Some years ago, I would have listed these as problems that could be solved by now: Seamless language translation Babel Fish by Douglas Adams. No matter what language one is writing, another should be able to seamlessly read and understand the written. We do have Google Translate, DeepL and LLMs, some of them even built-in in modern browsers, but...
One thing that surprised me when I moved to the Netherlands was the difference in how the seasons are observed. It turns out that there are at least two ways: astronomical and calendar-based. I was used to calendar seasons, where each season has three months, starting on the first and ending on the last day of the respective months. While some...
I decided to extract a blog engine from my blog repository, even though nobody asked for it. While doing so, I dropped TypeScript but moved it Deno for the rest of the tooling. There's nothing particularly interesting about this, except for one thing I noticed: If I decide to publish this for others to use, it could be as simple as just cloning...
Quitting social media is like quitting smoking — easy, done it several times. E-mail correspondence I suggested in my previous update didn’t really work out. Not that I expected it to. So here are some links I found interesting recently: A story how on 1700s Spanish King ordered to an accurate map of the kingdom and that resulted in 500 different...
No updates here for a long time. And 2023 has ended, so why not to journal some results. Then I saw others' posts online and realized I would be writing roughly the same, and for some reason, it stopped me. Then, having found no rationale why not to, I thought it still was worth writing about the disenchantment which feels now not transient but...
I'm afraid of being that bear to the gardener, but let's talk about burnouts. Good things first. Burnout is not a stable condition. Once you remove yourself from the environment that caused it, you recover. I did. I even got curious about the work again. A thought of returning too soon and spoiling the time spent recovering was quite scary. At...
Around 8 years ago I started to buy vinyl records. It wasn’t for the vinyl audio quality. The idea was to have the most favourite albums in physical format. I did not even have a record player. I thought of getting one at some point but the goal was to have records on a shelf. I could stream the music online while sitting in the chair and...
I've just realised that Joanne Dvorak might be not the only one to make such mistake. So let me fix it. I've never been a fan of write-your-own-thing when there are many superior alternatives available. Now I’m even less of it. But when I decided to spin up a stand-alone blog, I didn’t go for Hugo, Gatsby or Jekyll. I thought it’s just a bunch of...
For most of my years in photography I’ve been using digital cameras. I bought film cameras a few times just to play around with the film but always sold it back after several months. And I never got into analogue printing, just developing and scanning with DSLRs. Around three years ago I found a full darkroom set for sale and decided to...
I was born in late USSR. Some things, somewhat ordinary to Western World, were either in scarcity or just not existing in my childhood. Though my uncle emigrated to Australia so occasionally we were getting something from there. At some point, we got a VHS. The player came with a bunch of cassettes with movies recorded from Australian TV....
Obviously, it turned out harder than expected. My plans to go through all my photos year by year stalled on year #2 (2006). I haven't picked a photo and finished the note but already have an external HDD dead, recovered data from backups, disassembled proprietory photo libraries, found a way to export photos from Lightroom CC (which doesn't have...
There is no better than to start from 2005. I borrowed a Minolta DiMAGE A1 from a friend and started shooting. That was my first exposure into digital photography and photography in general apart from few episodes in my childhood. Obviously, there is nothing worth sharing from these times, now it all seems very primitive and full of mistakes, but...
If you take metro and stand facing doors, it might feel as if the train goes straight without turns. Though if you look back and the previous car can be seen, you'll notice that it's wriggling from side to side. That's what I ended up with while trying to describe my interests in creativity. To capture and share such moments, mostly by...
If we take popular JS topics currently out there, type annotations, server-side rendering (SSR) and CSS in JS are probably in the top four. Virtual DOM frameworks have come as a solution to a request of getting more code on a client side. Tools like TypeScript and Flow appeared as attempts to fix some JS parts. Also, people started to seek for...
That's the third article in a series on TypeScript started by ‘TypeScript. Bad Parts’. You can read them in any order as they aren't really connected apart from covering the same topic. But if you can't decide, make it chronologically. This time I'd like to show how you can leverage types to simplify your runtime code. Let's say we have a...
That's the second article in a series on TypeScript started by ‘TypeScript. Bad Parts’. You can read them in any order as they aren't really connected apart from covering the same topic. But if you can't decide, make it chronologically. So what do types bring to JS? They fix some bad parts of JS, but that's a byproduct. Mainly they add some...
I've been writing TypeScript for more than a year now and gone through well-known five stages of grief so it's time to share my experience. It all started as a compilation of tips & tricks I've discovered so far. Then it went to a more meta level of what types bring to JS at all. And as I was writing two pieces asynchronously I began to find...
a post testing micro.blog integration.
On December 2006 I joined a digital agency as a humble HTML coder. There was neither Chrome nor iPhone yet, IE market share was around 85%, table-based layouts ruled the internet and we all were debugging using window.alert calls. Fast-forward 10 years. Chrome's released v.54, iPhone is in its 10th generation, IE has less than 15%. Web standards...