My name is Artem. I’m passionate about computers, arts, and writing. I’m both a career software engineer and a hobby computerist.
There’s one genre I haven’t seen formally recognized, but is very dear to my heart. I call it “vacation trip drama” and it’s exactly what it sounds like: a dramatic story that takes place on a vacation trip, or involves one as a plot progression device. There’s something special about how the temporary nature of vacation trips brings about nuance and complexity to the characters. Almost as if…
I’ve so far avoided writing about The Thing on this blog, mostly because I wasn’t sure whether a post about AI would have me channeling naive optimism or launching into a bitter anti-capitalist diatribe. If you’re on social media, it’s easy to get the impression that software engineers either believe that “manual coding is already obsolete” or that “a single line of LLM output will turn your…
Today I want to share a neat trick I use to link to files from my iCloud Drive in my notes and tasks. These links work across macOS and iOS and don’t require an active Internet connection. By default, iCloud doesn’t offer anything like this—but luckily, there’s another built-in app we can call to the rescue.
I’ve written before about my fondness for the simplicity of Apple Notes and the seemingly infinite flexibility of OmniFocus. I’m still partial to both apps but haven’t used either for some time. The reason is that I’ve concluded that notes and tasks belong together, and neither app could be stretched to do both well enough. As a result, I ended up switching to Obsidian, which, with the help of…
Several years ago, I deleted all bookmarks from my web browser and moved them into a plain text note. I then set up Alfred to always keep those important URLs right at my fingertips. This simple setup has since become a crucial part of my workflow, bringing me daily joy and impressed reactions from coworkers watching my screen. In this post, I’ll describe how it works.
A screenshot of the running Random Melody app
Recently, my system automation journey took me on an unexpected excursion as I found myself building a native macOS app. Now, mere two weeks later, it’s finished and I’ve integrated it into my main setup. It’s called Anykey, and it’s a tool for binding arbitrary shell commands to system-wide or app-specific hotkeys. It’s configured via a text file that can be stored in Git or synced to Dropbox.…
I really like this comic by Rakhim:
This past year, like many other “suddenly remote” workers, I found myself using digital calendars even more than usual. Mainly, trying to block some focus time before another “X sync” splits my afternoon into two chunks too small to do any deep work, but also looking for any documents linked via attached notes (yes, the documents everyone was supposed to read before the meeting), and, of course,…
I gave a talk about the philosophy of technology choices at the (online) Philly ETE 2020. You can watch the recording on YouTube or in the embedded player below.