Every developer eventually builds their own website. I've put mine off longer than I care to admit; not from a lack of technical prowess, but reluctance to splash my opinions all over the internet. I remember getting my first PC at 18, standing at the shores of the internet, its waves playfully lapping at my feet. Since then I've tentatively taken steps to go deeper but a part of me has always feared losing my identity and personhood to a riptide of opinions that aren't mine. This website is a dam I've constructed to prevent the flooding of my own consciousness and ideals. How very Dutch of me.
Who I am
I'm Thomas Cyriac — thinktanktom online. I've always been the kind of person who stops to help. Whether that's carrying bags for someone who's bitten off more than they can chew, or sitting down with a founder wearing twenty hats and slowly sinking under the weight of all of them — I simply can't stop myself. Helping people is my thing. I do have one flaw, though. Just the one. Okay, a couple. The most peculiar being this: the simpler the problem, the more my brain quietly folds its arms, leans back, and refuses to engage. Especially if someone's already solved it before. Hand me a novel, knotty, borderline-unreasonable problem and I'm insufferably alive. Hand me something straightforward and I become, somehow, the least useful person in the room. If I were in a manga this would be called a character quirk. In real life it mostly translates to questionable life decisions. Blockchain was one of those decisions. When I started taking on decentralised finance work the domain was still in its infancy. Where everyone else saw fear and risk, I saw opportunity. Someone had just made financial tools open source, and I had the chance to be an early contributor.
Open source
That being said, I'm ashamed to admit I haven't contributed to open source as much as I've wanted to. I've been a little too busy teaching clients how to use AI tools to replace me. Suffice it to say I've done a pretty good job, and am adequately unemployed enough to contribute now. I might even start building my own open source product. Anywho, I'll have a separate page up to track my contributions and builds, so if that's your particular interest, I'll have a dedicated page up for it.
What I'll write about
Honestly, I don't know yet. Probably a how-to document with a philosophical rant on identity and work ethic somewhere in between. I've never seen myself as a tech bro and I don't intend to write like one. I think of this as a bit of a time capsule — something I'd look back on in 50 years and show my grandkids. "Ooh, look, kids, this was back when GitHub used to be a thing."