Recent content on Alex Selimov
I just finished “The War of Art” by Steven Pressfield and I wanted to collect/formalize my thoughts about it and about achieving success generally. While there was a lot of weird spirituality in the book, I did come away feeling motivated to continue working away on my craft. It also reinforced some things that I’ve already believed. The main purpose in writing this post is to…
I switched to Kagi search maybe 1 to 2 months ago, and I’ve noticed a significant life quality improvement. The amount of AI slop web pages I have to click through before getting to a real answer has dropped significantly. Sadly, for certain searches I still get the AI slop summary pages, but it’s a lot more manageable since switching. The biggest surprise for me has been the friends I…
The kind of developer I hope to be someday It seems like there are a lot of people either leaving or talking about leaving Github, a very prominent one being Mitchell Hashimoto . Fragmentation seems inevitable, as people/companies start to distribute among the various options (Codeberg, self-host Forgejo, Gitlab, etc…). I think the decision Hashimoto makes with ghostty will potentially set…
I came across a video by Simple Lucas describing a routine to improve focus and productivity. The routine was basically: Don’t use any screens/entertainment when trying to focus on work. When you start to feel mentally drained, sit and stare at a wall for x minutes to recover focus. I’ve been trying it, and it’s a very effective (but hard) routine.
Let no good crisis go to waste -- Winston Churchill 1 I’ve been thinking about the above quote lately. Normally this is applied in political contexts, but I think it does a good job describing the last couple of months for me. For example, today I’ve been sick as a dog (probably with that new covid variant). Normally I would be trying to speed things along by rotting my brain on YouTube or…
Long Story Short I wrote a little system called upvoters in Rust to handle anonymous upvotes, and it’s compatible with Hugo! In fact, you should see a little chevron at the bottom of this post to upvote if you like it. Check it out if you need something like it! Motivation I’ve been working on some website refactors/design changes lately. My taste has been influenced recently. I may at…
I have a confession to make to anyone who has stumbled across this blog. Some of the posts I’ve previously written had strong AI generated segments. I’ve since added a note at the start to mention this. The post ideas were always mine, and I always edited the outputs. However, there were still occasions where AI generated segments made it into my final draft unedited. I’m…
I am an Orthodox Christian, husband, father, and software developer (in that order). My wife and I currently have two lovely children, a son born in 2022 and a daughter born in 2025. I grew up moving around a lot, but I spent a majority of my formative years down in sunny Florida. I have a BA in Mechanical Engineering from University of Central Florida and a PhD in Material’s Science from…
First version of this post was generated with LLMs before manual revision. See this link for more details. What motivated me to try it I somehow recently accidentally stumbled across the Pillars, Pipelines, and Vaults (PPV) system by August Bradley. In a nutshell, this system is a way to align your daily efforts to the pursuit of goals that contribute to core areas of your life (the pillars). As a…
First version of this post was generated with LLMs before manual revision. See this link for more details. I’ve been a suckless software user for a long time because the software was superior to a lot of other options out there. If you have never experienced the blazing fast speed of st opening, you are definitely missing out. Sadly it was time for me to leave st behind and move on to a new…
First version of this post was generated with LLMs before manual revision. See this link for more details. Another quick post that may be useful to somebody else. I’ve been working at UKG for about 4 months now. In my work I use a Mac laptop. I’ve tried my best to unify my configurations between my personal Linux system and the Mac dev machine provided by UKG to reduce headaches when…
First version of this post was generated with LLMs before manual revision. See this link for more details. I run Void Linux on a Thinkpad T480 with Integrated Intel graphics and a discrete Nvidia MX150. I’ve decided to start working with more CUDA development and was running into an issue where my Nvidia GPU would suddenly stop being detected by CUDA applications. The only way I could figure…
AI has become a very useful tool for me If you know me personally, you know that I’ve been pretty slow on the LLM/GenAI uptake. At this point, however, if you are a software developer that isn’t integrating GenAI tools into your workflow I think you are probably going to be left behind. I’ve been playing around with these tools a lot more lately, and I’ve come to a few…
I recently realized that my web server was still on Debian Buster, 2 whole major versions behind the latest Debian version. Normally this kind of thing wouldn’t matter to me except that my matrix-synapse server was unable to federate with matrix synapse servers running newer versions. I normally run rolling release distributions on my local machines (I use Void btw) and it had been a long…
This is a short post (mainly for myself) to remember how I got CUDA installed on Void Linux. These steps are as follows: Download the installation files: Go to the CUDA toolkit installation website. Select Linux->x86_64->Debian->11->runfile (local) Set executable permission: chmod +x ./cuda_version.run Install using the correct flags: 1 sudo ./cuda_11.8.0_520.61.05_linux.run --silent --override…
I recently ran into some problems with java development. One problem was neovim specific but the other was an issue with gradle. I wanted to document these in case any one else has similar problems as it took me a little bit of time to figure out. Problem 1: jdtls exiting with status code 13 I use jdtls through Mason with the built in nvim LSP and was recently having an issue where jdtls would…
In my current position I’ve had to swap to full time Rust development. After about 2 months of full time Rust development I think I’ll likely be developing projects in Rust in the future instead of C++ when performance is important. My reasons for this are primarily: Just Works™ build system and crates.io makes drawing in libraries painless Guaranteed memory safety is pretty nice…
At my previous employment I was forced to use a windows system. Although not ideal, I was able to continue using my Linux terminal workflows by heavily utilizing Windows Subsystem for Linux. As part of this I had to get comfortable with integrating tmux into my workflow as I didn’t care to learn the Windows Terminal options for terminal multiplexing. I don’t need tmux quite as much…
This is going to be primarily opinion based post but I want to talk about a shakeup that has happened. I have uninstalled Artix from all of my computers and have instead swapped them to Void Linux. This is the first time I have changed Linux distros in about 3/4 years and was done with a heavy heart as having to setup a new system is always a pain. Regardless I have been using void linux for about…
I’m currently working on developing an implementation of the Concurrent Atomistic-Continuum method using C++ and CUDA to accelerate calculations. A need arose to use valgrind for debugging some memory issues. I currently run Artix Linux and it turns out that both Artix Linux and Arch Linux have fully removed all debug packages from their repositories and have swapped over to a debuginfod…
I’ve recently been developing sites for some family/friends. I had one person request highlighting the currently selected menu item. I had built a custom theme which used a navbear defined in the site wide hugo.toml . There were a few different solutions but I wanted to highlight the solution I ended up using for my use case. A dummy of my site directory set up is: content |-- section1…
I recently had interest in starting to work on the implementation of the Concurrent Atomistic-Continuum Method using C++ to take advantage of GPU acceleration. As a first step, I began thinking about where I wanted to host my project. I decided to add hosting my own git server to my list of self-hosted services, including e-mail and matrix chat server . This is a quick guide on how I set up Gitea…
I recently had a situation where a library I was working on, originally as part of one project, was going to be needed for another project. The ideal way to handle this situation, is to have the library files as their own git repo which is then added to the projects as a submodule. This way any changes required to the submodule for the needs of each project can be shared easily. It took me much…
I personally am a big fan of navbars as they are a clean way to navigate any website. The classic navbar, that you are likely seeing on this site if you are viewing this on a desktop browser, is extremely simple to make and you can easily find guides to develop these. The one I personally used is here . What was not as simple for me was creating a decent navbar for mobile. I had to develop it for…
Now that I’ve graduated from my PhD, I find that I have more free time that was previously spent working on my dissertation. I also have the desire to continue to publish in some manner. My solution to both of these problems is to revamp my previous website which I only used as a portfolio site for job search purposes into a random blog. In my time online I once came across a talk titled The…
My work has been featured on the San Diego Supercomputer Center website! This post highlights my work published with title: “Effects of interdiffusion on shear response of semi-coherent {111} interfaces in Ni/Cu” which was conducted using XSEDE allocation TG-MSS150010. XSEDE resources were critical for running these simulations as it required significant computational resources.
This article offers a sample of basic Markdown syntax that can be used in Hugo content files, also it shows whether basic HTML elements are decorated with CSS in a Hugo theme.
Alex Selimov alex@alexselimov.com · https://alexselimov.com Skills Programming Languages: Python, C++, Rust, Java, Fortran, Bash Algorithm design, data structure design, runtime complexity analysis High Performance Computing: Message Passing Interface (MPI), OpenMP, C++17 parallelism, Rayon, Python multithreading Proficient in Linux environments on desktop, personal server, and computing cluster…
Here are some of the projects I am working or have worked on: Scientific CAC ← Implementation of the Concurrent Atomistic Continuum method CACmb ← Model builder for CAC (inspired by atomsk) Random neovim configs PaperPicker ← Use local llms to find relevant arxiv papers upvoters ← Rust backend with postgres to handle anonymous upvotes on this blog