Half Life and Half Life 2 are my favorite games. I've played them through multiple times. I played Half Life 1 for the first time in 1999 or 2000, can't remember. My computer at the time could barely run it. Nowadays, it's a struggle to play older PC games on a Mac. There are two fundamental issues: A while ago...

I made a little puzzle game called Knight Ride. You can play it here: knightride.rakhim.org. A few months ago, I started learning game development with Godot and began building a chess-inspired game. Game development is new and unintuitive to me, so for some quick 'build-n-ship' dopamine, I took one mechanic from...

Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its consequences. Any large company that creates products, whether software or physical, is...

Sublime Merge is a fantastic Git client. I’ve been using it for years, even after switching from Sublime Text to VS Code. VS Code has excellent built-in Git support, but I still prefer a dedicated app for staging files. Even when I used Neovim or Emacs (which has Magit, arguably the best Git client), I stuck with a...

Computers are precise machines. You can give a computer a precise command using an inhumane language, and it should perfome the command. It's not a human, and there is no point of treating it as one. The goal of humanizing user experience isn't to create an illusion of human interaction - it's to make these...

I've added a new feature to Exotext which converts YouTube links into embeds (when a link is on its own line and surrounded by newlines). To test things out, here are some cool YouTube videos I've watched this month.

Sometimes you need to make a change to an SQLite table which is not possible with a simple ALTER command. For example, today I realized that email_verifications table in my DB references users with a foreign key, but does not have ON DELETE CASCADE (I simply forgot to put it in). This makes it impossible to delete a...

I discover and curate dozens of blogs every day while working on Minifeed. The blogging is far from dead, there are SO many blogs out there! Sadly, lots of blogs don't have RSS. What's surprising is that the "techiest" of blogs usually don't have RSS. Quite often, I come across a beautiful blog, handcrafter with...

While developing Textpod (a simple note-taking app written in Rust), I needed to automate building and publishing on Github. This article (or the corresponding set of YAML-files) describes the setup which performs the following: Build binaries for Windows and Linux Build binaries for x86 Macs (Intel) and ARM Macs...

I had a "woah" moment once when one programmer got genuinely baffled about the fact that a website somehow "erases" the history of requests from the Network tab of Chrome DevTools. He was wondering what magic method was used to hide the communication. He hadn't realized the app was not a single-page JS application...

Lots of scientific Python libraries are often used within Jupyter notebooks. At work, we develop and maintain plenty of such libraries for quantum computing, and some more higher-level ones include extensive user guides in form of Jupyter notebooks. Recently, I've been involved in building a new library, and it...

I love science fiction in all forms, and I can't resist watching almost any sci-fi movie. So, I watch a lot of them. It's a bit annoying how "sci-fi and fantasy" became the standard pairing. In my eyes, these genres are exactly opposite. It's like grouping movies about horses with movies about cars. Anyway, here are...