Jan Malakhovski (aka oxij)

is a computer scientist (Ph.D. in Computer Science, specifically, in Programming Language Theory), software and DevOps engineer, and constructive mathematician, on a quest to become a constructive polymath.

Things I like

Overview of things I do/did

Recent public activity

Help me do the work I do

If you find something I’ve done — be it my software projects, or notes, teaching materials, or something else — to be cool or useful to you, you can help me do more things like that by following one of the following procedures.

Help me get my sustenance by donating some coins into my tip jars so that I could devote more of my time to those personal projects instead of doing freelance work:

Patreon
BTC
XMR
Any other cryptocurrency,
selectable after a click

(Personally, I think everyone should have their own indie cryptocurrency tip jars. Allowing Patreon and GitHub to control future livelihoods of potentially everyone makes me feel very paranoid. Isn’t it enough that Visa and MasterCard take 3% tax on the whole world economy already?)

(I.e., if you are an indie developer, make such tip jars too! Personally, for tips, I would rather use Monero than anything else in existence.)

Report issues, bugs, and missing features

If you think one of my software projects or notes has an issue, bug, or just misses something obvious, open an Issue on GitHub or write me an email about it.

It’s nice to know what people are using my things for, and even though my answer to any feature requests will likely be “eventually”, I’m trying my best fix any reported bugs ASAP.

Inform me and/or others about how you find my work useful

I will be quite thankful if you decide to write me a thoughtful email about how you use my things. In such a message, please specifically mention the parts you liked and the parts you didn’t. This does more than just stroke my ego. For example, so far, most improvements to UI of hoardy-web were a results of such email exchanges. E.g., most recently, several persons wrote me emails which, essentially, said

hoardy-web rocks, thanks for making it! Ka-ching! But, re-queuing sucks. Whomp-whomp-whomp! Can we have a different UI for this, please?

and thus re-archival machinery was born.

Also, I’m self-aware enough to notice that honest praise is the best motivator for me and that I spend most of my idle time thinking about things people wrote to me about.

Though, be aware that while you are technically allowed to ask me hard technical questions and request me to contribute to your projects instead of working on mine in those messages, I will probably ignore such requests, simply skipping those parts in my answers to you. Don’t take it personally, please. I’m a perfectionist and hard questions usually require me to do quite a lot of research to produce a response that satisfies me, while half of my project aren’t finished yet, so I would rather work on those instead.

Social media and etc

If you would rather praise or complain about my things in a blog post, podcast, or video instead, you are welcome to that too.

Though, in that case, I would be thankful if you would also kindly send me a link to it. Similarly, I would be implicitly thankful if you would, in good faith, mention my stuff where it would be relevant, both on social media and in non-spam private communication. Relevant gossip is the best advertisement, after all.

On alternatives

If you think you have a better solution to a problem mentioned in notes or solved by a piece of software I use, please inform me about it. I will probably link to the thing from the relevant page on this site and/or from the relevant project’s documentation, depending.

If you browse the docs and GitHub issues of my projects, you can find multiple examples of me doing this. I hate how search engines apparently lower you search rank when you link to too many other useful things. Which, while they have a good explanation for doing it, I find it mightily suspicious that it also benefits them greatly, as now you have to go to them for alternatives and comparisons, instead of the original project pages listing those things, even though that’s actually the best place for those things. So, I refuse to obey these stupid rules and all my project feature extensive list of alternatives and comparisons, for example, like this.

Sponsor me, transactionally

As an extension of the above option, you can write me an email describing how you use my things and any features you or your company wants to be there but are apparently missing, and then, assuming we mutually agree on the terms, you can simply hire me to add those things for you.

In this case, my terms are as follows:

The above terms ensure that

I like things being fair and voluntary on both sides and both sides parting on amicable terms.

Contribute your own work

If you like something of mine enough to make a patch for one of my software projects or write and publish your own version of one of my more theoretical notes, please open a PR on GitHub or drop me an email about it.

I’d love to see if I can adopt some changes back from your work, or maybe I’ll just link to it, if it is relevant, but not useful to what I want my thing to do.

In short

Write me an email. Yes, you get the idea. I love emails. Thank you.

Contact me

E-mail

GitHub

If you are contacting me about one of my software projects you can also open an issue or PR on its GitHub page instead. Each project page has a link to its GitHub page at the very top, right under the title header.

If you don’t want to make that conversation public, emails, including those with outputs of git format-patch are perfectly fine too.

OpenPGP keys

Instant messaging, voice and video chat, file transfers over Tox