Happening now
May 2025
Every year I fall into the same trap. Every winter I think, “Hmm, winter is brutal, but it’s not that bad, I wonder why everyone talks about gray sadness and vitamin D deficiency…”. And then spring comes, and I, feeling 10x better than at winter, think to myself, “Ahhh, so that what seasonal depression is…”. This year wasn’t any different. I really should start taking vitamin D in the winter…
Anyway! I’m glad it’s better now, and I have a lot more energy. Spring so far was a pure delight. In March my mother and sister visited me in Bratislava, and we had a really great time together. And in April I went to Warsaw to have my first impression of the city and meet my homies there. I’m very happy with timing, because it was time lilac (one of the best flowers!!) was blooming, and there is a looot of it in Warsaw, it smelled incredible.
May is going to be pretty packed too. The highlight is, of course, Deepnote’s onsite in Prague (did I already mention I love Prague???), but in addition to that, there are a couple of meetups/events I want to attend, and I also wanted to spend more time in nature this month (both around Bratislava and somewhere in Tatras). And throw in some more boring stuff related to relocation.
But I also want to carve out some time for my projects too. Anori could use some love. I consider it quite a mature project, and thus most of the low-hanging fruits are already harvested; adding new features (that are actually useful) takes a lot of time, and I’m not sure this energy boost will carry over to the next months. So I don’t want to commit to bigger features just to leave them half-done. Instead, I want to focus on smaller, incremental updates. For example, setting up better linter and formatter rules, migrating to Rspack, cleaning up code of ad-hoc and half-working features (looking at you, Safari version). And maybe setting some kind of roadmap to make future improvements easier.
Another one of my projects that didn’t receive much love recently is this website. After publishing two last articles about typography last autumn, I hit some kind of writer’s block. I still very much want to publish articles, but when sitting and trying to write at least an outline for one, I just couldn’t do it. It was so boring. And I’m not a huge fan of forcing yourself to do hobbies so you become to despise them. And that’s why you didn’t see any new posts on this website. I’m feeling better now and want to try writing again, but we’ll see how it goes. No promises!
And lastly, there is one more project I didn’t mention before. Even though I entertained the idea of it for longer than I’d like to admit. My teen years were spent in small group chats. What initially was just a group of randos with common interests (from anime to game dev) quickly turned into a tight-knit community that stayed together for years, often with the original topic long forgotten. That happened to me just by itself; I did not look for those communities, nor did I try to manage or create them. But I enjoyed being part of them a lot. Looking back, I realize how much those communities helped me and shaped both my career and my world view.
I want to replicate this experience. Not only for myself, but also for other people who miss this kind of community of like-minded people. And now, when I’m an adult, I’m realizing that it won’t happen unless I make a conscious effort and try building it myself. So that is how the idea was born; let’s see if my execution will be successful.
January 2025
A lot of time has passed, hehe. But the weather is still awful here, albeit in a different way than in August. Autumn was nice though!
And a lot of stuff happened in my life, but I won’t bore you with all the details🙃. First, an update on stuff I mentioned in the previous record. Work is going well! I still feel like I have a lot to learn (the code base is huuuuuge~), but so far I really like it. I already went couple of times to the office in Prague, and man, I miss a big city sooo much. Prague felt just like home. At the same time, it’s like Bratislava (similar language, familiar way of life, idk how to describe it honestly) and Kyiv (big city vibes). So, a combo of two homes.
The Situation with relocation became a lot clearer, too. With some outstanding hurdles with docs solved (finally the Slovak government decided to implement EU directive properly after 3 years, lol), I can start preparing to move to Poland. Yeah, not going far really, lol. Slovakia headed in questionable political direction, and I don’t think staying here will be a good decision. Plus, I really crave living in a bigger city (like Warsaw) again. Bratislava is lovely, but with the trip to Prague, I realized how much I miss this feeling. Oh, and lower taxes, lol.
In recent months, I feel so content with my life. I just live, cook tasty meals, walk around the city, work on my day job, read in coffee shops, talk with people sometimes, practice languages, spend time on my personal projects, and so on and so on. It’s so mundane, but I’m happy I can find happiness in those simple things.
August 2024
Long time, no see, sweeties! Weather here in Bratislava is kinda awful. I get pretty used to heat, but it’s still unpleasant. Hopefully, it won’t continue for long!
Unfortunately, my application for a Global Talent Visa in the UK was rejected. But it’s still a visa with great terms, and I plan to give it another try in a year or so. But for now, I’ll be staying in Slovakia, I guess. From one side, it means I again can’t make certain plans for more than a year in advance, which very much sucks. But from the other side, I like Slovakia (except a few things) and very much like the routine we and my girlfriend established here, and now I have some additional time to enjoy it. But for a long-term residence, I’m not really sure; Global Talent Visa terms are really hard to beat.
My prolonged vacation is also ending this month as my new job starts. I’ll be working on a notebook app for data scientists. I’m very excited to work in this field, as I’m sure there will be all kinds of different UI problems to solve. And finally, I don’t need to go on interviews; I really hate doing them 😁.
While I didn’t make much (if any) progress on crypto patreon, I did a couple of other cool projects, including my frontend for LLMs I mentioned in the previous post. But I’m especially proud of Emera, as it was one of the most unusual things I worked on recently but still very interesting. It combines Babel, Rollup, my whacky abstractions, and CodeMirror extensions to bring MDX-like experience to Obsidian.
May 2024
I left my last workplace at the end of March and decided to take it slow and give myself at least two months before searching for a new job. I did so last summer, and it was great. Job market didn’t look great at the time (still isn’t probably?) and weather in Bratislava was good in April, so time well spent so far.
Still working on docs for my visa; hopefully I’ll be able to submit everything at the start of the summer. And from there I’ll be left to wait for the decision.
I actually made a landing page for the “crypto patreon” project. It turned really good, in my opinion! But while I was waiting for illustrations, I switched to other projects and now don’t really have time or desire to actively work on this one. But I’m planning to return to it once I settle matters with the visa. Maybe I’ll be just in time for the new crypto boom, who knows. Anyway, I should add it to the projects page.
Recently I found myself working on another app, which is multiprovider frontend for Large Language Models. I wanted to use local LLMs through Ollama, but I didn’t fully like any of the available frontends, so I decided to roll my own and add support for OpenAI and Anthropic along the way. I decided to pick a new shiny stack for the backend this time (Bun, Hono and Drizzle) and I must admit I enjoy it very much, maybe except for the small compatibility issues in Bun. Maybe I’ll be able to finish it this month and release it as an open source project. I’ll need to pick a proper name first, though.
Gosh, first crypto, then AI… I don’t chase the hype train, I promise.
February 2024
Heeeey, I finally got my master’s degree! Still not sure if I will ever need it, and it was quite stressful for the whole 1.5 years it took, but I’m very happy it’s over now.
I caught myself thinking about that crypto-patreon project a lot; I guess it’s time to put it into work. I spent a lot of time reading about EVM, Solidity, and smart contracts to just make sure it’s possible to implement. And it seems it is! There are a few more nuances, but I think it’s time to start building a landing page for it and try to figure out if there is an audience for it at all.
And I got myself a really cute pin holder cloth last month. Planning to fill it with cool pins too.
December 2023
This was quite a pleasant year. I left my freelance projects in the middle of the year and had my two-month vacation. After that, I got a job at a quite big tech company. Though I still don’t like working full-time (and I think part-time is one of the best things to happen to me), it was better than I expected.
Currently, I’m concentrated on preparing all necessary docs for my visa in the United Kingdom, and hopefully I’ll be there next year. Besides that, I actively work on posts for my blog. It turned out I quite enjoy writing, and now my 40+ hours spent on building this personal site don’t feel wasted, haha.
As for pet projects, Anori is now in a state of being lazily maintained (and has been there for a few months). I recently got into crypto, idea of programmable money fascinates me so much, and now I find myself thinking about how I can turn this into projects useful for a broader audience. I have this idea of crypto-patreon, but I’m still not sure how to best approach it.