The DIMV Blog

I’ve been doing medicine my whole life — well, more than half of my life, at least. I must admit, it was never my calling, yet I got rather good at it.

I quit. Today is my last day at this job.

My not-yet-three-year-old daughter seems to like The Rolling Stones a lot. Even the first song she started rocking her head to back when she barely learned to sit up was “Anybody Seen My Baby?” And these days…

We were in our car, The Beatles were on, me and my wife were enjoying the music, the daughter also rocked her leg to time a little, everything seemed fine. At some point, the playlist was over, and a Stones’ song came up. The daughter reacted immediately:

USB type C is lovely, isn’t it? You come to your office with your laptop, and just plug that single cable you have lying on your desk. The other end of the cable is connected to the monitor on your desk, and you immediately have the second screen, the full-size keyboard and the mouse that are connected to the USB ports in the same monitor, and also the headphones (that are connected to the 3.5 mm jack in the monitor). Oh, and the laptop’s charging. With one cable plug, you have the whole workstation set up, the monitor acting as a docking station. Lovely!

Life is actually awesome!

In weekdays and worries, you get too involved. It is absolutely necessary to stop and look around from time to time. Otherwise, it’s easy to start believing that life is hard and gloomy, while in fact this life is the best thing that could ever happen to us.

Что я — поклонник творчества БГ, ни для кого не секрет. Я даже иной раз читаю в глазах людей, хорошо меня знающих, что, может быть, я — даже больше поклонник его творчества, чем прилично здравомыслящему и уравновешенному человеку (мне, впрочем, можно: я ни тот, ни другой). Вслух мне этого пока не говорили, но думали очень громко. Я, бывает, даже задумываюсь: не чересчур ли я, правда…

А потом выходит вот новый мини-альбом из четырёх песен. И начинается он с куплета:

From time to time, working with S3, I remember that my website is static, and hosting it in an S3 bucket may be a good idea…

Then I remember that I want to correctly serve HTTP 410 codes where applicable, and become sad…

And then I look at all the Redirect, Rewrite a Header add lines in my .htaccess, calm down, and stop wishing impossible things.

Having seach on your website is very nice and convenient. I had it with Known, then, as I moved to static, I didn’t have it for a couple of months, then after the switch to LoveIt I had it back. LoveIt has builtin facilities to make use of either Algolia or Lunr.js, so I started using this second option. It worked well for some time, but then I started adding old posts from Google Plus and LJ, and suddenly there were too many pages on my site.

Выборы в России — это всегда немножко магия.

For years, the comment system on this site was essentially webmentions. It worked, mostly because I was able to syndicate my posts to social networks like Google+ (does anybody remember that?), Facebook, or Twitter, and then pull the comments back from there. With time, the social networks became more locked-down and I hardly go there anymore (not only for that reason).

Webmentions are quite a niche thing; not everyone wants to own a website¹, and even people who do may not have webmention support on their sites². They are still useful to interact with webmention-enabled-site owners, as well as Fediverse inhabitants, but a lot of people around me don’t fall into those categories. I could expand to Telegram, I think. That would require syndicating my posts to a channel there, and pulling back the comments. Looks doable, but to be honest, I don’t feel like putting my effort in another closed platform that is likely to fence up and slowly die, like the others. Meanwhile, there’s another system that should work reasonably well.

For a long time, I was puzzled by how popular Python was for backend development. Of course, it’s very convenient for drafting and prototyping, but the code runs slowly! Who would, in their right mind, write production code that is guaranteed to be slow (and hence to require bigger infrastructure budgets)!? Later I learned that many popular Python libraries (especially the performance-critical ones) are actually C++ and even C “under the hood”. Things started making sense.