Andrei in 2022

I’m a war refugee, never thought I’d become one. I lived in Ukraine for 12 years before the war, now adapting to a new life in Portugal.

I wrote my first complete program in 2002 (20 years ago at the time of this writing), and I’ve been programming professionally since 2007. Things I worked on:

  • A system for cancer diagnostics.
  • A web browser.
  • A large telephony system (millions of phone calls per month).
  • An industrial monitoring system.
  • Plugins for IDEs and text editors.
  • A bunch of SaaS products.

I programmed in large variety of languages: Bash, Perl, Ruby, Rust, Java, and wrote tons of JavaScript throughout my career. I’m very interested in computer history, and history in general, so ‘ve got a lot of stories to tell.

I’ve been giving conference talks and conducting workshops in person and online, mostly on web technologies. I also ran several large online developer chat communities in Eastern Europe. In past I organized two RustFest events in Kyiv and Zürich, and spoke at numerous JS events.

Horoshok the Budgie

I have a budgie, her name is Horoshok / Горошок (lit. “Little Green Pea”). She’s absolutely wonderful, very playful, cheerful little bird. In my spare time I sometimes play very complex Excel-spreadsheets-pretending-to-be-games from Paradox Dev Studio.

How this website runs

This website is hosted by GitHub Pages, which supports Jekyll out of the box. Every other static site generator would require me to mess with GH Actions, and I don’t want to deal with it. So, while using something like Zola sounds really cool, Jekyll it is. Which is totally fine by the way. I have Ruby installed, so it’s all good.

Minima is the default Jekyll theme, and that’s what I use. Turned out it supports Solarized Light color scheme. It’s one of the few - if not the only - color schemes that has its own Wikipedia page, btw. I’ve been using since its release in 2011 - for 11 years already! This is how my editors look like, my terminal, etc., you get the idea. It’s only fitting to have it as my website colors, too. Though I decided to turn on auto switch to Solarized Dark for those of you who run Dark Mode everywhere.

While we’re at it, I also switched code font to Source Code Pro - a typeface that was released in 2012 and which I’ve being using as my primary monospace font since release. For a decade my editor and my terminal look like this site, so you can get a taste of what it feels like to code with me.

Finally, I host my email on FastMail, and use their DNS because it keeps things simple. Turned out, they don’t allow changing A records for the main domain, but allow setting up redirects. Oh, well. listochkin.com redirects to blog.listochkin.com, which is set in GitHub’s CNAME file. Conveniently, both FastMail and GitHub take care of LetsEncrypt certificates for you. Neat!