Author Archives: George Valentin Voina

Acronyms of a #VC for #fintech people

By | December 8, 2019

When you start reading lots of VC tweets and blog posts is easy to get confused by the deluge of acronyms they use. The following are the basic definitions for the most important acronyms. CAC = Customer acquisition cost TAC = Total acquisition cost LTV= Lifetime value TAM = Total available market YoY growth =… Read More »

Disable core dumps in #Linux

By | December 11, 2019

Systemd doesn’t completely control whether core dumps are made or not. It mainly determine where such dumps go, and whether they should take up space or not. It may prevent some user space core dumps, but not all. With “Storage=none”, they can still occur and are registered by journald, but they don’t take up disk… Read More »

Things worth reading: Some resources about Protocol Buffers in #golang and #gRPC

By | November 1, 2019

Looking around microservice communication protocols I discovered protocol buffers and gRPC as a new alternative to REST with XML or JSON. XML is used in standards like ISO 20022 for financial messages, JSON is widely used by all the new APIs in fintech (Stripe, TransferWise, lots of PSD2 API implementation of banks etc.) Both of… Read More »

Banking 2.0 or the online revolution @imaginecurve #fintech #swag

By | May 6, 2020

As a new found collector of challenger bank accounts the new #fintech Curve (@imaginecurve) it was an obvious must have. When I heard about this “magic” proxy card, one card to hold all your other cards, I was in awe. How natural and simple idea that fit my case perfectly. Due to the new found… Read More »

Libraries #golang : Inter Planetary File System client

By | October 29, 2019

In all this talk of distributed systems the Interplanetary File System is a fun practical subject. Obviously golang should be part of that. According to Wikipedia: The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file… Read More »

Connect to github with ssh key

By | October 28, 2019

This is a straight forward list of steps to connect to github with a ssh key instead of user/password. I am using Linux on my development machine so things are quite easy with ssh. STEP 1: Create a ssh key # ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C “george@voina.org” STEP2: Add the key to the authentication… Read More »

Ferengi Rules of Acquisition vs #Fintech

By | October 3, 2019

Like a true Star Trek fan I have my lists: this is one of most complete compilation of the “Ferengi Rules of Acquisition”. I swear they apply in the real Business World, almost to the letter 🙂 Sadly we can see behaviours that follow the rules also in #Fintech, Banking and Social Media companies. So… Read More »

Banking 2.0 or the online revolution #Monese #fintech

By | February 22, 2020

My new collector passion seems to be about new challenger bank accounts 🙂 Yes, now is the turn for Monese. My third online bank after #Revolut and #TransferWise. As I already mentioned in a previous post, banking 2.0 is here. Enrollment is very easy with a video based verification and with a simple upload of… Read More »

How RomArg “helped” me to change my domain register to @namecheap ?

By | December 8, 2019

A name registrar is that sort of service provider everybody needs at some point when they get serious about their online presence and want to have their own identity thus domain. Basically from the times when Internet was young their main function is to keep that record of who owns a name and to broadcast… Read More »

#Healthcheck for #golang #microservices

By | July 14, 2019

One of the important paradigm change in moving away from monolith application to a cloud of micro-services is how to keep all that interconnected could functioning. A monolith enterprise application usually runs in an application container so a lot of time you are using the container monitoring features to make assumptions about the heath of… Read More »