For me, the new year usually begins with my birthday. Whenever I’m a year older, I evaluate where I’ve moved over the past year and think about what to do next. However, 2020 was very different. So much has happened that I have decided to evaluate the calendar new year as well.

Work projects

Apart from COVID, the year 2020 was extremely successful for me. After two years, I see how my business is starting to grow. I already have several projects on my waiting list, where people are willing to wait a few months for me. You may have noticed that I haven’t written a single new post since August. Not that I don’t want to. I even realized how much I missed writing. However, I was so busy that there was no time left for other things. …

Porting software to new architectures or platforms has always appealed to me. Imagine that the software that was not written for your device suddenly runs on it. I’ve always admired people who develop emulators for older (but also new) game consoles, do reverse engineering, or write software on the console without access to the devkit.

Specifics of the Arduino platform

My task was much easier, but I still learned a lot. I had to bring the C library, written for Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms, to the Arduino platform. The library’s authors mentioned that porting to new platforms, including microcontrollers, shouldn’t be difficult, but Arduino is quite peculiar. Notably, Arduino is not just another instruction set architecture. It is a framework, which supports multiple development boards across different CPU architectures — MIPS, ARM, RISC. The authors have also defined the essential functions that you must use in your programs, when you code using this framework. Otherwise, you will not be able to print “Hello, world.” into the console. …

I recently wrote about the challenges our speaking club faced in moving to the online environment. And today, I attended the first online training of incoming Toastmasters club officers. Organizing a speaker meeting for 15 people is one thing, but a virtual event with 120 participants who participate in various workshops in parallel brings several new challenges. And these need to be addressed. Let’s see how the organizers did it.

Organization and hosting

For the first time, the training of leaders from Slovakia and the Czech Republic was combined. However, we also had a few guests at the conference who only knew English.

Meeting language

Some participants knew only Slovak, other Czech, or only English. In my opinion, the organizers chose an unusual approach by trying to address all groups. Czechs and Slovaks understand each other thanks to their linguistic similarity. …

At the beginning of May, we chose new management in our speakers club, Toastmasters Košice. I didn’t run for the position anymore because I wanted to focus on other things. However, the question before me was how to train my successor, Roman, as effectively as possible.

When I was the newcomer a year ago, my predecessor Janka explained my work basics in about an hour. However, it took me several months to gain the necessary experience and knowledge for my work. And I want to pass them on so that my successor does not have to learn from his own mistakes. …

It was March 9, 2020, and the officers of the Toastmasters Košice club had its meeting. It was only a few days after I organized a successful event with a guest from Bratislava. I have been monitoring the COVID situation in China for a long time and evaluating the risks for myself. At the meeting, I announced a discussion on corona virus as the first item on the program.

“Hello, I would like to inform you that I will not be attending the next club meeting in person. I have been monitoring the situation closely for a long time, and I do not want to take any more risk, which is even higher for me because I travel by train. …

I’m not a professional promoter, and I don’t have many opportunities to practice it. Thus, when I had the opportunity to promote the Toastmasters Košice club meeting with a special guest, I took it.

It was the end of January 2020, we had a club officers meeting, and one of the program’s main points was our guest’s educational event from the Bratislava club, Matthew. He had work duties in the east of Slovakia, and on this occasion, he offered to come and see us and prepare a lecture on a topic. What topic, though? We needed to solve that.

We came up with six topics and had our members vote on them. Although not everyone was involved, I sent the results to Matthew. The winning topic was “Why go into club management,” and the runner up was “What can Toastmasters give you?” Matthew liked both, but he chose the latter. He said: “I can include leadership in that topic, too.” We agreed on the date of his speech at 03/02/2020. …

Foreword to my English readers

I wrote this post out of frustration. After I had one too many bad experiences with my bank, writing about it was my way of coping with that. When I published this post in Slovak, I was very surprised by the positive reception. What was a painful experience for me, many of my readers found amusing.

If you read this post, you’ll hear the story of leaving my bank. Most likely, you never heard of them. However, I believe that you experienced some of these situations, too. Just somewhere else. The firms don’t differ that much in the core if you think about it. Perhaps you’ll find some of the anecdotes funny too. …

The word mentor comes from ancient Greece, Homer’s mythological Odyssey. Mentor was a friend of King Odysseus of Ithaca, and since Odysseus considered him wise and prudent, he entrusted him with his son Telemachus as he went to the Trojan War. Telemachus treated Mentor as his father, and Mentor had a tremendous influence on him. To the extent that his form was taken by the goddess Athena when she wanted to say something important to Telemachus. Today, nobody thinks about the deeper meaning of the word mentor, and I think that’s a mistake. …