Alex Kotliarskyi's occasional posts on technology, productivity, and side projects.
If you find yourself in a game of StarCraft, and ahead of your opponent, the worst thing to do is to try to wipe them out. This is counterintuitive. You have a better economy and a stronger army. Why not attack? The first reason is in game theory. StarCraft is…
Report #250012-22-N9 Subject: Carbon based intelligence form from Terra The Subject has been involved in the ancient software engineering for at least 20 Sol cycles. Attached is the observations log starting from the time T of the first contact. Phase 0. The S…
I remember this legendary software engineer at Facebook. His name is Bob. Bob is a prolific engineer – he was responsible for shipping Facebook Groups (among other things). He was also a hackathon legend, delivering hit after hit. At the time I was a massive p…
The 80/20 rule says that 80% value come from 20% effort. What if we apply the 80/20 rule to the first 80%? So 80% of 80% of value come from 20% of 20% of effort. Or 64% of the value come from 4% of the effort. Apply it again and you’ll get ~51% value from ~1%…
We just published a blog post about Symphony – an agent orchestrator I built for my team at OpenAI. Here I wanted to share a few behind-the-scenes bits that didn’t make the cut. Earlier this year I joined a team that had gone all-in on Codex. And it worked! It…
Vjeux once told me a story that stuck with me. It was about the good old days of the World of Warcraft. Blizzard shipped regular updates to the game, but their change logs were very sparse. The community had to figure out the details on their own, and there we…
Many years ago, I was invited to an adventure. My colleague from Facebook was assembling a little skunk works crew for a mission at Apple’s headquarters. We were to build the first prototype of the Facebook app for Apple TV. It was 2014. An engineer from Apple…
Remix is a web framework by React underdogs authors of the most popular React package. A few days ago at Remix Jam 2025, Ryan and Michael shared a sneak peek of Remix v3. There’s no official blog post or documentation yet. Here’s my attempt at explaining what…
One of my most successful side projects had exactly 2 daily active users. When I was growing up I loved listening to music, especially my parents’ cassette tapes and CDs. Back then music had a physical form. You had to take a magical artifact and carefully put…
The Get Your Shit Together day is a day off you take from work, family and other obligations. It’s a day you dedicate fully to things you’ve been always postponing. Fix squeaky door hinges, repot your plant, publish that blog post, start a side project. Really…
In 2017 I gave a talk at Chain React about building great user experiences with React Native. At the time the tech was new and the quality of the mobile apps built with React Native was poor. The gist of my talk was that it’s possible to build great apps with…
If you want to build a web app The Hacker News Way, here’s the stack you should use: Rust – the only language that gives you the privilege of calling your app “blazing fast”. According to the undocumented Hacker News rules, any post mentioning Rust in the titl…