Bozhidar Batsov

Hacker. Emacs fanatic. Lover of parentheses. Firebrand. Just another programmer with too many opinions. I’m not the best, but I’m pretty good.

About Me

Bozhidar

Hello, world!

I’m Bozhidar1 and I love computers in general and programming in particular2. My fanatic devotion to Emacs is known world-wide. I spend a lot of my (free) time on GitHub, contributing to various open-source Ruby, Clojure and Emacs Lisp projects.

The above paragraph is actually what I typically use as my bio for conference talks. I love speaking at conferences and I’m really bad at it!3

I’ve always struggled to write about myself, so I’ll just list here some random trivia that might give you some idea about the type of person I am:

  • I got my first computer in 1998. It cost $1011 and it had a Pentium II Klamath @ 300 Mhz CPU, 32 MB of RAM, a Quantum Fireball 5.1 GB HDD and a Diamond Viper V330 GPU (with 4MB of memory and 3D acceleration). I didn’t plan to do much (any) programming on it.
  • I studied CS in high-school, but I didn’t really think I’d end up as a programmer. Programming felt like something quite boring when I was a kid.
  • Cinema’s one of my biggest obsessions. I’ve been a devoted movie-goer since 1995, when I went to see “Toy Story”.
  • When I was little I thought that all you need in life in an unlimited supply of chocolate and bananas. Turned out I was wrong.
  • My first trip abroad was to Budapest, Hungary. I did it for my 24th birthday. Since then I’ve become quite passionate about exploring the world and I visited 60 countries.
  • I’m a big comic book fan. Batman is my favorite superhero. I went to see “The Dark Knight” 7 times.
  • I once watched “Gladiator” around 20 times in one week. I used to know every line in the movie.
  • When renting video tapes was a thing, I’d typically watch every movie that I rented 3 times. No matter how bad it was.
  • I love music and it has always been a big part of my life. I mostly listen to hard rock and indie rock. My first audio tapes were bootleg recordings of some Nirvana and Offspring albums. I’m not ashamed to admit that around 1995 I liked Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys more than rock.
  • I used to be a big sports fan, but I never excelled at any sports. Unless you consider gaming a sport. Occasionally I still watch a football game or two.
  • I’ve started to study Spanish 7 years ago, but I was too lazy and can’t do much more than order some food and pay for it.
  • I still have a guitar, but I have barely played it in the last decade. I always plan to change this, but I never do.
  • I dream to retire in Andalucia.
  • My name literally means “a gift from God”. It’s basically the Slavic version of Theodor(e/o).
  • I used to re-read “The Lord of the Rings” every year.

You can learn way more about me from:

About (think)

(think) is my personal blog. It started with a focus on programming and Linux, but its scope got broader with time. The name (think) is a reference to several things:

  • My love for IBM’s ThinkPad laptops. THINK has been one of the company’s slogan for over 100 years (ever since 1911). My very first laptop was a ThinkPad T61, which I got around the time I started (think).
  • My love for Apple and their slogan “Think Different” (which takes a stab at IBM, of course).
  • My love for IMAX movies and IMAX’s slogan “Think Big”.
  • My love for Lisps and parentheses.
  • My love for thinking about all sorts of random things.

Thinking outside the box might be cool, but nothing beats thinking inside parentheses.

This site was my first attempt to write. I failed miserably and I produced some pretty crappy content, but I also learned a lot in the process.

These days (circa 2021) most of my writing on topics related to programming and my OSS projects happens at Meta Redux, but I still post here things that are worth sharing, but don’t fit the overall vision of Meta Redux. Not to mention that my vision for (think) and Meta Redux changes quite often.

I guess I’ll be writing here occasionally on programming-related topics, but who knows… Knowing me there’s a high chance I won’t actually write anything at all!

About My Other Blogs

I have a small problem with blogs - I’ve created way too many of them! I already mentioned above Meta Redux, but there are actually more!

Emacs Redux

I run a separate blog focused on Emacs, that you might want to check out as well - Emacs Redux.

Colophon

This website is powered by Jekyll and uses the Minimal Mistakes theme.

I write all of the articles in Emacs and publish them to GitHub pages. These days (circa 2021) I’m a Windows 10 (with WSL2) user most of the time. When I’m at home I do all my writing on my beloved Leopold FC660C4. When I’m on the road I do (or don’t do) my writing on a Apple Magic Keyboard or the built-in MacBook keyboard5.

The source code of the site is freely available at GitHub.

License

All original content here is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license.

Disclaimer

This is my personal site and it expresses my own personal opinions and nothing else. Shocker, right?

  1. Божидар in Bulgarian. I know, I know - that’s both pretty hard to read and to pronounce. My friends call me Bug and so can you. ↩

  2. Especially Lisps! And Unix-like operating systems! And Emacs! And video games! ↩

  3. But at least I’m honest with myself. ↩

  4. Also known as the “best keyboard ever”. Seriously! ↩

  5. Also known as the “worst keyboard ever”. No shit! ↩