Life is a long lesson in humility.

– James M. Barrie

Long time, no write. It’s been quite a while since my last article here. Such dry spells always make a bit sad, as I love writing and I have a huge backlog of ideas that I want to expand upon. So, why did this happen?

As you can imagine - there are always multiple reasons. I do think that the main reason for my diminished presence here is that I turned 40 earlier this month.¹ As it usually happens with me around milestones in my life, I’ve been in a very self-reflective mood during much of the year. I’ve been wondering a lot about the life decisions I’ve made to date, and what’s next for me. I didn’t really come up with any revelations, but I did a lot of thinking regardless.

It’s funny how quickly life passes. I feel like I was 20 just a couple of years ago. In a way it seems to me that life moves faster and faster the older you get. I’d like to believe that I’m still young at heart, but I might just be fooling myself.

I highly doubt anyone wants to read anything about my personal struggles, goals, regrets, etc, so I’ll just write a bit about some “professional” milestones that might be more of general interest:

• 20 years in programming, even more if we count the time in high-school, where officially I studied CS, but for me computers were mostly fun. (I was an avid gamer back in the day) That’s half my life at this point. 20 years later I love programming a lot more than in the beginning, so it seems to me I chose the right career (hobby as well).
• Almost 20 years of passion for Free and Open-Source software. 15+ years of being very actively engaged in the FOSS community. I’ve learned so much from the amazing people in the Emacs, Java, Ruby, Clojure, etc communities and I feel very fortunate to be able to contribute something back.
• 19 years have passed since my first attempt to be an educator. I used to do a lot of teaching, but this now feels like something that happened in a different life.
• 13 years working in various managerial roles. 12 of them spent in the so-called “Senior Leadership”. I love to think of myself as a programmer first, but this might be just wishful thinking at this point. I never thought that I would become a leader in any shape or form. I’m still surprised that I did!
• Almost 10 years in the same job - essentially my entire 30s. A quarter of my life! That was one wild ride, that I would have never envisioned when it started.
• Almost 20 of years preaching the gospel of the One True Editor! I’m still a true believer!
• So many articles, talks and FOSS projects! Looking back I’m not sure how I found both the time and the energy for everything I’ve done. The “era” between 27 and 35 was particularly wild. I will always cherish those years and remember them fondly!
• I still didn’t manage to finish “The Wheel of Time”, but I’m closer than ever to the end! Perhaps I’ll finally achieve that epic milestone before the end of the year!

If I have to narrow to the past decade:

• I learned a lot about scaling projects, teams and businesses. Funny enough - many of the lessons I learned on the FOSS front I managed to apply in my managerial job and vice versa. Turns out that being the head maintainer of big OSS projects is not very different from being an engineering manager.
• I learned a lot about humility. In my 20s, like many very young people, I was quite arrogant and often felt all-knowing and self-confident. I thought I knew better than most people and I can make no mistakes. In my 30s I made a lot of mistakes and I think I learned quite a few valuable lessons from them about both life in general, and programming/management in particular.
• I learned to value the boring side of life. I miss the world before the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. I miss the world before the times of ultra-deep divisions in societies. Sadly, I didn’t realize how precious our life back in those peaceful times was, because I took it as a given.
• I developed a deep distaste for modern social media. I rediscovered the joy of using e-mail, RSS and communicating bigger ideas via old-school blog articles.
• I’ve started to enjoy more non-fiction books compared to fiction. And I’m not talking about books about programming!
• I can barely tolerate any Marvel movies, and I used to be a huge fan!
• I made the mistake to start re-reading “The Wheel of Time”.
• I traveled all over the world and realized my life-long dream to visit places like New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, etc. Travel brought me a lot of joy over the last decade. Exploring the world, experiencing new cultures and meeting people from all over the world certainly changed me.
• I worked remotely 9.8 out of the past 10 years, which helped a lot with the previous item. This was another very novel experience for me and it had a lasting impact on me.

After all this time I’m still very passionate about programming, building great products and great teams, and I highly doubt that’s going to change any time soon. But I’ve developed other passions along the way as well, which compete mostly with the limited time (and energy) that I have for my FOSS work. Sometimes I wonder if I have too many hobbies, as I’m often struggling to dedicate them as much time as I’d like! Oh, well - I guess that’s not a horrible problem to have.

While I do have some regrets about some things I’ve done and I didn’t do, looking back I’m quite happy with how my life (and career) turned out. Thanks to everyone who was a part of it, supported me in some shape or form, and made the adventure as fun as it was! A physician recently told me the period between 30 and 40 is the best in life and it all goes downhill from there, but I still hope that the best is yet to come.

That’s all I have for you today. Keep hacking!

31st of October is the next best thing.

I envy everyone who picked up their nickname when they were 12 and just stuck with it. For me the journey to discovering my One True Nickname was long and somewhat messy, as at some point I was using several nicknames simultaneously. If it weren’t for password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden I would have probably struggled to remember which nickname did I use for some services.

I think I got my first computer in 1998, when I was 14 years old. Back then one needed a nickname for only 2 things - IRC and gaming. I don’t remember my IRC nickname to be honest, but I assume it was something like “bozhidar84”, as this was the trend back then. I do remember my gaming handle quite well, though - it was “Lord_Bad”. Remember the arcade games where you had to use your initials for the leaderboard? Well, my initials are BIB, but I never liked how this looked, so I always used the initials BAD instead. It felt badass! When I finally had a computer at home, one of the first games that I played was “Age of Empires” and I thought it’d be cool if I had a nickname that was fitting of the game - both noble (Lord) and fearsome (Bad). Eventually I adopted this nickname outside of gaming as well and I was mostly “Lord_Bad”/”lordbad” online until my early twenties.

I had gotten to the point I had to find myself a job and I felt it’d be silly to have an email like lordbad@developer.bg on my resume. It was time to grow up and adopt a new “more professional” online identity. I knew that the prevailing fashion of the day were handles like “jsmith”, which meant “bbatsov” in my case. However, for some reason I never liked addressing people by their last name, and I didn’t like being addressed by my last name either. I still hate this to this day. That’s why for a while, when signing up for something, I was trying the following nicknames in this order:

• bozhidar (my name is pretty rare, even in Bulgaria, plus there are several ways to spell it in English;¹ this meant there was a good chance I’d land “bozhidar” with some services)
• bozhidarb
• bbatsov
• bozhidar.batsov (I rarely got to this one, as it’s quite long and “bbatsov” was usually available)

Over the course of the years I realized this nickname selection process was a big mistake, as people were often struggling to figure out who I was on certain services. They’d expect me to be “bbatsov”, but I’d “bozhidarb” or “bozhidar” there. Messy.² That’s why I eventually came to accept that “bbatsov” is the one true nickname for me - there are plenty of Bozhidars out there, but it seems I’m one of only a handful of Bozhidar Batsovs (I think there’s only one, besides me). As an added benefit - this nickname is the easiest to type, and probably the easiest to read, as that “zh” in Bozhidar confuses a lot of people.

While writing this post I realized there’s one more feature of “bbatsov” - it could stand for Bozhidar Batsov or Bug Batsov. Many of my friends call me Bug, and I’m 100% certain that if you’re not familiar with Slavic languages it’s much easier for you to pronounce Bug than Bozhidar.

Of course, I do have some secret nicknames that I use in various anonymous contexts, and I have a ton of legacy/failed gaming nicknames - e.g. at some point I was obsessed with “The Lord of the Rings” and I’d often style myself as “elendil”. I also had a few nicknames inspired by WarCraft and StarCraft - I’m reasonably sure that my first email address was alexei.stukov@yahoo.com (followed by lordbad@usa.net). I love a couple of my secret nicknames and their stories, but for obvious reasons I can’t discuss them here.

So, that’s the story of my nickname. It’s a bit boring, just like the nickname itself (if only I were as cool as “Neo”, “ZeroCool” and “Morpheus”…), but it’s my story. Frankly, I don’t even know I why I decided to write it. Perhaps it’s because I came to value a lot consistency and simplicity in every aspect of life. Perhaps it’s because I’ve always been fascinated by the power of names. I’m sure there’s some reason, even if I’m not sure what this reason is.

I’m still not happy with the current state of X/Twitter, though, so I kept looking for other alternatives and lately I’ve been playing with Bluesky. I like it for a few reasons:

• I don’t have to think which server to use
• I can easily self-verify using some domain that I own
• It looks just like Twitter
• They don’t have plans to monetize it with ads (or so they claim)
• It’s small enough that bots and trolls still don’t care about it
• It’s developing quickly - I’ve noticed lots of improvements over the time I’ve been using it

Bluesky still misses a lot of features I consider important - from basic stuff like bookmarks, to more important things like enough (critical mass of) people using it. Still, it has a nice vibe and I think it has a higher chance to succeed in the long run, compared to Mastodon.

I serious doubt in will really challenge the leading position of X (or even that of Threads), but as long as it attracts enough people to be useful that’d be a big success in my book.

If you’re on Bluesky feel free to ping me. If you haven’t tried it already - it just went public a few days ago, after requiring invites for sign-up for the past year. See you around! Blue skies ahead!

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

– Søren Kierkegaard

Another year is behind us and I guess it’s time to write the obligatory year in review post about it.

Note: Here I’ll focus on the personal side of things and won’t go into details about my OSS work. I plan to write a separate summary article about it on “Meta Redux”.

The Bad Stuff

The bad stuff hasn’t really changed much from last year:

• The war in Ukraine still rages on and the end is nowhere in sight. It also seems that the resolve to support Ukraine is wavering across the world, which is quite disappointing. At least we finally managed to spend some time with my wife’s family who came to visit us in Bulgaria during the summer.
• The global economic downturn continues as well. The IT sector has been heavily affected, including the company that I work for. It has been the hardest year on the job in a very long time.
• Once again I didn’t do much (anything?) on the self-development front. Shocker, right?
• “The Wheel of Time” ruined another year of reading for me. I got to the 10th book, so at least the end is in sight.
• My attempts to replace Twitter/X have failed and for now I’ve resigned myself to the idea that it doesn’t have a real alternative. That being said - I did have a lot of fun playing with Bluesky in 2023 and I hope that the platform will continue to grow and attract more users in the future.
• I dropped the ball on learning OCaml, although I still plan to return to it at some point.

On top of this I really lacked inspiration to write, so it was a pretty bad year for blogging.

I hoped that I’d do more conference talks/trips this year, but ended up doing just one (RubyDay in Verona). I had a ticket for the final edition of “Strange Loop”, but the time of the conference was quite inconvenient for me, so at the end of the day I’ve decided to skip it. The prospects for massive changes on this front in 2024 are modest, but I’ll try to attend a few more conferences, starting with Balkan Ruby in April.

The Good Stuff

Not much to report here - again things haven’t changed much since last year. Same old on the OSS front, less wine (but still plenty) and more travel. And a bit of fun with old-school digital (think Casio) and mechanical watches.

The highlight of the year for me were a couple of vacation trips to Spain and France and a couple of team trips. I finally made it to Burgundy, which is quite the achievement for any wine lover!

The political situation in Bulgaria remains very unstable after the invasion of Ukraine by ruzzia, but it was a bit better in the second part of the year. Our new government is flawed in numerous ways, but it re-affirmed the pro-EU orientation of the country, passed some long overdue reforms and provided a bit of military aid to Ukraine. This certainly provided a bit of respite after what happened here in the second half of 2022 and early 2023.

In December we demolished the infamous monument of soviet occupational army in downtown Sofia, after debating what to do with it for over 30 years. I hated this monument and what it stood for, so seeing it torn down felt pretty good. In the final days of 2023 Bulgaria was admitted in the Schengen space (albeit partially), effective 31st of March, 2024. That was another long-awaited event that I was quite happy about. There are still a lot of problems, but there’s always some hope for the future.

Everything Else

• I’ve stopped buying wallets, after getting The Finnigan by Lost Dutchman Leather. I like it so much, that I’ve decided my quest for the perfect slim wallet is finally over.
• On the other hand - I did spent an unreasonable amount of time watching and reading mechanical watch reviews. And I added a couple more to my small watch collection. And several cheap vintage digital Casios, which are insanely cool! And plenty of straps! Watches are a very dangerous hobby, so I really hope I’ll get bored with it quickly. At least it helped me leave the grip of smartwatches and brought a bit more calmness to my days.
• I’m still using the Pixel 6A as my primary phone and I’m now pondering whether to stick to Android going forward or switch back to iPhone now that they have finally embraced USB-C. Overall both the Pixel and Android have exceeded my expectations.
• I didn’t buy pretty much any new gadgets this year, so I’m pretty proud of myself in that regard.
• One year later I can say I’m quite pleased with my Apple TV box, although the difference between it and Google TV is fairly slim.
• The only truly memorable TV show for me this year was “The Bear”. I’d say this was a pretty bad year for good TV and movies. That being sad I did waste a lot of time on “The Last Kingdom” and “Vikings”. I love historical dramas and both started pretty strong, but sadly ran out of gas fairly quickly. I didn’t even bother to watch “Vikings” until the end.

Lessons Learned

We are what we repeatedly do… therefore excellence is not an act, but a habit.¹

– Will Durant

We are what we repeatedly do… Not exactly something new I learned in 2023, but definitely something I was often reminded about.

Also - I have a very obsessive personally and once I set my mind on something I usually go all-in. That’s why people like me should have fewer hobbies, as they often turn into some manias. Oh, well…

And finally - don’t commit to reading long-winded mediocre fantasy series! Seriously!

Goals for 2024

Haven’t figured them out yet.

Epilogue

Not great, not terrible.

And that’s a wrap. One less item in my personal to-do list!

I think the words “not great, not terrible” perfectly describe 2023 for me. I haven’t had a truly great year since 2019 and I often dreaming about the “boring” years without political turmoil, major wars, pandemics and recessions. Now I finally understand why “May you live in interesting times” is a curse.

I hope you’ve had a great 2023 and that 2024 will be even better for you!

In 2023 I lacked the inspiration¹ to write and as a result, I’ve written only a handful articles to date. I’ve been pondering this morning what contributed to this lackluster performance and the following reasons came to my mind:

• Increased workload on the job, which left me with less energy for extracurricular activities. I completely dropped the ball on OCaml at one point and I’ll definitely need to revisit it. Whatever energy I had, I funneled into my primary OSS projects (think CIDER & friends, RuboCop, etc), which advanced at a good pace throughout the year.
• More travel. I guess I need to make up for lost time in 2020 and 2021 and I did something like 20 international trips this year. In terms of travel the year felt almost like life before the pandemic years, and I rarely write articles while I’m the road.
• My watch hobby (obsession?) taking up a lot of my free time. I think I’ve watched more YouTube videos on watches this year than I’ve watched TV shows and movies.

There are still a ton of topics on my backlog that I’d like to write about in the future (e.g. the lessons I’ve learned as a long-time OSS developer/maintainer, updates on OSS projects and some ideas for their future, more musings on Emacs and Lisp), but I’ll get to those when I get to those. If ever. Let’s see if 2024 will be better on this front. Perhaps I find my inspiration every other year!

A couple of years ago I disabled the comments here for various reasons. Given my overall positive experience with Hyvor Talk as a comments service for my other blogs I thought it might be a good idea to enable it here as well. So, I finally took the time to figure out how to make it work with my current Jekyll theme (Minimal Mistakes). Turns out the configuration was trivial and the whole thing took me less than 5 minutes.

Blog comments are back. Use them… or not.

2022 was another pretty crazy year.

The Bad Stuff

The War in Ukraine

For me the year was definitely defined by the war in Ukraine. It has been a tough year for our family and many of our friends there. Several friends of my wife from her hometown have been killed in action in the past couple of months alone.

My only wish for 2023 is for Ukraine to win the war. If something bad happens to Putin and his warmongers in 2023 - I’d consider this a nice bonus.

Global Economic Downturn

I guess this doesn’t need much explanation, as so many people have been affecting by it. I have a feeling that the worst of the recession is still ahead of us, but I doubt it will be as bad as the one in 2008-2009. Time will tell.

Self-development

I didn’t do much of that front. Wanted to learn and do a lot of new things, but ended up doing pretty much nothing. Classic me.

Reading

I read a lot fewer books than usual. Perhaps starting to re-read “The Wheel of Time” was a horrible idea indeed.

Twitter

My favorite social network has been in free fall after getting acquired by Elon Musk. A lot of people jumped ship already, but I’m still hoping that the situation there will improve with time. I’m on Mastodon these days as well, but I still enjoy using Twitter much more.

I guess old habits are hard to change. Or perhaps that’s the perfect opportunity for me to stop using such social networks completely and remove a huge time sink from my life.¹ Time will tell.

The Good Stuff

Return to (Mostly) Normal Life

COVID seems to be in the rear-view mirror these days and life has mostly returned to “normal”. I had to opportunity to travel a lot in 2022, I’ve met some of my colleagues for the first time since 2019 and I’ve seen again movie theaters full of people. I’ve spent a lot more time with my family and friends. I also attended one in-person conference. That felt good.

I can only hope the pandemic is behind us for good.

Wine

I drank a lot of good wines in 2022. I’ve also visited a French winery for the first time in my life. I’ve met a lot of cool people at wine tastings and wine events in general. Wine certainly grows on me more and more with each passing year.

OSS

It was a relatively good year for all of my projects. A few highlights:

• nREPL made it to 1.0
• CIDER and RuboCop turned 10

I can say a lot more on the topic, but I won’t. I’m still here and I’m still very motivated to build great OSS projects.

Blogging

Surprisingly I bested my all-time blogging record. Let’s see if I’ll be as inspired to write in 2023.

Misc Highlights

New Obsessions

I’m the kind of person who constantly obsesses about something (new). In 2022 my primary new obsessions were:

• OCaml
• Wallets
• Mechanical Watches

I’ve spent a lot of the year playing with OCaml, I’ve watched countless reviews of (slim) wallets (and carry items in general) and mechanical watches and now I have more wallets than I’ll likely need in my lifetime. And a long shopping list for watches. Fortunately their relatively high prices prevent me from making spontaneous purchases.

Currently my primary wallet is the legendary Bellroy Slim Sleeve (which I totally love) and I’m sporting on my wrist a Tissot PRX Powermatic 80. While the Tissot PRX is nothing fancy, the brand has always had a special place in my heart for historical reasons. Apart from that - you’ll be hard-pressed to find another watch of that quality for 650 EUR.

I hope that in 2023 I’ll add a couple of other watches to my modest collection. My favorites so far are:

• Junghans Max Bill 34 mm (manual)
• NOMOS Tangente 35 mm (manual)

I totally love the German Bauhaus-inspired designs! I also find it pretty charming to wind your watch manually every day. (plus manual calibers are cheaper and slimmer than automatic calibers most of the time)

Return to Android

See this article.

Gadgets

As usual I bought a lot of things, that I didn’t really need. My favorite purchases in 2022 are:

• MacBook Air M2 (aka “The Greatest Laptop Ever”)
• Philips OneBlade (if you’re a man I can’t recommend this highly enough)
• Philips Sonicare 5100
• Google PixelBuds A-Series (not the best sound, but extremely light and comfortable)
• Fitbit Charge 5 (a compact no-nonsense fitness tracker to replace my Apple Watch)
• Apple TV (I bought this only because for some reason the Apple TV+ is not available in Google’s Play store in Bulgaria)

Watching “Ted Lasso” certainly wasn’t cheap.

Epilogue

And that’s a wrap. Right now I’m not particularly inspired to write, but knowing me probably I’ll revisit this post a few times over the new next couple of days and extend it a bit.

It’s funny how strong the “recency bias” is - many of the things I’ve mentioned here happened in the final months of 2022 and I can barely remember things from its first half.

I hope you’ve had a great 2022 and that 2023 will be even better for you!

Lately a lot of people of people I know have quit Twitter and switched to Mastodon. This finally forced me to check out Mastodon myself and after some initial period of discovery & confusion I’ve settled on Hachyderm as my (primary instance). In short - I love the name and the mission. My handle there is bbatsov@hachyderm.io.

You’ll also find me on a few other Mastodon instances, but I don’t plan to use my accounts there much:

• Fosstodon - this was the first instance I tried, because it had a cool name and I’m into FOSS. At first I was thinking of posting here updates to my OSS work and everything else to Hachyderm, but I’d rather have only one canonical account for everything.
• ruby.social - I just this one just because I know so many people from the community and it was the only instance where reading the local feed make sense. Don’t expect much (any) activity from me there.
• masto.bg - One of the general-purpose Mastodon instances for Bulgarian speakers. Probably not of interest to you, unless you know Bulgarian.

Not sure how much I’ll be using Mastodon, as I still have hope that Musk won’t kill Twitter and I certainly like the user experience there a lot more. On the other hand - I do find appealing the idea of a distributed social network that’s not controlled by any business and I’m curious how far it can scale given all the resource limitations. Time will tell!

See you on Mastodon!

• Emacs
• Clojure
• Ruby
• OCaml
• Meta (much of my essays and random articles go under this tag)

I even wrote an article a while ago about how to setup multiple feeds with Jekyll.

That’s all I have for you today!

A few years ago (think) was stagnant (I wrote 0 articles in both 2016 and 2017) and when I launched Meta Redux in 2018 I thought this was probably the end of my original blog. It’s funny that 4 years later I do most of my writing here again, and I even managed to reach the heights of my activity from the days when I was younger and had both more energy and more time to spare.¹ Let’s hope I’ll keep this positive momentum going for a while, as there are definitely many topics that I’d like to explore here.

This blog was quite the journey:

• 14 years have passed since its launch
• The name kept changing²
• My vision for the blog kept changing
• The visuals kept changing
• The underlying tech stack kept changing

Yet it is still here. And I’m still here. And we both keep evolving.

Thanks for following that wild journey along! As usual I’m optimistic that the best is yet to come. Until the next article!