City planners know that you can't solve traffic problems by building more roads. We could apply this line of thinking in our personal lives, too. I've written about small battery productivity before, and the more I think about the pattern, there more missed opportunities I see.| rakhim.org
A Scottish writer Matt Gemmell described a technique of “small screen productivity”. He was talking about either a small laptop or a tablet which doesn’t allow him to see many contexts simultaneously, thus boosting creative output. One window, small screen, no distractions.| rakhim.org
I always thought these fashion runway shows are kind of silly.| rakhim.org
Finnish language has 15 noun cases which pack a lot of expressive power. For example, let's take the word “kissa” (cat). Here are some of the cases:| rakhim.org
Intro| rakhim.org
I guess it was inevitable. Once you embrace Emacs, at some point you gonna want to do email in it. Honestly, I don't think I'll stick with it, but as an experiment, I want to try and see whether it makes sense to use Emacs as an email client.| rakhim.org
This is a complete summary of an excellent talk by Rob Pike “Concurrency is Not Parallelism”. Illustrations and diagrams are recreated; source code taken verbatim from the slides, except for comments, which were extended in some places.| rakhim.org
Picking a university was one of the main tasks in the last year of high school. That and exams. I wasn't sure what to study and which place to pick. I had no idea how one can make these choices. There weren't too many resources available at the time. So, a lot of us relied on promotional info provided by universities themselves.| rakhim.org
I love bicycles.| rakhim.org
I believe the 80-characters (or any other number) line limit for text to be wrong. Not archaic or irrelevant, but wrong. It violates a fundamental idea of computer science: separating layers of abstraction.| rakhim.org
Here is a TL;DR version:| rakhim.org
In light of recent changes to Google Chrome, many forums have filled with bitter discussions. Here are just a few:| rakhim.org
Society has certain expectations when it comes to engineering and technology. We expect buildings and bridges to basically never fail. We expect cars to be extremely safe and fool-proof, as much as explosions-based metal boxes moving at hundred miles per hour can be safe and fool-proof. Home appliances are supposed to work for years without any serious maintenance. Electricity is just there, always. And when it goes out, we are incredibly frustrated and surprised.| rakhim.org
Hi, I'm Rakhim. I teach, program, make podcasts, comics and videos on computer science at Codexpanse.com. You can learn more about my work and even support me via Patreon.| rakhim.org
“Pochards”, was the first word spoken today. Emil looked up cautiously, keeping the corner of his eye on the road. Several dots on the dark-blue morning sky, no clouds. He was never quite sure whether dad could really recognize particular species of birds at this distance.| rakhim.org
I hate to use a smartphone.| rakhim.org
They housed me in a small metallic room and gave me pants, a small towel and soap. Others from my group were close by in similar rooms, all in the same building where we woke up. Someone had asked if we could go outside, but I didn't hear the reply.| rakhim.org
There's this thing called fundamental attribution error:| rakhim.org
Intro| rakhim.org
When I'm searching for docs, 95% of the time a single example would suffice. Yet, 95% of the time I can't find one in any official source.| rakhim.org
Computer programmers often talk about tackling complexity, yet they thrive on complexity. I believe tech people experience a constant dilemma: on one hand, we want things to be simple and straightforward; on the other hand we love complex structures and engineering marvels.| rakhim.org
User is dead. User remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the developers, the designers, the growth hackers? What was holiest and the final judge of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our a/b-tests and new features. Who will wipe this blood off us? What garbage collector is there for us to clean ourselves? What conference of atonement, what disruptive technology, what sacred meeting shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed...| rakhim.org
A process of learning is analogous to an attempt of building a three-dimensional model from two-dimensional photos.| rakhim.org
Good old days| rakhim.org
As a software developer, at some point you discover simple slides and presentation generators: Markdown-to-PDF/HTML converters, Emacs extensions, LaTeX exporters, VIM plugins, etc. The idea makes perfect sense, because:| rakhim.org
I'm trying Firefox as my primary browser on all devices. It has some great features like Multi-Account containers in addition to being a non-Google product, which is an increasingly rare feature on the web nowadays.| rakhim.org
Now that you're familiar with direct proof and proof by contradiction, it's time to discover a powerful technique of proof by induction.| rakhim.org
Nikita just published Software disenchantment, and here is my rant-y reply. Please, read his post first.| rakhim.org
At work we use SCSS and HAML, so I rarely write pure HTML and CSS there. But for small side projects and my personal blog I tend to stick with the simplest (and dumbest) possible tools. This week I was working on a refreshed look for this blog. Being a good modern man, I tried to stick with em or rem for sizing and typography.| rakhim.org
In mathematics, a theorem is a true statement, but the mathematician is expected to be able to prove it rather than take it on faith. The proof is a sequence of mathematical statements, a path from some basic truth to the desired outcome. An impeccable argument, if you will.| rakhim.org
I've been reading an article about Emacs, and this paragraph had nailed me right into the soul:| rakhim.org
Most of my life, I didn't have much money. I was born in the 90s in a tiny Kazakh town, and nobody had a job there, it seemed. USSR just collapsed and my parents were trying to make ends meet in a constant hustle.| rakhim.org
I've launched a podcast recently (EmacsCast) and received lots of feedback. One of the perplexing things people said was “that's great, but how do I subscribe, it's not on iTunes/Google Podcasts?”| rakhim.org
I'm not going to try to convince you to backup data. I didn't do backups for the most of my life, except for some photos and videos here and there. And those weren't really backups, more like archives on external HDD's.| rakhim.org