Добрый день! / Good afternoon!
2020-12-07
In academia one's desire to write is usually satisfied (with a considerable margin :) during the semester by communicating with students. My latest attempt to start writing systematically and to publish my writing online took time around the 2020 New Year holidays. The primary objective of that effort was to build a static blog focused on minimalism (a kind of “4KB club”), text and readability. However, as it frequently happens, the effort was put on hold after the development of convenience code for site maintenance: automatic linking translation and the original, «the simplest possible» converter from Markdown to HTML etc. In March the transition to the distance learning forced me to invest more time in video-streaming and to give up on the personal blog once again.
At the end of 2019 I discovered the Geminispace and gradually came to the conclusion that it would be the best place to publish. Furthermore, previously I tried numerous ways of personal note keeping, from Evernote and LaTeX-books to popular Markdown-based applications and do-in-yourself tools, but eventually decided that the simplest and the most reliable format is plain text in UTF-8 encoding. The less markup the better. It was the written word that brought us where we are today; printing, the typography and the related design tools came much later. So this time my writing will start with Gemini, manually, without any automation. At some later date maybe I will make a local proxy to present my notes to the World Wide Web (or should I write a converter? — oh, hold me seven, as the saying is ;).
I plan to keep my gemlog both in Russian and in English. In fact, it is a pleasure to see in geminispace texts on many languages — I've seen at least Spanish and Japanese (however, unfortunately, for now I can read only the two languages I mentioned). I hope, gemlog in Russian could also be welcome here. Trying to be a good netizen and not wanting to fill the feeds with pairs of duplicate entries, I plan to post English translation with a couple of days delay after the Russian source. But as geminispace today is primarily English-spoken, the right thing to do will be to publish this greeting entry in English first.
My future entries will be on and around the topics of programming and computer science. First, I plan to write reviews on the posts (mostly from the Internet) which I would recommend my students to read if I had enough time in classroom for a commentary, and if they had enough interest to read (well, a lot of them actually do). The second group would be short (like this one) essay-entries on the same topics. In particular, when the time will be right, I would like to discuss in a next couple of posts the question about the English language in teaching the programming and, further, in professional communication in Russia. I will try to write as frequently as I can, but the most I can promise is an entry every month.
For me it is usually very interesting to read the notes of other people on their daily life in the other countries. And while I am in doubt whether I will have such interesting topics to write myself, I will be glad to write on such topics by a request, if someone is interested. Except one topic that I would like to skip, if possible — the politics. I feel hopeful that my bilingual posts could be useful to someone learning Russian. In my turn, I will be grateful to get a remark on the quality of my English writing, including both grammar mistakes and especially the stylistic flaws. It would be nice to get comments to my posts over an email, and I will be happy to receive responses in separate posts. However, the short comments, while being undoubtedly pleasant for the author to get, contribute significantly less to the discussion than the self-sufficient reply with thought-out reasoning. In my opinion, in geminispace we have a chance to revive the tradition of slow paced deep discussion in «letters», as it was customary in past centuries, and we need to make the best of it.
-- maxxk (Maxim Krivchikov)
License: CC-BY-SA