ftvkyo

2025 in review

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 22:00:00 +0000

Last year, I wrote 2024 in review. There are many good things about that post. I reviewed it a few times throughout the year, curious about the changes in my mental state since then and about the goals I had set. It has also been fun to share it with my friends and acquaintances. And, most importantly, it presented a good opportunity for reflection at the time of writing. So, here I am, writing a follow-up :)

2024 in review

Thu, 26 Dec 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Recently, I considered writing a follow-up for My Time and Focus posts, titled «My Time and Focus. 2 years later». I thought I couldn’t finish writing it in one day, so I didn’t start.

This post is what I am writing instead. It will touch on some of the topics I wanted to bring up, but won’t go into as much detail. This is a spontaneous decision, I am doing it instead of other plans. But today is a holiday, so I am fine with it.

Making a "Known Error" app for Tildagon

Mon, 17 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

At the end of May 2024, I went to my first EMF Camp, and I loved it. It had many interesting things to see and cool people to meet. I wouldn’t say I made new friends there, but I did get closer to members of Edinburgh Hacklab which I am also a member of.

This post is not about EMF Camp though, it is about one of its highlights: the Tildagon badge. These badges are electronic devices that are meant to be extended and modified, this is a hacker festival after all. The badges could be preordered for 25£.

Hovert60 keyboard devlog #2: Design

Sun, 05 May 2024 17:00:00 +0000

Overview

In the previous post on the topic, I introcuded my new project: making a personalized mechanical keyboard from scratch. I described my criteria for the end result and showed you the components I intend to use.

This post is focused on the design process of the project. The posts are sequential, but in reality they go hand-in-hand. The design influences which components can be used. Availability, price and properties of the components influence the design.

Hovert60 keyboard devlog #1: Init

Wed, 10 Apr 2024 22:00:00 +0000

Background

I have been a mild fan of mechanical and ergonomic keyboards for a while now. I have used Ergodox EZ, Planck EZ ¹ and OLKB Preonic. Additionally, my XKB configuration is somewhat interesting.

OLKB Planck with «ergonomic» wristrests

You see, Russian alphabet has 33 letters, while English only has 26. This means that on the default Russian layout more keys are used for letters, and punctuation keys are different from the US layout.

Website overhaul

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 14:00:00 +0000

I have done a major overhaul of the website.

The primary focus was on styling. I was not satisfied with the original theme (Cayman) and wanted to change it. The problem was not in the look of the theme, but in how much tweaking I wanted to do, so it was easier to just make a new theme of my own.

I have also changed the way the website is built. I used to have the website sources in a public Github repository and the deployments were done with a Github Action, to a gh-pages branch in the same repo. I have moved the sources of the website to a separate repository and the deployments are set up to update gh-pages in the original repository.

My Time and Focus. Part 2: But how?

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 17:00:00 +0000

Reintroduction

In the previous part I have gone through some tools and approaches to self-organisation. The main focus was on note-taking, and now it is finally time to highlight some neat parts of it.

I have already more-or-less described the criteria that I want the note-taking system to satisfy, and why I need it, so here I’m going to talk about its implementation details.

My Time and Focus. Part 1: But why?

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 11:00:00 +0100

Introduction

The purpose of this series of posts is to share some details of my journey of organizing myself. I think this might be interesting or even useful for somebody, but I am mostly writing this to stay motivated to continue (and as writing practice).

I’ll start by explaining the problems I’m trying to solve and why they matter. Along the way, I might learn new things or find some insights I missed in the past. In other words, I want to begin by describing things I already understand, and after that, I would like to continue the series by making «progress updates».

Website tweaks

Fri, 17 Sep 2021 13:00:00 +0100

I have done some minor optimization of the website in order to improve its Lighthouse score and its performance.

The score should be above 90% in every category (except PWA that I don’t target) at the moment of publishing this post. I only tested it on localhost, but as the most significant problem was caused by Google Fonts the website depends on, that part should be the same as in production.

Parentheses programming language devlog #1: getting to LLVM IR emission

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 21:00:00 +0800

Pre-intro

I start these series hoping to continue them along with the development of the project this devlog is related to. Not only the project is an excercise for me, but the devlog itself is as well. I think about making some games in the future, and how could I make a good game without having a devlog about it?

Also, thanks to all the advice from different people who suggested some better techniques of dealing with challenges I face in this project.

A New Website

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 20:20:00 +0800

Anybody here?

I got this thought to make my website a very long time ago. A classic idea for a developer, right? However, I could never finish its creation. For a long time, I had some random pages dangling on my domain.

I always wanted to put something interesting there, and as I never truly needed a website, I just played with different things abandoning them later.

Only two attempts were notable. One where I made it work, with some pages and even some interactivity, but it all was weird, as I started trying out some unrelated ideas. «What if I use Python for boring content serving and Rust for a quick API?» (not that I needed this API). I managed to make it work, it was running in Docker for quite a while, but it had zero useful content and almost no value except the experience I got from it.

ftvkyo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

rei (at) ftvkyo.me github.com/ftvkyo linkedin.com/in/ftvkyo ftvkyo.me

Interests

The field of Software Engineering as a whole, and these things in particular:

Home floorplans

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Russia, 1999–2019

Dates are approximate.

Asia, 2019–2021

Philippines, January 2020

Hong Kong, September 2020

UK, 2021–now

Cambridge, September 2021

Edinburgh, September 2022

Edinburgh, March 2023

Edinburgh, August 2023

Edinburgh, November 2024

Edinburgh, May 2025

Lazy keymap

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Github repository: ftvkyo/lazy-keymap
Work started: Dec 5, 2023
- Code recreated based on a previous implementation written in Python
- And then again, but with a better approach to getting things done

Rust, ZMK, X Keyboard Config, SVG

Example reference card for my one of a kind Hovert60 keyboard

Milling calculator

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Tool diameter (mm)

Number of flutes (integer)

Surface speed (m/min)

Chip load (mm)

Spindle speed (RPM) Feed XY (mm/min) Feed Z or plunge (mm/min) Stepover (mm) Stepdown (mm)

Personal experience

There are some settings that worked well for me.

Obsidian ftvkyo

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Github repository: ftvkyo/obsidian-ftvkyo
Work started: Jul 23, 2023
- Code was migrated from «Inline plugins» I made earlier

TypeScript (React), Electron, CSS (SASS)

I have been using Obsidian for a while (since March 2021). Finding a good workflow, a good approach to work and study is important for me, and it is an interesting challenge. This project is the culmination of my efforts.

OpenSCAD snippets

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

For now, the snippets are self-contained. That implies there may be duplicates of common functions between snippets. Even worse, the functions with the same names may work differently in different snippets. And there may be fewer comments than desired. You’ve been warned ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Wavy donut

Just why did I do this?

A render of the wavy donut with 2 waves

It is implemented using the polyhedron() OpenSCAD module. I generate flat slices of the donut, rotate and position them in 3D using pts_rotate3 and pts_translate3, and then stitch them into a loop in the pts_extrude module.

Tekutonu

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

GitHub repository: ftvkyo/tekutonu
Work started: Oct 14, 2022
Work stopped: Nov 20, 2022
Timespan: 38 days, 17 of them have commits

Rust, Vulkan (vulkano.rs)

It is not the first time I tried to build a voxel engine. This time, the primary objective of the project was to learn the basics of Vulkan.