order of prevalence from the [Pwned Password data set](https://haveibeenpwned.com/) are:

-   123456
-   123456789
-   qwerty
-   password

[Adobe](https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/11/04/anatomy-of-a-password-disaster-adobes-giant-sized-cryptographic-blunder/) and [Facebook](https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/), both Fortune 500 technology giants, stored their user passwords in insecure formats leaving theme susceptible to attack.

### About 2FA

Yes, two-factor authentication is an excellent choice for beefing up account security. Microsoft recently revealed that [99.9% of all breached accounts weren't on 2FA](https://www.welivesecurity.com/2020/03/09/microsoft-99-percent-hacked-accounts-lacked-mfa/), so it's clearly doing something. But the fact is that the vast majority of end-users are simply too lazy to enable it. Cybersecurity company and hardware manufacturer Yubico published a study that [indicates around 67% of all users do not use any form of 2FA](https://www.yubico.com/blog/yubico-releases-the-2019-state-of-password-and-authentication-security-behaviors-report/).

If end-users believe that 2FA is too laborious to set up, it should not be the user's fault if they do not end up choosing to do so. Developers calling end users stupid for not enabling 2FA isn't going to solve any of these problems. Idiot proof systems are fundamentally more secure systems.

Most complaints around 2FA are because of inconvenience. If the majority of users believe that security is worth sacrificing for extra convenience, so be it. Digital platforms should aim to include 2FA as a nice additional feature but they should not expect that the vast majority of users will enable it.

![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1557200134-90327ee9fafa?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&w=2000&fit=max&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjExNzczfQ)

### Passwordless OpenID Connect and email links

Currently, integrating OpenID or sending email links is the least complex and most accessible form of passwordless authentication. [OpenID](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID_Connect) is the fancy term to describe what happens whenever you click the sign in with Google or Facebook button. By centralizing identity into an email or third-party account, we offload the responsibility of authentication to the email or third-party provider.

By going passwordless we can:

-   Reduce the complexity of authentication systems, thereby reducing the likelihood a bug will cause a large scale security catastrophe; s[ee Dropbox for a good example](https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/company/yesterdays-authentication-bug)
-   Eliminate password reuse
-   Eliminate the risk of weak passwords

That being said, there are valid concerns about the disastrous consequences which can happen if your email or your OpenID account ever gets breached.

Those concerns, while very real, pose a much smaller risk. The most popular OpenID providers, Google and Facebook, and the most popular email services, Gmail and Outlook, all have dedicated security teams, developers that practice robust password storage techniques, and platforms that enforce reasonable password requirements for new accounts. In short, as a developer, I trust Google, Facebook, and Outlook more than I trust myself and the company that I work for.

Reducing password reuse is critical for preventing targeted attacks on an individual scale. A reused password that is obtained during a breach can have disastrous consequences for all the platforms which the user has signed up for.

### Why not just use a password manager?

Yes, password managers are handy but they serve the exact same purpose as your OpenID provider or email account. They centralize identity by allowing you to sign in to any one of your accounts using one single master username and password. A breach to your password manager will be seen equivalently as a breach in your Google, Facebook, or Outlook account.

The only difference is that password managers are optional and as I previously stated before, only 12% of users end up deciding to use them. If more websites do make the push and force passwordless authentication to all of their users, they will be enforcing password manager level security to every single user regardless if they actually use one.

### Leaving passwords behind

Going passwordless with OpenID or email isn't a radical idea. Medium is one good example of a forward-thinking platform that actually forces password-less authentication. To sign up, you need either a Google, Facebook, or email account.

![](https://cdn.oculusinventa.com/2020/09/passwords-suck-lets-go-passwordless-medium-preview-signup.png "No password required")

Tech giants such as Google and Microsoft are also moving away from passwords and have been exploring options to allow you to sign in with your phone or a physical security key.

Google has in the past [expressed a large amount of interest](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/24/google-passwords-android) in passwordless authentication by experimenting with tools which allow third party developers to integrate authentication using face shape, voice patterns, and typing patterns. Recently, Google's AI focused venture investment fund Gradient Ventures, funded a [company](https://www.typingdna.com/) developing a typing pattern authentication tools for developers.

![](https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1567826722186-9ecdf689f122?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&q=80&fm=jpg&crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&w=2000&fit=max&ixid=eyJhcHBfaWQiOjExNzczfQ)

### A more secure passwordless future

And although biometric and security key based authentication is even more secure compared to email links or OpenID Connect, it is farfetched that the vast majority of users will have access to such technologies. Not all of us have fingerprint scanners on our phones and laptops, but that day is coming quickly.

That being said, I do fear the day that Google and Facebook will force you to sign up for an account using a photo of your face or a scan of your fingerprint when the technology becomes more commonplace.


If we want to truly secure our systems, we need to centralize user identity.

Passwords Suck, Let's Go Passwordless


Having recently switched from Ubuntu to Windows, I forgot how awfully Windows handled the software installation process. Updating all your packages is a nightmare and eventually you forget which applications you've installed to your system and. But if you want your Windows package installation experience to reflect more of what you'll find on Linux, use Chocolatey.

I had heard of Chocolatey before but I didn't have the opportunity to use it since I was rolling on Ubuntu. Having used it for about a week now, I can confidently say that it is one of the best sysadmin tools for Windows in existence.

There are plenty of other binary package managers out there for Windows but Chocolatey makes the experience simplistic and powerful. It has a consistent and easy to follow interface. It doesn't take a whole lot to get started and its certainly less complex than npm.

Using Chocolatey will be easy and intuitive if you've some sort of package manager before. Whether that would be apt or npm, they operate primarily in the same way.

---

### 🤔 How do I get started?

**You should never trust any blog on the internet to tell you what to paste in your PowerShell console, especially with administrator privileges. You should verify with the official installation and usage instructions on** [**Chocolatey's website**](https://chocolatey.org/install)**.**

Install Chocolatey

`Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))`

Installing a package

`choco install <package name>`

Want to find some software to install?

Head to [https://chocolatey.org/packages](https://chocolatey.org/packages)

Want to upgrade all your packages at once?

`choco upgrade all -y`

Uninstalling a package

`choco uninstall <package name>`

List all the packages you've installed

`clist --local`

### 🔐 What about security?

If you're using the community repository, Chocolatey actually handles security pretty well. All packages have to be approved by a moderator before they can be made available and you can even audit each of the package files to make sure that they don't contain anything fishy.

This is the `tools\chocolateyinstall.ps1` file for AWS CLI version 2:

```plain
$ErrorActionPreference = 'Stop';

$toolsDir   = "$(Split-Path -parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition)"
$url64      = 'https://awscli.amazonaws.com/AWSCLIV2-2.0.42.msi'
$checksum64 = 'a4a690235e48768183c692d3b0fb246ab6dbde41dc0d04ad98e680ca6b73c345'

$packageArgs = @{
  packageName   = $env:ChocolateyPackageName
  unzipLocation = $toolsDir
  fileType      = 'MSI'
  url64bit      = $url64
  softwareName  = 'AWS Command Line Interface v2*'
  checksum64    = $checksum64
  checksumType64= 'sha256'
  silentArgs    = "/qn /norestart /l*v `"$($env:TEMP)\$($packageName).$($env:chocolateyPackageVersion).MsiInstall.log`""
  validExitCodes= @(0, 3010, 1641)
}

Install-ChocolateyPackage @packageArgs
```

You can verify the installation URL for the package and the checksum of the package. If you notice something that doesn't look quite right, you can report the package directly to Chocolatey.

**🏢 Enterprise considerations**

If you're really serious about security or you plan on running Chocolatey for your organization, consider hosting your own Chocolatey repository server. You can read up more about that [here](https://chocolatey.org/docs/how-to-host-feed).

### 🧐 How does Chocolatey work under the hood?

Windows geeks might be familiar with NuGet. It was built by a Microsoft affiliated non-profit and it serves as a package manager for .NET applications and libraries. Chocolatey is built on top of NuGet but was adapted for more consumer orientated software.

Whenever you install a Chocolatey package, you are downloading the source from a Chocolatey repository; wheter that be the public repository or one that you've rolled yourself. Typically, the package also includes a few automation scripts which are required to get the package installed correctly.

Once everything has been downloaded, Chocolatey handles running the automation scripts and if available checks the hashes in order to enforce download integrity.

By default, all the packages you install are in `ChocolateyInstall\lib`. This is because Chocolatey needs to track all your packages in order to install, update, and uninstall correctly.

You can read more about this process [here](https://chocolatey.org/docs/getting-started#how-does-chocolatey-work).

---

I know this article ended up more like an advertisement for Chocolatey but I have really grown to like them. I'm not paid by them in any sort of way.


Chocolatey is one of the best sysadmin tools for Windows in existence.

🍫 Make Windows Tasty with Chocolatey


Sometimes during your build process, Netlify or Vercel might get mad and throw this at you:

```plain
Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, scandir '/opt/build/repo/posts'
    at Object.readdirSync (fs.js:948:3)
    at getAllPostIds (/opt/build/repo/.next/serverless/pages/blog/[id].js:41622:63)
    at getStaticPaths (/opt/build/repo/.next/serverless/pages/blog/[id].js:18191:89)
    at buildStaticPaths (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/next/dist/build/utils.js:18:86)
    at Object.isPageStatic (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/next/dist/build/utils.js:25:548)
    at execFunction (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/jest-worker/build/workers/processChild.js:155:17)
    at execHelper (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/jest-worker/build/workers/processChild.js:139:5)
    at execMethod (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/jest-worker/build/workers/processChild.js:143:5)
    at process.<anonymous> (/opt/build/repo/node_modules/jest-worker/build/workers/processChild.js:64:7)
    at process.emit (events.js:315:20) {
  type: 'Error',
  errno: -2,
  syscall: 'scandir',
  code: 'ENOENT',
  path: '/opt/build/repo/posts'
}
```

If you're using Git to push changes to your site, your static site generator can't find `/opt/build/repo/posts` or whichever directory you're having trouble with because it doesn't exist. Well, it might exist on your local machine, but its empty.

Git doesn't allow you to add an empty directory to your repository. You might see the directory on your local machine, but it is not tracked by Git and therefore not seen by Netlify. To allow adding an empty directory on Git, chuck the two lines of code below inside a `.gitignore` file inside your empty directory. In this example it is `/opt/build/repo/posts/.gitignore`.

```plain
*
!.gitignore
```

Now that Git can find your empty directory, Netlify will be able to find it as well during build time.


TLDR: Git doesnt allow you to add an empty directory to your repository

Fixing ENOENT: no such file or directory on Next.js + Netlify


For my most recent site redesign I decided to get rid of the monolithic Django + [Wagtail CMS](https://wagtail.io/) + PostgreSQL + S3 + CloudFront nightmare and swapped it out for a refreshingly simple [Jamstack](https://jamstack.org) oriented Next.js static build.

### Version 1

![Version 1](/uploads/version-1-screenshot.png)

### Version 2

![Version 2](/uploads/version-2-screenshot.png)

### Version 3

![Version 3](/uploads/version-3-screenshot.png)

I have already gone through two iterations of my site design and this new one is the third. I was not happy with the second version at all and it looked like something that had just ascended from Dante's inferno. It had clutter everywhere and the ORM schema design was just terrible.

For version 3, I ditched the database model and went with a clean Jamstack and Markdown powered blog. Jamstack architectures allow for a very minimalist setup; you won't be banging your head trying to fix database connections, 500 errors, and trying to guess which one out of the twenty or so environment variables is broken.

Previously, I had to set up a Django, Wagtail CMS, and PostgreSQL clusterfuck on Heroku with an AWS S3 bucket behind a CloudFront instance which was also behind a Cloudflare CDN.

Heroku itself cost me $7 a month and added a bunch of unnecessary complexity for a site that was extremely simplistic in functionality. This new Jamstack build costs $0 as both Netlify and Cloudflare offer very compassionate free tiers; no credit card required which is blessed for someone who cannot legally obtain one.

With the Jamstack, you can configure every single push to a GitHub repository to be built with Netlify and served with Cloudflare. Combining it with a [headless CMS](https://headlesscms.org/) like [Netlify CMS](https://netlifycms.org) gives you a WordPress level platform with no PHP witchcraft.

**Think of Jamstack as the electric car of web development.** Traditional gas cars need things like oil changes, fuel filters, spark plugs, emission checks, and a noisy polluting engine. Jamstack throws all of those components out of the window and replaces them with a battery (GitHub) and a motor (Netlify).

Give the Jamstack a go, you might enjoy it.


Getting rid of monolithic Django and swapping it for Jamstack

🌐 Jamstacking My Website, A Minimalism Experiment

Superhuman for contacts. Failed finding product market fit.

📇 Persona Personal CRM

Project was noticed by Desmos engineering team and commented "it's a very cool high school project"

🧮 EquationSpace

Engineered a Y Combinator Hacker News reader using React, Hacker News Firebase API, and Algolia REST API

💻 Prettier Hacker News

Text-to-speech Android app that reads the news to you while you exercise using Firebase

🏃 Steps4News / Hack the Northeast

Coordinate purchases and transactions of goods using Django on Heroku for RU Hacks 2020

🍔 Bazaar / RU Hacks 2020

Illustrating connectivity hotspots around the world, powered by the WebGL Globe framework

🌐 Mozilla Location Service Globe

3D globe visualization of COVID-19 cases around the world using Google WebGL Globe Toolkit and Python

😷 Coronaglobe

🚘 Road Image Segmentation w/ Encoder-Decoder Network

Predict stock market fluctuations from word embeddings with Word2Vec and scikit-learn

📈 NLP for Stock Market Prediction

TSNE model to detect credit card fraud using scikit-learn

💳 Credit Card Fraud Detector

Timetable sharing platform for TDSB schools

📅 SemesterShare

Detects lane lines using colour space filtering and regression using OpenCV and NumPy

Hey, I'm Alex Yuan

Recent Posts