Welcome to Side Effects. My name is Alex and I will be taking you on a journey through my thought process. I am a software engineer by profession but am keenly interested in the way the world works. You can say that I want to learn about life in general so that I can leave things better than I found them. My approach relies on consuming quality content, exercise and travel.

“./side_effects.sh” (read execute the side_effects shell script) links to a concept in computer science which describes changes that happen to the state of a computer program.

With that in mind I think that reality - by humanity’s current understanding of it - is very much full of side effects. In Side Effects I intend to ruminate on what I know and don’t know about how life works. Here you will find essays based on my personal experience in the software industry as well as my life across the planet. My pursuit towards mastery is the primary drive for this blog. As I continue to discover and divide inherent from accidental complexity in my day-to-day, I will try to formalize my learnings in an eloquent and thorough manner. The occasional code snippet may pop up here and there to emphasize the duality between hard and soft skills.