Brother John, a classic of the genre, has served us well.

The English version is well known:

It’s basically an almost word-for-word adaptation of the French version, which is the original:

The Russian version I use, suggested by my dad, is not the canonical translation (one does exist), but rather a cheeky reworking by Soviet music students, which cracks me up each time I really think about it:

And the Chinese version is really fun too – an adaptation of the melody with a completely different story, well known to kids growing up in Taiwan in the 90s:

N. loved the Chinese version especially when she was smaller, and now E. is enjoying the songs as well.

I’ve started noticing the Delicas on our last trip, but this time around, hunting for them has become a bit of an obsession: I’ve been collecting different variants and liveries (my favourite is the very colourful school bus version!), which I’m sharing below.

This might yet turn into a proper project with time, but for now, enjoy the photos!

K-Pop Demon Hunters (aka KPDH) sneaked up on me via my daughter: she’s heard the songs at her nursery, and started requesting them in the car. The songs were catchy; I ended up watching the film a few weeks later.

And wow, the film was really great! I became a fan.¹

I love a good found family narrative, and KPDH is a great example of one. Rumi, Mira, and Zoey come together for a shared purpose (being pop stars! hunting demons!), and find community and acceptance with each other, despite each bearing the burden of trauma. Is it the nerdy immigrant kid in me that loves this kind of narrative? Probably. It feels super warm, and comforting.

Trauma comes hands in hand with shame, which is another central topic of the film, and it’s beautifully handled. The best analysis I’ve seen is this video from Cinema Therapy, which I wholeheartedly recommend you watch:

(The channel also has another video, focused on the HUNTR/X girls specifically, which is also really great)

It’s also clear that the film is made by people who care very much about their work.

The visuals are top notch: some of the artists have posted their production work, and there’s a whole artbook online!. Exploring all that actually led to me rekindling a very old interest in drawing and painting, and I’ve since started sketching with ink and colour pencils, which feels really great after many years.

The music plays a very important role in the film, and is exceptionally made, too. The songs have been stuck at the top of the global charts for months, and it’s no wonder: the soundtrack had some of k-pop’s biggest names working on it, just one example being Teddy Park of Black Label. This led me into an ongoing deep dive into k-pop, which has been fun and rewarding².

I’ve also been reading tons of KPDH fanfiction, via randomly discovering the incredible project that is An Archive Of Our Own (aka AO3) in a random Fedi post. I haven’t read fanfic since my teenage years, and while the overall quality can vary, some works are very well written, and worth exploring. A favourite example is the first chapter of Hindsight, by BigFigNewton, which is a really fun take on an important scene of the film.

I’m grateful KPDH found me when it did, and I’m grateful for the expanded worldview it brought me. The sequel has already been announced for 2029, and I’m sure there will be other stories told in the same universe by the same crew in the meantime (after all, KPDH has been nominated for an Oscar!). I’m looking forward to that!

Looking for work

After a 4-months stint at Clausebase where I worked on really interesting natural language processing projects and some LLM-powered workflows, I am once again looking for work.

I would like to spend the next few years at a stable, friendly team where I could work on hard problems, be they technical or organisational.

I’ve added a page to this website to show off my skills and experience, please take a look and reach out if your team could use my expertise.

Parenting

E. was born in June, and has been delighting us ever since. It’s been a lot of fun to get to know him, and we’re slowly getting used to being a family of four. It’s a big change for all of us, but especially for N., who is now three years old, and has been adapting to her new identity as a big sister. It hasn’t always been easy for her, but she’s been brilliant.

Same as I have done with N., I’m documenting the first year of E.’s life with daily instant photographs.

Making progress on Parts

Together with my partner, an Internal Family Systems therapist, we’re building Parts, a parts mapping tool for IFS therapists and their clients.

Progress has been slow with the birth of our son and the previous job hunt, but I’m slowly starting to work on it again, and have actually started building Minigraph, our own interactive graph editor, which is the piece of UI that’s at the very core of Parts.

Trying to get good at Clojure

At the suggestion of my friend BG, I’ve been doing the 4ever-clojure exercises, looking only at the official Clojure docs and the Clojure source code. It’s been slow going (like everything else these days), but I’m about 35% through, and it’s been great fun.

Our son, E., was born in June; the sweetest, happiest baby I’ve ever seen. We are now parents of two.

I’ve been trying, and failing, to write something meaningful on the occasion of his birth: it’s hard to find the free time, and the focus, to go as deep into this topic as I want.

So I’m putting this up as a placeholder for now: E. was born, he’s healthy, and grows well. It’s all we could ask for. I’m sure I will have much more to say later.

The JavaScript Extended Universe has never been my favourite part of the programming world, but Effect has forced me to reconsider. The library (think missing stdlib for TypeScript, or Haskell-but-make-it-TypeScript) is taking the TypeScript world by storm, and if you’re frustrated with JS/TS, it’s worth a look.

Preparation

Effect comes with a Language Service, packaged as a plugin to typescript-language-server. Getting it to work is straightforward in VSCode, but needs some extra steps in Emacs.

Follow that project README by installing the @effect/language-service package to your dev dependencies, and adding the relevant plugin configuration to your tsconfig.json file.

Getting it to work in Emacs

The Emacs typescript LSP unfortunately doesn’t load its plugins configuration directly from tsconfig.json (why?), but instead looks into a variable called lsp-clients-typescript-plugins, which contains a plist of plugins to load.

It’s possible to configure this on a per-project basis by adding a .dir-locals.el file at the root of your project. For effect-language-service, it would contain something like this:

((typescript-mode
  . ((eval .
           (setq-local
            lsp-clients-typescript-plugins
            (let ((root (project-root (project-current))))
              (when root
                (vector
                 (list :name "@effect/language-service"
                       :location (expand-file-name
                                  "node_modules/@effect/language-service"
                                  root))))))))))

What’s happening here:

1. When the typescript-mode is activated in this project,
2. We set the buffer-local version of the lsp-clients-typescript-plugins variable
3. To a vector that contains one plist that specifies the name of the plugin and its location

After adding this .dir-locals.el file to your project, revert a project buffer (M-x revert-buffer) for the file to be picked up by Emacs, then restart the LSP workspace (M-x lsp-workspace-restart).

Enjoy the Effect-specific features in Emacs!

Waiting for our family to grow

My partner and I are expecting our second child to be born any day now :) To say I’m thrilled is an understatement.

Looking for work

My contract got caught in a round of layoffs, so I am now hunting for a new job. I’ve put together a Hire Gosha! website for job hunting purposes, check it out, spread the word, and please let me know if you (or anyone you know) need a senior full-stack engineer who can ship fast.

Making progress on Parts

Together with my partner, an Internal Family Systems therapist, we’re building Parts, a parts mapping tool for IFS therapists and their clients. We have made a lot of progress on Parts, and we are going to be asking the people who have signed up to the waiting list to start testing it soon.

I’m excited to see if this project will fly!

Exploring programming languages

In addition to getting comfortable with Clojure and ClojureScript, I’ve been poking at some other programming languages recently, mostly of the functional and strongly typed variety. The most fun of those has been Haskell. I’ve written a little Scheme interpreter in it, which has been a really enjoyable experience. I’d like to get a chance to use Haskell more!

Studying computer science and math

I’ve been very slowly making my way through the legendary computer science textbook, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd ed.), by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. Although my progress is slow, it is also immensely satisfying, and I hope that brushing up on comp-sci fundamentals (and math — I’ve been going through fundamental courses on Khan Academy) will in the future allow me to tackle harder, more interesting problems in computing.

I went to my first Clojure conference yesterday — my first tech conference since Rails Conf 2012. It was reClojure in London, and it made me think.

Talks were generally really good, but a couple landed particularly well.

Replicant creator Christian Johansen’s talk hit close to home: I’m building Parts, and he demoed what UI development (with Replicant) can look like when one takes functional programming seriously¹. He also introduced a couple of interesting tools, including Portfolio, a Storybook-like tool for Clojure, letting you test components visually and separately from each other.

I can’t use Replicant or Portfolio yet, as Parts is deep in the React ecosystem with React Flow holding the whole thing together, but the talk was a needed reminder: modern UI doesn’t have to mean React and its complexities. Simplicity and testability can win.

Another talk I liked was on brain/computer interfaces, by Lorelai Lyons, who cracked open a field that felt like sci-fi to me via an impressive growth mindset. “You can just do things”, was my takeaway, “and share what you do, and be open about what you don’t know, and be excited about it all”. I wasn’t expecting to leave thinking about brain/computer interfaces, but Lorelai’s talk put them on my radar. She made the field feel accessible, like something weird and wonderful I could just start engaging with. That felt rare and freeing!

On the way home from the conference, I made this post on my socials:

A day at #reClojure, listening to inspiring talks & talking to inspiring nerds, made me realise just how burnt out I am on the whole field of CRUD-adjacent webdev. I feel I need some kind of reset, to start working on more challenging, more meaningful problems 🤔

This wasn’t nothing. Everyone who gave talks (or just showed up) brought this infectious kind of energy, the energy of people who care about their work, deeply. It made me realise that I need a lot more of this energy in my own life.

I’ve been circling this particular kind of burnout for a few years now, trying not to name it. Attending reClojure wasn’t a magic fix for all my problems, but it nudged me in what feels like a positive direction. Maybe that’s the start of doing some things differently.

This creates a situation where I would sometimes have two projects open in Emacs: one with Sorbet, and one without. When working on the project that does not use Sorbet, each new open buffer would try to start sorbet-ls, and fail, complaining about not being able to find the srb executable in the project bundle.

It’s of course possible to disable the lsp-mode client for sorbet-ls entirely, by adding it to lsp-disabled-clients, but this will also disable it in the project that does use Sorbet.

Below is the workaround I’ve come up with, I publish it here in the hopes it will be useful for someone else.

1. We disable the default lsp-mode client config for sorbet-ls so it won’t auto-start everywhere.
2. We create a function that checks whether the project associated with the current buffer uses Sorbet. It checks for the presence of a sorbet directory, and for any mention of Sorbet in the Gemfile.lock file.
3. We register a new LSP client that will start in all ruby buffers, but only if that buffer belongs to a project that uses Sorbet.

Please note that I’m using Doom Emacs (which provides the after! macro), and lsp-mode rather than eglot.

(after! lsp-mode
  (require 'lsp-sorbet)
  (add-to-list 'lsp-disabled-clients 'sorbet-ls)

  (defun gt/project-has-sorbet-p ()
    "Does this project use Sorbet?"
    (or (locate-dominating-file default-directory "sorbet")
        (when-let* ((root (locate-dominating-file default-directory "Gemfile.lock"))
                    (gemfile-lock (expand-file-name "Gemfile.lock" root)))
          (with-temp-buffer
            (insert-file-contents gemfile-lock)
            (search-forward-regexp "^ *sorbet \\|^ *sorbet-static " nil t)))))

  (lsp-register-client
   (make-lsp-client
    :new-connection (lsp-stdio-connection
                     (lambda ()
                       (when (gt/project-has-sorbet-p)
                         (if (file-exists-p "Gemfile")
                             '("bundle" "exec" "srb" "tc" "--lsp")
                           '("srb" "tc" "--lsp")))))
    :activation-fn (lambda (filename _mode)
                     (and (eq major-mode 'ruby-mode) (gt/project-has-sorbet-p)))
    :priority -1
    :add-on? t
    :server-id 'gt/sorbet-ls)))

Please adapt as needed, and do let me know if you’ve come up with a simpler and/or more elegant solution for this problem.

Once upon a time, I had the ambition to become a Real Professional Photographer™, and built myself a workflow to match. It goes like this: all my raw files went into one giant Capture One library¹ that has everything neatly arranged into albums, with a 1-5 star rating for pictures. When I travelled, I created a new session in Capture One, I’d download photos from my cameras every day, and I’d import the session into my giant library once we got back home. I’d export JPEGs to post on socials and this blessed website from Capture One.

I no longer hold this ambition, but I was still using this workflow pretty religiously, until recently.

Nowadays, I shoot mainly with a Ricoh GR III (a perfect camera for parents, but that’s a topic for another post), and mainly in programme (P) mode, in which the camera sets the shutter speed and aperture automatically.² I have also started saving JPEGs in addition to raw files, mainly because when we first got the camera, I couldn’t create a good colour profile for it to use in Capture One. These days, I’m trialing shooting JPEGs only, and I have a feeling it is going to stick.

The GR3 JPEGs look good, and I found myself basically storing the raw files, untouched, and using the JPEGs for my needs. My needs are not that advanced: I’m not making massive prints, and I’m not spending hours fixing stuff in photoshop — the height of my ambition is to, one day, make some more books. JPEG files are definitely good enough for this!

So this is what my setup looks like for this trip:

I download JPEGs from the camera to my phone using the GR Linker app. This app has a huge benefit over Ricoh’s own Image Sync app in that it makes downloading photos Not A Pain: it lets you use your phone to browse photos on your camera, and when you like one, a single tap will add it to a queue of items to download. This downloading happens in the background, and by the time you’re done browsing, usually your selects have already downloaded.

Ricoh’s app, by contrast, freezes the UI while photos download, so you have to first make the perfect selection of what you want to download from thumbnails, and then sit there like an idiot, remembering to tap the screen at regular intervals so that your phone doesn’t fall asleep and disconnect from the camera’s wifi.

I do still need to have the Ricoh app installed, because it keeps a Bluetooth connection active to the camera which enables geotagging, but that’s the only purpose it serves for me now.

Once the photos have been downloaded to my phone, I work with them in Apple’s default Photos app. Instead of the 1-5 star rating, I just add the photos I like to the Favourites, and it’s more than enough to be able to quickly find them later. While the editing functionality is not as powerful as in Capture One, it’s also plenty good enough — the perspective correction tools deserving a special mention for how nice they are. The facial recognition and search engine are also very helpful for navigation.

A benefit of shooting only JPEGs is that photos take up much less space. Storage is affordable these days, and the SD card I have in the GR has a 128 GB capacity³, which translates to about 7000 photos. This is more photos than I’m likely to take over the course of the trip, making bringing the laptop optional altogether, since I will not need to download photos to make space on the card.

I’m very happy with this setup: I spend much less time messing around with tools, and much more time taking photos, and enjoying the results. I’m looking forward to seeing where this drive for simplification will take me next.