2026-05-26 02:29:09
Every year I’m looking forward to the KotlinConf, my favorite conference. And this one was very special for me, as it took place in Munich, my hometown.
The first surprise awaited on the highway approaching the convention center. The roadsigns shown the directions to the conference!
Roadsign on the highway A94
The conference started for me on Wednesday with the workshop. It was an updated version of the workshop we did with my colleague Martón last year. It went smooth this year as well, with a genuine interest of all attendees.
We were off for a good start! And when I was sitting at the reception after the workshop, decompressing from the whole day of talking, another colleague asked me if I can help with the Coding Challenge. I agreed and spent next two days commentating the blind coding competition.
KotlinConf 2026 Keynote
But before that, we started with an hour long keynote, featuring days and months of work of hundreds people at JetBrains and other companies to make the Kotlin Ecosystem the best for development on all platforms.
The conference is, of course, a bubble of like-minded people. So nobody asked a question “why should I use Kotlin?”, they were rather asking “can I use it in scenario A on a platform B?”, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time. We absolutely realistically cannot support that many scenarios and platforms. But we’ll do our best!
Happy me at the start of the second day
At the end of the second day I was even happier than at the start of the conference, but absolutely exhausted. Most of my colleagues who worked at the conference felt the same, but we had a great afterparty nevertheless.
Thanks to the public holiday on Monday, I had a long weekend to recover. And now, I already can’t wait when and where the KotlinConf 2027 opens it doors.
2026-05-09 17:53:34
I’ve just experienced the power of Brandolini’s Law on myself. It is an anecdotal observation which states that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
Back in 2021–2022, I was co-hosting and producing a podcast. I purchased some fitting background music before we started and have been using it in every episode.
Some distribution platforms even requested a proof of purchase when I first added the podcast there, which I, of course, provided. But not Spotify. Instead, Spotify decided to remove half of the published episodes at the beginning of this week, seemingly on a random basis. They claimed that I didn’t have permission to use the third-party music. And all that 3 years after the last published episode.
In their email, they required me to answer no later than in five days. I needed to spend at least half an hour to find the proof of purchase and to write an individual response for each affected episode. And there wasn’t even an option in the form to attach the receipt.
It took another 24 hours for Spotify to reinstate all episodes without asking any additional questions. Basically, they just believed my word, that I do have rights for the music. So, some of their systems just generated some bullshit allegations, and I needed to react to that in a very short timeframe to just revert everything back to how it was.
And after this, the story is over, I hope at least.
I love Spotify as an avid music listener. But as a (very) small content creator, I sometimes feel helpless, that any of the big platforms can just suspend my account for made-up reasons, and I would need to invest significant time to respond to unfunded claims just to prove that I haven’t done anything wrong.
2026-04-12 22:23:52
Earthset captured from the Orion spacecraft
When wild and crazy things happening every day on Earth, it is even more incredible to see humans flying into space and successfully getting back. The true celebration of science and hard work. It gives me hope in humanity.
NASA shared this and other amazing photos in the gallery and I can also recommend a video with insightful comments about all these amazing photos.
2026-04-09 16:14:34
Today is the CSS Naked Day, a day dedicated to showcasing the raw, unstyled version of websites.
You can do crazy things with CSS nowadays, and it’s even more exciting to see what you can do without it.
I haven’t checked what my homepage will look like without CSS yet, so I’m as curious as you.
Update 12 Apr 2026 All in all, the site was 100% accessible,
except I forgot to set width and height attributes on my photo at the top of the page.
And without CSS it was unnecessary huge.
I fixed this.
2026-04-08 00:05:27
On February 1, 2011, I acquired kropp.name.
According to the whois data, it’s been registered 10 years before, but unused.
Since then, it’s been my personal homepage and my Internet identity.
I don’t have any screenshots of old pages, and the Git history dates back to April 2012. So the first few years are lost to time. But thanks to the wonderful Wayback Machine I could still take a look at them.
At first my homepage was just a simple HTML file with a handful of links.
At that time I was fascinated by the idea of a static site generator. And Hyde was the first one I tried. It was promoted as Jekyll’s evil twin and was written in Python, which I liked more than Ruby.
So it stuck for a while, with just a minor font and photo update.
And Twitter was still good that time, so I even included a recent tweets widget right in my homepage.
But I was increasingly dissatisfied with its performance and lack of features. So I decided to try something else. And I found Hugo, which I’ve been using since 2015.
At first the page was trilingual, with the main content in English, occasional triathlon and run updates in Russian, and a few pages in German.
It gradually evolved over the years, while the main page stayed the same, again not counting for a photo refresh.
I ditched language versions, as I didn’t have enough content and willingness to maintain them. Translating the content was never a goal for me.
The font has changed to Inter, which I’ve been using since then.
The site reached the design I’m using now.
2026-04-02 01:37:23
I wrote my first program in Basic on a Macintosh Classic or some of its successors someday in 1998.
I almost haven’t used Apple products after that, until 2020, when they announced Apple Silicon. Since then, I’m fully converted to the ecosystem.
Yes, they have a lot of things to improve, but modern Macs are the best computers I’ve ever used, and iPhones are the best phones I’ve ever used.
50 years of Thinking Different as seen on apple.com on April 1, 2026
Happy Birthday, Apple! On to the next fifty years!
