A π-shaped web developer.
I love contributing to open-source projects. There is this insanely good feeling that I get when my changes get merged into the main branch. Dopamine goes through the roof when I see the number of “projects I’ve contributed to” go up, and the shade of blue on my contribution graph get that little bit darker. I wish I could do this my whole life. Contributing to open source is not easy, though,…
If you asked me what drug would I ban outright, without any repercussions, I would pick nicotine. When I was growing up, I was always being told that smoking is bad (m’kay?) and that I should never even consider trying it. This rule got stuck in my head, and with it the seeming intolerance to the cigarette smoke. And the older I get, the more difficult it becomes to try evading it. Here’s a brief…
Before I joined my current Fediverse home instance— Polymaths.social —I didn’t even know what a “polymath” is. I guess I kinda am one, given how many loose hobbies and skills I have. Amin agrees! But since my impostor syndrome does not allow me to fully accept this title, I’ll use the word “polymath” to mean “a person with many interests”. Anyway; as a polymath, the thing I always struggled with…
In 2025, the online translators are quite good. Google Translate is actually usable, and its Camera feature is a life-saver. DeepL makes use of context and can produce high-quality texts. And even open-source solutions like LibreTranslate have reached the point where the other person will most likely understand you. Yet, they’re not always the perfect solution: When I start getting a hold of the…
Here’s a sentence I’d never thought I’d be saying at any point in my life: Yeah, I’ve watched the Germany game with friends, and then we went to the bar. It had no TV, though, so I’ve watched the France vs. Portugal game on my phone. When I was young, I didn’t like football. In fact, I didn’t really like any sport, but football especially. Growing up, it was the most popular team sport across my…
This article is hidden from robots, crawlers, and indexers, because the last time it was published, this happened: Yes, this was the top result for “why is algeria dz” for many weeks and months. Spreading misinfo in my name :P After some months of trying to figure out how to control my SSG, I have finally replaced the old blog post with a shortened version containing just the correct answer. Below…
Heads up! This is not a serious blog post, but rather my attempt at a funny April Fools joke. When the news about Redis®, a registered trademark of Redis Ltd, dropped, I have held my urge to comment on the situation. For one, because I didn’t have time to collect my thoughts, but also because I knew I would not be understood by the other members of our community. I was afraid of mean comments…
If you’re a Python developer, you’ve probably heard about Ruff . A linter for Python written from the ground up in Rust beats all competitors in benchmarks (even with all rules enabled) and amazes everyone with its release cadence. At least one release per month and over 300 releases since its inception in 2022; a new version every two days, on average. “Move fast and fix things”, as Charlie…
Today two days ago marks one month since I started working full-time. Since it was such a pivotal point for me, I’ve decided to share my experience so far. Searching The job I’ve started is not my first job per se . Apart from small gigs, I’ve had actual software development part-time positions. Due to this, I’ve always thought I had both good practical knowledge and a satisfactory amount of…
About two months ago, Fosstodon (a Mastodon server I use and help moderate) was hit with a major controversy when the foreign-language posts of a user were deleted, which they’ve found racist to say the least. I do not want to comment on this situation (given that it happened, like, an eternity ago), but I want to touch on the experience I get on Mastodon as a multilingual person. Mastodon already…
The article 5 of the EU General Data Protection Regulation defines the principles of personal data processing that processors should follow. In particular, there’s the principle 5(1)(c): Personal data shall be: […] adequate, relevant and limited to what is necessary in relation to the purposes for which they are processed This is referred to as ‘data minimisation’. For example , if a processor…
After a hiatus caused by me writing my bachelor’s thesis, I have finally got time to blog again. And, would you look at that, WWDC just kicked off! Naturally, I’ve got thoughts to share. Let’s discuss the boring stuff out of the way first: Vision Pro is gimmicky and creepy, and I didn’t even believe the rumours that it would be announced. With that out of the way, let’s talk about what got me…
Most things that happen in our day-to-day lives are far from deterministic. We can’t predict a coin flip, a stranger’s response to a ‘Hello’, heck, we can’t even predict weather conditions. When I think about computers and software, I imagine a different thing. Computers are beautifully deterministic. There isn’t really such a thing as unexplainable bugs or glitches; there is always a reason for a…
You already know this story: I have been tired of not having a proper blog, so I started one . I absolutely didn’t want to try out anything with a CMS (sorry, WordPress folks!), but rather stick to a minimalistic statically generated site. When it came to choosing a generator, I had a few options I could consider: Jekyll . I like that it’s native to GitHub Pages while also being easy to deploy…
It’s sad, but it’s true: I still have a Google account. There are many reasons for this: YouTube, old websites, a bunch of data, and Android, among others. Gmail is one of the products I use the least, I’d say; Ever since I started using email on my own domain, I never looked back. The spam problem has persisted for quite a while. I had been moving my account to a different mailbox since 2016, I…
Ah yes, another day, another outdated website that still doesn’t know about .dev domains. At least it doesn’t deny me signing up for their services, but it still nags me with ‘Hey, did you mean me[at]kytta.de ?’ No, I didn’t. I find it hard to understand why the companies care so much about what the emails look like. Some do not allow me to use plus addressing , others fail on domain names with…
I’m tired of myself. You see, I am a failed perfectionist. My brain is constantly between two sides of a weird spectrum: Either I am concentrating on tiny little details for way too long, or I have no interest in a project whatsoever. I can spend hours fine-tuning a config file to then leave the project with no functionality. This is the reason I haven’t started a blog until now. I was spending…
An idea just struck me. What would the world be like, if the computing power kept increasing, but not the Internet speed? Imagine computers that are as quick as ours today, but without dumb usage of resources. You know, why your desktop apps are slow? Because they each ship a Chromium-based browser AND a server environment with them. For example, the app for Signal is 370 MB. This is a messenger!…
Note: this article was initially written in Russian for my Telegram blog. You can read the original here . Ways to effectively declutter my life become bigger of interest to me as I get older. I started to get more convinced that organization and minimalism do lead to greater efficiency and contribute to a more pleasant life. There are many ways to bring organization into your life — by doing a…
One of the assignments I got at my university’s IT Security classes was to write a small Python script that would create and send an empty TCP packet with specified flags to the desired host and port combo. This could be easily achieved with scapy , but here’s the catch — we weren’t allowed to use external dependencies for this assignment. Building the packet itself didn’t cause problems, but…
Alright, alright, I’m guilty. I have been using the same password on various different websites. It all started in 2012, when I was young and careless and couldn’t wrap my head around the concepts of password generators and 2FA and so on. Almost seven years worth of websites, apps, services I have signed up for — and nearly all of them had the same password. The password wasn’t strong by any…