Introducing Dennis

Dear readers,

You may have guessed my real name from the nickname as Dennis Kwan. If it's your guess then you're goddamn right, congrats 🎉. I'm a 21-year-old well-intentioned college student in Ho Chi Minh City who is still trying to find a purpose of living, something that I can commit into for an extended period of time.

Saigon is hot all year round and packed with people. And there was not much open space and green areas that encourage me to be more outdoorsy. I don't fit in really well with the society here, and as an introvert I don't socialize much with the locals. So I spent most of my time at home listlessly doing some nerdy hobbies, like reading books, watching fun stuff on YouTube and learning different stuff on the Internet. It is fair to say that, my laptop represented my childhood more than anything.

I believe hobbies are among the most important parts of human experience and by pursuing hobbies we can learn different things that our job doesn't teach us. What's also great about it is that you can accomplish whatever you have in your mind without a specific deadline. It is the one of the few human activities we consider as an end itself rather as a means.

As an avid reader, I often read anything that educates me. I'm somewhat OK with self-help books and fanfics, but I was especially into three things: economics, psychology and philosophy. These kind of books shaped my thinkings and beliefs during my early adult years and honestly, it helped me through difficult times and solve complex problems . Like Warren Buffett's quote, relationships and money come and go but knowledge doesn't. Knowledge has no physical appearance and it doesn't say "I love you", but it is always there rooting for you. I had this habit of thinking how the world would be better off if everyone in the world behaved like what my books tell them to.

I have a love & hate relationship with coding. Web development is self-contained and highly business-oriented, so there is less creativity involved than I previously had thought. Most of the web technologies in the market revolve around UI/UX, APIs, frameworks and what not. It was a blast learning these technologies and I was eager to learn more, but as soon as I've gotten good at those I found myself doing the same thing for each new project, and my interest in web development started to dwindle. Unlike some developers who simply enjoy programming, I simply see coding as a tool to get something done. Tldr, web dev is to solve business problems but not world problems.

Now that my interest for web dev was gone, I decided to look for ways to earn crypto online. And through the rabbit hole I went, I was introduced to PublishOx and Brave Rewards. I initially wanted to become an author to PublishOx, but I found out that most content creators on the site focus solely on crypto and most non-crypto posts are either forgotten or ignored. And my authorship application is still pending to this day. So days kept flying by until someone on PublishOx introduced read.cash. And before I knew it, I was instantly hooked to the site.

One thing I loved about read.cash is that the community here is not obsessed with crypto and people here seem to enjoy writing what they want without worrying if anybody cares. What I'm grateful about is that I get rewarded for writing what I'm passionate about. Without all the encouraging comments from you guys and the generous tips from TheRandomRewarder, I wouldn’t have enough motivation to keep learning new things and write more stuff to share with the world. All in all, my writing "career" is just as successful as the amount of support I get from you, the readers.

My goal on read.cash is to not to offer life advice of any kind, but to give you detailed discussion on world problems and technologies with easy to read English and scientific reasoning, thus doing my part in keeping you informed in this post-modernist world.

P/s: So the last version of this article is lost because of my stupid mistakes. As I was working on another article and I wanted to add new stuff to this introduction but I unknowingly replace all the contents with my draft simply by clicking the restore draft button. A cautionary tale for folks who are still figuring out what the "you have an unsaved draft" message means. The article doesn't look as fresh and good as it was but at least I won't bounce you around.