Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I am from Siberia. I studied CS there, got my first job in IT, and moved to Germany in 2018. Apart from programming, I am passionate about movies and filmmaking, UI design, experimented with standup, play badminton.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I started writing in LiveJournal when I was still in uni, found a very nice Russian-speaking FP community there. Had a lot of eye-opening and often very heated discussions. Experimented with publishing in collaborative blogs (Habr, approximately Russian dev.to) but felt that author’s identity gets lost there.

Personal blog was my attempt at reaching a wider English-speaking community. Livejournal was already dying by then, and I was smart (lucky?) enough to not choose Medium (TBH, it looked very promising in 2014).

I am pretty happy with that decision. The older you get, the less you believe any startup has your best interests at heart. This leads to the only possible conclusion: self-hosting. It is hard to start but once you get your core audience there’s no limit to your growth.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I usually collect ideas for a while (pictures, phrases, links, thoughts). This happens in the background and can take years. Once it reaches critical mass, I sit down to organize it all in a coherent whole.

I don’t do separate drafts; it’s more like a pile of ideas — first pass — reflection — reorganization/cleanup — review — publish.

A mandatory part of the reflection phase is questioning myself: why am I writing this, nobody is going to read it, this is stupid/silly/trivial/too complicated. That’s how you know you are writing something truly great.

I usually ask a friend or two for feedback, Grammarly/ChatGPT/built-in Apple AI to do proofreading.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I can only write in Sublime Text because it’s a tool I use daily for coding and it has become second nature to me. I feel very uncomfortable in any other tool when some minor detail behaves slightly different from what I am used to. iA Writer is fantastic and I tried to reproduce it as close as possible, its only downside being not being Sublime Text.

I recently bought a NuPhy keyboard (Air60 v2 Cowberry) for my PC because of its compact size and cute looks, but was surprised that it sounds amazing and now I am addicted to typing on it.

Apart from that, no: any place, any time, any device. No sounds, no music, as I find both distracting.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I used to use Github pages but got tired of Ruby/Jekyll local installation breaking on macOS every year or so. I don’t blog often, so it’s the worst: you come back to your blog once every few months, completely without context, and you need to spend hours just restoring it to the status quo. Wrote my own engine in Clojure and has been happy ever since.

For some reason I didn’t go with the static generator route. I do a good old CGI style approach, with an actual server rendering your pages. It’s more fun that way, and allows for more interactivity, although I didn’t explore it much yet.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

No, I am totally happy with where I am.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Server costs €35/mo, but I co-host a lot of other projects there. Domain is €25/year.

I used to have Patreon, but it was not just for blog, also for my open-source projects. I never tried monetizing writing, not sure how well that would go, but I have nothing against it.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Off the top of my RSS feed:

• Jamie Brandon https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/log/
• Rakhim Davletkaliyev https://rakhim.exotext.com/
• Marcin Wichary https://aresluna.org/
• Ilya Birman https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Fira Code is a nice programming font you might like.