STAR🌻KOV
Overview
Illya Starikov Ukraine-born, San Francisco-based software engineer writing about computers, science, and the tangents in between.
News
Stock Ticker
/ Stock Ticker - a self-contained, editable multi-stock tracker styled to read as native Supernova editorial content, not a bolted-on widget. The SHELL (input, list frame, rules, labels) is monochrome and consumes the theme's own tokens (--color-text, --c
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Typing Test
#typing-test-app{--tt-text:var(--color-text, #1d1d1f);--tt-bg:var(--color-background, #f9f6ee);--tt-surface:var(--color-surface-muted, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.06));--tt-surface-strong:var(--color-surface-strong, rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1));--tt-border:color-mix(in srgb,
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101 AI Uses
NOTE This is a post about AI. All views are my own and do not represent my employer. Please review my Disclosures. HEADS UP AI chatbots are stochastic: ask the same thing twice and you can get two different answers, one of them confidently wrong. Treat ev
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The Lifecycle of a Code Change
In the last year, AI has seeped its way into every part of my development process: design docs, code, tests. It automated most of the toil I never enjoyed day-to-day, fixing presubmits, linting files, refactoring old code. It also raised the ceiling on wh
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The Commit Checklist
Everything below happens before you hand the change off for review. Tick the boxes as you go; they persist when you reload the page. The reasoning behind each one is in The Lifecycle of a Code Change.Check The Scope The change does one thing; if it does t
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Begin a Brag Doc
NOTE This is a post about Software Engineering. All views are my own and do not represent my employer. Please review my Disclosures. Brag Doc Template The structure below, as copy-paste-ready markdown. My Brag Doc The personal version: NBA arenas, gym PRs
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Brag Doc Template
Copy this file, fill in your own content. Update the Quarterly logs once a month. Promote items into the upper sections every 2-4 weeks. At review time, you trim and reorder. Don't write from scratch.Brag Doc TemplateLaTeX mirror of this template.brag_doc
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The Vanishing Keystrokes Bug
A few days into an uptime, deep in something, my Mac would stop listening. Not a crash, not a freeze. The cursor still moved, windows still highlighted under it, I could click anything. But the keyboard went dead: I'd type a whole sentence into a window t
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Talk To Your TODOs
NOTE This is a post about AI. All views are my own and do not represent my employer. Please review my Disclosures. I love TODO lists. I especially love spending days bringing one up, and promptly abandoning it.Weeks later, I'm using it again. It's capture
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AI Won't Replace Software Engineering (Yet)
NOTE This is a post about AI. All views are my own and do not represent my employer. Please review my Disclosures. I have a boring opinion: AI is a tool.Like a text editor, a compiler, grep. And like every tool, it's clueless, easily nudged off track, and
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