Dmitrii Kovanikov

Functional Programming self-affirmations: 1. Parse, Don’t Validate 2. Make Illegal States Unrepresentable 3. Errors as values 4. Functional Core, Imperative Shell 5. Smart Constructor Repeat daily in front of a mirror for 2 minutes.

Starting another stream in 5 minutes. We continue torturing C++ with Functional Programming. Today, I will talk about Algebraic Data Types (ADTs) and pattern matching. You don't want to miss it. Link: www.twitch.tv/chshersh

I've been absent here for a while, but apparently, this website now requires age verification to send DMs 🫠 Maybe just a UK thing. I'm sorry, but I'm not doing it. Apologies if I never see your message. Please, use other ways to contact me.

Sharing recent news. I'm leaving Bloomberg as an OCaml Engineer. And.. I'm joining Bloomberg as a C++ Engineer. After using FP for the last 10 years, it's time to switch. I moved to another internal team, and I now work with C++ full-time. It's a big change for me. But I'm enjoying it so far!

Men be like: "This is my favourite ramen place. I'm going to study Japanese for 3 years, so one day I can come here and make my order fully in Japanese, and they'll compliment my language knowledge, and we'll have fun, and it'll be worth it just for this single moment."

I flew to New York for two weeks and I’m grateful I don’t have to deal with a lots of things. I’m taken care of. Yet, it’s still so hard 😭 Being pulled from my daily routine and comfort zone affects my energy and mood so much. It’s important to learn such things about yourself.

I transitioned from a Software Engineer who thought: “Programming Language is the most important part about the job!” to “Money is the most important part about the job” And I’m not sure what I think about this transition.

As an autistic person, I have so little agency. I’m constantly low on energy, and simple things like getting groceries or making a phone call take so much energy. I’m constantly surprised how much I have going on in my life rn considering how little I can do.

In the last weeks, I’ve heard multiple times from different completely unrelated places that I’m not good enough. It’s just an unfortunate coincidence but it affected my mental health a lot. It’s hard to continue improving and getting better when it’s never enough.

I finally watched Joker for the first movie. Damn, this movie is dark.

New York, I’m in you

I checked how much money I spent on Steam overall and oh my god. I have zero regrets tho.

I’m visiting New York for the next two weeks. It’s going to be busy. But I’d love to explore the city and meet cool people. Let me know what should I do/visit in New York and if you want to meet! I’ll do my best to make it happen.

There many annoying things about being autistic. Recently, I’ve been especially annoyed when my brain randomly decides to shutdown during conversations and ignore everything the other person says. It’s always hard to keep focus, now this.

I haven't done OSS in OCaml for a while. I finally installed OCaml on Windows WSL, it was rather flawless this time. I'm currently busy with other activities, but hopefully can return to my projects soon 🤞

It’s impressive how good sleep turns me from an annoying irritated person into a nice guy

Today is my birthday. It used to be a huge day for with a lot of presents. And I always anticipated it a lot. Even tho I celebrate it with close people today too, it feels different. Nothing bad happened, I just grew up.

I’ve met a friend yesterday. We are burgers, drunk wine, talked about Functional Programming, mortgages, cars, travel and’s many other things. It was fun. That’s all. That’s the whole post.

As an autistic person, I can listen the same song again and again hundred times. But for some reason, I can’t watch the same movie even twice.

I’m starting to trust Steam reviews less and less. The number of video games with the “Overwhelmingly positive” rating that I didn’t enjoy at all is now alarmingly much higher than a number of games with the “Mixed” rating I enjoyed.

I’m huge fan of the Mass Effect video game series. I started playing Andromeda. And honestly, I’m considering dropping just because of bad UX. M to open a map but then double Esc to close it 😭 I’m too old for tolerating this shit.

IQ, number of partners, salary, follower count, SaaS number of users, … It’s funny how entire human personalities are reduced to single numbers.

Can you have writing dyslexia instead of reading one? I think I can read fine. But during writing I constantly make typos or even miss words. I can accidentally skip the word “not” which will completely change the meaning of my message 🫠

Beginner OCaml book title: Getting over the hump Intermediate OCaml book title: Getting over the second hump

My pet peeve is when there’s a company-wide chat which is usually quiet, you post a message there, and someone else immediately posts an irrelevant different message or question right after you 😒

OCaml community at Bloomberg is small but passionate. I've been trying to grow it for almost 2 years. But it's been challenging. Ngl, these years removed a lot of illusions from me about what works and what doesn't to grow a small FP community in a big company.

I started playing video games since I was 4yo, and I played till 17yo. Then I went to uni and didn’t have time for games. Then I got a girlfriend and didn’t have time for games. Then I started doing OSS and blogging and didn’t have time for games. 13 years later, I finally have time.

I love writing OCaml. It’s just a nice feeling to spend 4 hours of focused coding. However, at my job I switched more to a mentoring role. I don’t assign OCaml coding tasks to myself, I just review code. Instead I write design docs and fix deployment issues. I’m both sad and glad about this.

I quickly checked the contents and this free book looks great. Especially if you enjoy coding DSA. So why not write them in OCaml!

The second best part of doing OSS is how your project is still alive if you're occupied by other responsibilities. Really appreciate @heathhenley.dev working on GitHub TUI while I'm sick or busy at work 😮‍💨

UPD: It worked! Life is good again. I have: SpellForce 3 The Witcher 3 Baldur's Gate 3 and 20 other games waiting for me. There's a 20% chance you won't hear back from me ever. If this happens, I'm fine. In fact, I'm better than ever!

Bought a gaming PC. It arrived and.. didn't work. Just wasted a ton of money on a useless piece of shiny metal. Combined with being sick and lots of other stress today, I just had a really bad day. Another proof that money can't buy happiness. My inner child is officially dead today.

The video game studio Four Quarters accidentally created the best autism test ever. Loop Hero is so satisfying. You just do exactly the same thing with slight variations again and again and again...

I’m happy to share exciting news! I’m flying to New-York for several days in March to teach OCaml at Bloomberg. I’m glad I have this wholesome opportunity.

So far it works every day. Ngl, I’m enjoying this moment when contributors to GitHub TUI are so active. Gotta keep the momentum.

Just heard from an adjacent team at Bloomberg: “We write low-latency Java!” “Doesn’t it require a lot of memory? “Oh, it’s not a problem, we deploy to machines with 1TB RAM!” Amazing things are happening.

Lexa has been contributing amazing OCaml while being an experienced Python developer. So if you want to hire a great engineer with a growth mindset, I strongly encourage to consider her. Talented engineers are rare. You want to be the first to talk to Lexa not to miss this opportunity.

If you're OCaml curious and looking for a good self contained open source project with some well scoped issues to get you started, check out Github TUI Getting much more comfortable with OCaml from reading Dmitrii's code and getting feedback in code reviews - not to mention it's a cool app!

Honestly, my main motivation for building GitHub TUI is to prove you can build useful, complex, beautiful, scalable apps with Functional Programming. It takes time but we’ll get there. I can see the end of the tunnel. github.com/chshersh/git...

I started a new greenfield OCaml project at work 6 months ago. No legacy. I'm smarter. I have more experience. I learned from my mistakes. We're starting from scratch. 6 months later it's less than ideal. This day I learned an important lesson about making software.

I kinda enjoy doing open-source in the evening. With people living and working in different time zones, I may push something in the evening, go to sleep, go to work, return and something might get done in the meanwhile!

Another productive weekend with OCaml 🐫 Implemented the most difficult TUI element so far: Scrolling a generic list of UI elements. It required a week of thinking and touching the grass. But we got there.

Over a decade of experience with Functional Programming, I learned that every complex problem can be solved by introducing more ADTs.

Working on GitHub TUI just destroys all my illusions about my preferred programming patterns. I like The Elm Architecture (TEA) and I implemented TUI based on it. But currently I'm having an issue with an element where running 'view' after 'update' doesn't work. Why is this happening to me 🫠

For some weird reason, I like that I can define type and let in the same single line in OCaml. It feels unexpectedly satisfying. (yes, I know I can just do Map.Make (String), this example is just for illustration purposes)

The entire dynamic TUI layout is based on the following simple type. I feel like it's the cleverest ADT I created so far.

You spend 1/3 of your life sleeping. You spend another 1/3 of your life at work. Improving your sleep and working at a place that make you happy has the biggest impact on your life than anything else.

To balance this post a bit, while working on Ansifmt by @qexat.com, I found a perfect example of a simple problem that would be extremely hard to solve in traditional FP. FP and OCaml especially just shine here. I might even blog about it.

The best part of OSS is working together with other (good) people