Pretty sure I'm in the minority on this one, but this year was actually a good one for me! One of the best in a while, to be honest… Pandemic There's nothing good about this, and we all could do without it. But even then, being introverted probably helped me ...
Regular readers of this blog have probably noticed that it is now served from a different IP address… Okay, okay, I'm kidding! This blog doesn't have any regular readers, of course. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I recently spent quite some effort to move all my stuff ...
Hey, I almost managed an entire calendar year without a post! Not that I was ever adhering to any notion of schedule here, but I have to admit that lately I miss blogging more and more. It was nice to have a not-insignificant voice and be able to make some ...
I thought I'd post something for no reason… We're still living in Washington state, I'm still into programming, with much the same hobbies as before. However these days I actually work for money. The company is Shutterstock, and I'm a resident "refactorer" on one of the teams in Search. So ...
This quote has made my day. Frédéric de Villamil in his Docker review: If I was still 25, the whole production would most certainly be full dockerized. At 36, I’m more reluctant to change everything for the latest hype. Not that I’ve became old and boring. But I’ve enough experience ...
I finally followed the crowd and got an SSL certificate for highlightjs.org. The canonical read on the issue seems to be "Private By Default" by Tim Bray. However, Tim's piece is somewhat theoretical, so I took some additional real-world perspective on Hacker News. The process wasn't terribly difficult, though whenever ...
This blog turns nine today, and for the occasion I've got myself a new hairy yak to shave: Want to be famous again! Blog more Make time (done) The blog looks unkempt Comment system is outmoded Replace OpenID with something modern Remove Markdown legend WYSIWYG? The look is outdated Rework ...
Before writing this post I looked back at another one like this from a year ago and realized that I was going to write pretty much the same thing: the blog is quiet and it just turned eight :-). In the last July though I tried to resume more frequent ...
While working with people who write code I keep noticing three vaguely defined but nonetheless distinct "roles", or "styles of thinking", or "behavioral patterns", or "skill sets" — I don't really know how to call this classification per se, but I came up with a descriptive name for each class. ...
I'm guilty of it myself… But sometimes I feel this supposed "future" is a little bit farther than I'd like it to be. I can't tell any device to remind me to turn on my noisy dishwasher when I finished watching TV. Nothing is going to boil my kettle 5 ...
It's been a while since I stopped going regularly to work. And while I really needed this break it also had its negative consequences, I forgot how to work using my brains. Many, surely, know this state of mind when all the good intentions and wonderful ideas are stopped dead ...
This blog was pretty quiet for the past year, so instead of having a proper anniversary post consider this a mere technical announcement that today this blog has passed its seventh year. Yay! I'm pretty content with the situation of having a place where I can publish something whenever I ...
This morning I woke up to find that someone or something has retweeted spam messages on behalf of my Twitter account. Some of my followers alerted me about it (thank you!) and here are my thoughts on suggestions as to what might be the reason: This is not a personal ...
As a birthday present this year I upgraded my old and proven G1 to the new and powerful GH2. I've got the G1 3 years ago (also as a birthday present from my wife) and it was the first µ4/3 camera on the market. Though it was a promising system ...
After long time considering if I need an e-book at all I finally bought a new Nook. My current life style allows me more time to read and after having recently read "Anathem" I realized that reading and keeping paper bricks in the age of advanced contemporary e-books is just ...
Christian Giordano, designer at Canonical: We just noticed MacOSX Lion is likely to give it a try on merging the traditional scrollbars with the overlaid ones. From the few screenshots we saw, it looks like a quite different solution. What else can we say, good luck to them and may ...
After pondering for half an hour on the passing I realize that I can't really characterize it in a single way. Too many different things had happened, bad and good. On the one hand I almost didn't grow up professionally and had many disappointments at work. On the other I've ...
Today I've got a sudden revelation about the way I usually get to program. Not that it wasn't obvious before but this time I've managed to formulate this with actual words. Often I'm facing a problem of not being able to start programming something big: a big new subsystem, a ...
I've made a small restyling of the site involving mostly the blog and the forum. Had to remind myself some of my old rusty CSS skills :-). As usually I welcome criticism though, as usually, it's unlikely to change much :-). Not because I'm stubborn (which I am) but because ...
Hello, everyone! About a month ago I posted here an April's fool half-joke about switching this blog to English after writing exclusively in Russian for 5 years. Unexpectedly the idea was accepted by my Russian readers with mild enthusiasm. So here it is — an inaugural post in English about... ...