Date: 2016-10-03

I've just come back from spending a few days in Spain and this time I've decided to rent a car for a few days to avoid the bus-bus-walk-tram combination I'd have to take between the airport and my parents' house.

And now I've realised how much I miss owning a car. I used to have one back in Spain, but it belongs to my mom now.

Owning a car would obviously give me a huge deal of freedom and it would make tasks such as weekly shopping, visiting friends and discovering places around the UK much nicer. But there's a price to pay for that, so I thought I could write a blog post comparing the costs of owning and maintaining a car versus just renting one whenever I need it.

For the sake of argument, I'll use a Toyota Yaris as the example car I would buy and a Volkswagen Golf from Zipcar, the most common Zipcar car you can get.

Owning a car

A quick search on eBay tells me I could get a Toyota Yaris from 2012 for around £6000. I'm not very fuzzy and I would be satisfied with the most basic version.

I've got a quote for how much I'd pay for a comprehensive insurance and it would be around £600 per year.

Car usage

We fill the tank once per month for basic usage: shopping once a week, visiting friends in London, etc. It should be around £50 per month.

We also decide to get out of London once a month and we need to add some more petrol to the tank: £25 extra per month should cover that.

We should probably clean the car too: £10 per month.

General maintenance: £200 per year – providing nothing serious has to be dealt with.

And finally, around 3 times per year, we take a long weekend and we go far away from the city. Probably a full tank per trip should cover that: that's £150 for the three long weekends.

Summary

First year costs: £6,000 initial investment, plus £600 of insurance, plus £1470 for petrol and maintenance: £8,070.

For the next four years, the annual cost should be close to £2,070.

That means the first five years of car usage should be around £16,350. But for sure, something will happen in five years and you'll need to take the car to a garage for something slightly serious. But we're unlucky and we'll have to spend around £3,000 on something unexpected. That makes a total of £19,350 for the first five years.

Another good thing about buying your own car: you can always sell it when you're bored of it and get some of the initial investment back.

Renting with Zipcar

Zipcar allows its users renting cars per hour and per day. That's pretty cool, because you might only need the car for a quick ride to Ikea – although to be honest, rides to Ikea are rarely quick – or a massive shopping you want to do before throwing a party at home.

These are the Zipcar prices for a Volkswagen Golf as of 3rd October 2016:

• £7/hour and £64/day between Monday and Friday.
• £8.5/hour and £75/day on Saturday and Sunday.

Car usage

Let's say I take a car for 2 hours every Wednesday to do the weekly shopping. That's £14 per shopping – I could actually get it delivered for a couple of pounds but I never know what I need until I'm in the shop and I see it. If I do the shopping every Wednesday of the year, it would cost me £568.

During the weekends, we decide to escape London and visit a small town once a month. It's probably a good idea to get a car for a full day, we don't want to be scrumpy. That's £75. Zipcar also charges you for the extra mileage beyond the included 60 miles. To round it up, let's say we'll spend £100 per month between the extra mileage and the full day rental price.

We also visit some friends in London twice per month during the weekends, that's probably 6 hours of usage: £51.

On top of that, let's add three long weekend holidays per year: that's three full days renting a car, between Friday and Sunday. That would be £214, but let's add £86 on top of each for extra mileage – I always wanted to visit Cornwall and Scotland –, so that's £300 per long weekend.

And finally, we added a comprehensive insurance when buying a car, so we should do the same when renting one. Zipcar all-inclusive insurance costs £20 per month: that's £240 per year. Plus Zipcar membership, which is £60 per year, it becomes £300 per year.

The good thing about Zipcar is the lack of surprises. If you are paying for the comprehensive insurance, it doesn't matter what happens to the car, Zipcar will deal with it.

Summary

The total sum of all these expenses is £3,580 per year. And this is probably way above I would ever pay, because I would probably not use it as much as I mentioned above.

There are a couple of remaining gotchas I haven't mentioned about Zipcar:

1. The closest car from your home might not be always available, so you'll have to get around that.
2. No one delivers the car to your house, you have to go and pick it up – potentially having to take a bus or the tube to get there – and return it to the same spot when you are done with it, on time. It's hard to quantify how much money that would cost – for instance, I have a TFL travel card and it would be "free for me" –, but I can tell you how annoying it is to return the car to its original place after doing the weekly shopping: very much. So that's also something to take into account.

Conclusion

• Five years of owning and maintaining a Toyota Yaris: £19,350
• Five years of using a Zipcar rented car: £17,900

There's not such a big difference! I think it's more likely I'd end up buying a car at some point next year than I'd start using Zipcar as much as I've written above. Grabbing a Zipcar requires some actual commitment and a bit of work: plan the rental hours very well, purchase an insurance – if you want premium cover –, grab the car, drop the car… Owning a car might involve a couple of visits to the garage every year, but apart from that it's mostly a huge brick of convenience parked down your house.

I'll also set a reminder for every year after the date I buy the car, so I can write follow-up blog posts explaining how wrong I was thinking I could actually predict the amount of money I was going to spend on a car and its maintenance.

Date: 2016-09-24

It's been almost a week since we came back from this year's PotatoCon, so it's time to write something about it.

Every year gets harder and harder to tell which PotatoCon has been the best. They are all special in their own way. This has been my fourth PotatoCon, but the first one in Europe – being the previous ones in USA (twice) and Thailand – and they couldn't have picked a better location.

I'm going to highlight two things from this year's PotatoCon.

1. It's great being able to talk to colleagues I normally don't get the chance to talk to. There are truly amazing people in this company. I only regret not having talked to more of them! It's also impressive the fact everyone gets along with everyone. And even more impressive taking into account we were sixty four Potatoes this year. I guess we only hire nice people :).

2. The food. Oh god, the food was amazing. We were extremely lucky we were in an amazing hotel and absolutely all the food they made in there was incredible. Even the dishes that are not typical from the Canary Islands. Food is definitely in the top 3 of "things I miss from Spain".

Now, some pictures of the adventure:

Mount Teide.

Near the Teide.

Near the Teide, after 10 minutes climbing a rock.

We were drinking lots of cava while watching the sun going down.

A couple of days later we went on a boat trip. Which is becoming a tradition, this is my third boat trip in a PotatoCon so far.

It was actually a boat party. The theme was "Pirates!". But it was hot and most of the people undressed pretty quickly.

The last day we went to a pretty awesome water park, but I obviously left my phone in the lockers and there are no pictures/proof of that.

To end this post, here's a time-lapse a colleague made watching the sunset in the Teide National Park, at around 2200m.

Date: 2016-09-03

The problem

For years, I've been the kind of person who always used the same three or four passwords for every single online service I used to have. Every time one of these services got hacked, I was supposed to change the password I was using for that service and in every other service I was using that password. Obviously, I wasn't keeping track of that, so I used to miss many of them.

Then 2-factor authentication* came to be and I started activating it for every service I considered important: Google, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Dropbox, Github, Gitlab... That made me feel much safer. But it had a couple of inconveniences:

1. Not every service offers 2-factor authentication and not all of them would offer the SMS one, which is the one I chose.
2. I would need my UK phone number with me all the time – this is a problem four or five times per year, when I go to Spain and Poland.

2 Factor Authentication it's an extra layer of security that relies not only on the common user/password combination, but also on something you have with you. Most of the times, it's either an app on your phone generating security codes for the extra login step or this same kind of codes, but sent to you via SMS.

Despite of that, I got used to it and it felt safe enough. At least for the last three years or so.

Then a few days ago I got another email from Dropbox, saying I need to change my password (again) because millions of account credentials have been leaked (again). That got me a bit upset, so I finally decided to start looking for a better way of dealing with passwords.

The solution

I learnt from password managers two or three years ago, when I saw a workmate using one in the office. I didn't remember the name, but I did remember how the icon looked like. It turned out to be 1Password. I checked it out and it was offering – still is – a free six month trial period, which should be more than enough time to use it extensively. So I signed up. They also have some cool information explaining how it works in the security section.

I've changed every password in every single online service I've used for the last 5 days and updated every single 2-factor auth code to use the 1Password app rather than my phone - equivalent of using Google Authenticator, for instance.

I have to say that apart from the pain of changing every password, using this tool feels great. And it definitely makes me feel safer. Now every password I'm using is different: they are long, hard to remember, don't make any sense and combine symbols and numbers. Perfect passwords!

I will complain about one thing though: using it on a phone or tablet is not a great experience. You need to switch context to grab a particular password and then come back to the login screen to enter it. And if you have 2-factor authentication activated, it will mean an extra change of context – that would be 4 changes to get through a login form. There are a couple of apps that integrate their login forms with 1Password and make the experience much better, but that's still a small number of apps.

Summary

If you are concerned about your security, get yourself a password manager or a service that will make you create secure passwords.

Resources

• 1Password: the password manager I'm using.
• TwistPass: a very cool password generator built by a workmate from Potato.
• LastPass: I've heard great things about it.
• Google site explaining 2 factor authentication

Date: 2016-07-09

Two weeks ago, actually. After almost three weeks in Poland, we're finally back home. I have to say I've missed it a bit. It's been great taking so many days off, being with friends and family and taking days off in general. But it's been hectic. We haven't really stopped doing things for a single day until now.

So, what's like being married? Not much has changed, really. Magda has now a new surname, but that's mostly it.

It's hard to believe how things used to be 30 years ago. My parents, for instance, weren't living together before getting married. Which means they didn't know how life together was going to be until after getting married, such a commitment! Our thing is easy, Magda and I have been living together for almost 3 years now, we (kind of) knew what we were doing.

We decided we wouldn't go on our honeymoon straight after the wedding, but a few months after, to Japan. I'm really looking forward to it. Now we only have to start organising the trip!

Anyway, I leave you a couple of pictures we took the week after the wedding. Thanks to Magda's cousin for taking them!

Date: 2016-04-23

Last Wednesday I got good news at Potato: I've been promoted to senior developer :)

It's been roughly a year since I decided to ask for more responsibilities at work - tech leading small things at first, big ones until now - and it seems I've been doing things well (or so I've been told).

The reason I decided to ask for it was that I was going to get more variety of work than if I decided to stay the way I was. Which wasn't bad, but most of the times I felt like I wasn't being challenged and I really thought I could do more. Since then I've been lucky enough to work on Android and Arduino related stuff, tech lead a couple of short projects and more recently being the tech lead of a big team (oscillating between 6 and 8 people).

I think I could have got the promotion a bit earlier if I had pushed for it a bit more, but I really didn't want to rush it. Rushing it would have meant forcing myself to learn things faster and I think this is one of those things it's better learnt slowly.

The main difference I've noticed during the last year is that I now have to deal with people much more than I used to: people will ask you questions which answers you won't always know and figuring out how to solve these situations is, most of the times, a lot of fun.