Krister Viirsaar

I'm writing a language learning program to learn Japanese. For a client. It's a really cool project since learning languages has this strange rearranging effect on the brain. And the project that teach you something about the world are always best! So here's a

For a long time I was programming on a 1280x1024 ThinkPad laptop. Looking back that seems crazy.. totally insane.. I could see pixels. Why didn't I invest in the main tool I use to make money? Why not make myself more productive? What a

I liked Gnome 3 since it launched. Yet it didn't provide a lot of customizability. Plus it was buggy and extensions lost support fast due to the changing API. A week back my "new" used laptop ThinkPad T470 started crashing with Xfce. It just

Paul Graham has famously said "Startup == Growth" . But why is it so important? And by "growth" I don't mean everyone has to be Uber - score billions of investmend, scale across the world, fight governments and finally potentially go bankrupt since the only thing

Spent a whole day researching how video streaming works and all I needed was to play a rather large video in the browser (400mb). There are Nginx tutorials, Node.js tutorials, whole media servers and npm packages. None of them are easy solutions. But

I know how to code, but I don't go deeper than I have to. I specialize in understanding what the client needs and then fulfilling those needs. Problem arises when deep technical knowledge is necessary for a deeply technical task. I don't have it.

I decided to start blogging again. Just for the kick of writing - I love doing it. Yet once I've written something I'd love for people to see it. My first article I shared on HN and didn't get any votes, which was totally

So what are you going to do with your life? Great question. Bad timing. At least for a graduate student. We're used to thinking of a career as a profession. Yet here I am - a thinker, programmer, "startupper", teacher, entrepreneur. I wouldn't say

I very much dislike sayings like "Do what you love" and "Follow you passion", because they lead you down the path of seeking pleasure and not taking on serious challenges. Or perhaps it leads you down the path of feeling sorry for yourself, because

Learning Elixir is quite a joy. Yet some simple things take a looong time to figure out. Here's one written out to help others like me. Our task is basically to convert a conf line like info_fields: %{custom_field: :string} to a UI

This form will be embeddable to multiple static websites! So you're only doing this once. Disclaimer: Once you've got this set up you need to figure out how to send emails yourself. Check the ending before you start this. The finished product will be

Okay so I'm trying to publish data on the bitcoin blockchain from bash using createrawtransaction and decoderawtransaction and here's what I've learned. Hopefully this will save someone from suffering. How to encode and decode hex strings and decimals in Node.js String to hex

I've copy-pasted some random parts of this awesome article. Everything is taken out of context and probably don't make sense to you if you don't read the original. It's just me writing down notes for myself. All proposed PoW-alternatives could be relabeled “obscured proof