I just reviewed what I did and journaled that, so I think it’s worth a share (feel free to use any of my past, present or future ideas)

In the previous post I was complaining about how creative I was when I was younger, but my inner voice got a little stoic on me and asked me to just review myself. I explained about chocolate business and also the app I wrote for realtors. But when I dag deeper I found how much I've done even in past few years and I am explaining every single journey I had.

This post will be so long but I personally think it will be worth a few minutes of your time to read. If I inspire even one single future entrepreneur, I'd be happiest person on the planet.

Anyway, these are things I've done in my teenage time:

1. I made a custom linux distribution called JabirOS and it was based on Ubuntu. I was like okay, I made myself Mac OS X at home (honestly, it was basically ubuntu with a lot of mac-like features on top, around the same time PearOS did the same. I guess it was a common thing to make mac lookalike distros). It was cool and even school's magazine and a local Linux forum in Iran did interview me about how I learned these things and how I made my own distribution.

2. I do not know if you remember or not, but intel based mac os releases could be installed on non-apple systems with a little bit of tweaking and since it was basically a "hack" on both your hardware and apple's operating system, people called it "Hackintosh". I made an internet forum called "Iran Hackintosh" and gathered people interested in the tpoic in one place. Most of my current network are members of that forum (I remember even one of the members paid for one year of hosting, the other one paid for the domain and this was how site kept alive for 5-6 years).

3. I developed a love for FreeBSD operating system. So I disbanded Ubuntu-based JabirOS and made it a custom FreeBSD system. I loved how it worked and how I could mess with codes in kernel level and it still could boot up on my machine. Although it never was as successful as the Ubuntu based one, it was something that taught me a lot about computers/operating systems a lot.

4. I was almost 19, Iran Hackintosh forums were abandoned mostly by people so I made another forum called Iran BSD and kept it alive for 3-4 years. It was basically the same thing but with a wider variety of operating systems and topics covered. A group of new people also joined this one and I still am friends with them!

But after 20, I got a little more serious. I wanted actual influence and I did these things which are in my own eye more valuable (not disvalidating my teenage shenaningans) because they could land me on actual jobs:

1. I got into Ruby programming language. What annoyed me the most was lack of Persian content about it. So I wrote a Persian handbook and you guessed it right, a forum for Iranian ruby developers. I mentored people in Ruby and Rails and we made simplistic products using Ruby in order to demo and get paid projects. It was fun times (hint: most of AI tools even the best ones, usually are not good at Ruby, so an opportunity is a rails agent or something like that. Sorry, my ADHD hit me hard here).

2. Back then (2019-ish) Persian fonts weren't available on Google Fonts API. So I spent a few weeks and made a service for people who needed to call these fonts in their web apps. This thing got viral because everything on the app was open source. So It made sense people were deploying their own instances.

3. As a hobby, I got into retro/vintage computers. Made simple 8 bit ones and pretty much everything needed for those. So I made my experiences in one single free ebook (English this time) and people like me could have a better chance finding resources to make an Apple I replica or something similar in their home. You can think of me as a young and less catchy "Ben Eater" (look up his youtube however, he's awesome!).

4. Finally, I got into the business. I remember I wanted to commercialize my fine tune of Stable Diffusion 1.5. I remember uploading the codes under the name "Open Journey" (since midjourney was closed source) and another startup (PromptHero) also had their project named "Open Journey" as well. This coincedence, made my project famous (someone wrongfully posted my own project to hacker news) so I started my AI business. I kept it until last year (for 3 years, amazing adventure).

5. While working on my image generation company (named Mann-E) I also got into LLMs since I had to offer something as my master's thesis. So I made a Persian speaking version of Mistal named MaralGPT. It also got me a lot of attention and therefore grants in form of infrastructure.

So what made me stop? My personal life got ruined a lot (romance issues, family issues, health issues and substance issues) and also based on what I explained, you know I'm Iranian. So a lot of unfortunate events happened to my country. It made me stop. But I am grateful for the adventures I had.

But things are not being stopped here. The following list is basically what I wish I could make and despite having the opportunity, I didnt:

1. A unified IoT ecosystem (I only did it once for a greenhouse. I also recently sold my design to one of my old colleagues because she's now working in the weed industry in Europe and she seeked helped from me, so I guess it's a win). I mean a whole apple-like ecosystem for IoT. I don't know if it exists or not but it still has a blue ocean.

2. Making a real hardware product (phone, tablet, handheld console, ebook reader, etc). I always think I spent years of studying hardware engineering is wasted since I never made a real life useable product.

3. Making a useable independent operating system (it's a hobby project not a business, but I guess with my past experience I can commercialize the experience).

4. Making a mobile operating system (custom Linux or Android ones are good to go!)

5. Making a unified software ecosystem like what Meta, Apple or Telegram suggest.

6. Coding and designing a self-driving simulation system from scratch. Simulation in Robotics is really a hot topic and I participated in some projects before. I guess with current state of AI it's easier now.

7. I actually did this but I want it to be more advanced than what I own : Making Jarvis!

Since this became super long, I also add my most ambitious ideas which I most achieve in my life time (considering I have limitless resources):

1. Completing my OCR project. I always work on it, abandone it and then return to it. It must be completed (and I have to say I coded most of it myself. I may go for an open source variant and implement my ideas on it).

2. Designing an EV (motorcycle or car, doesn't matter). Specially when I saw Mercedes AVTR, I fell in love with that design.

3. Making a movie!

4. Making a Frontier AI Model, specially something with low costs on energy and computational resources. I worked on Frontier models before with my infrastructural grants, but the problem is no matter how hard you try you still need to damage the environment and make Jensen Huang richer. I was thinking about the way RWKV paper utilized RNNs for being frontier model. I am thinking of something like that.

5. DePIN (Decentralized Infrastructure) is also something blinking to me. I started studying last year and it has a lot of opportunities.

6. Being a car manufacturer. I loved cars since I was a kid. I always was the nerdy car person amongst my friends. So I guess universe can pay me back by this.

7. Working on metal industry (not metal music, although I love that), but copper industry seems something I can be, with this much of love and interest in electronics. I also thought of Bismuth based accessories, etc. My father worked in Aluminium industry as well. So I guess it's a family thing.

8. Joining the space game! I can't explain how much ideas I have!

9. Renewable energy. One part of my father's research was lowering the cost of aluminium industry by using renewable energy.

10. Making at least one billion dollars net worth and gain global recognition in my life time.

Okay, my rant is over. I love this sub because I found like-minded people. As I said in the title, feel free to use my ideas, and feel free to provide your experience in each of these fields.

And finally, thanks for your time.