/Nikita Prokopov

Hardest Problem in Computer Science: Centering Things tl;dr: Nikita discusses the struggles of properly centering text and icons despite the advances of modern CSS. He discusses problems with: (1) font metrics where the bounding box of a text block is not balanced around the cap height. (2) Line heights that complicate centering. (3) Icon fonts that convert icons into text. 

featured in #507


JavaScript Bloat In 2024 tl;dr: “I was a bit out of touch with modern front-end development. I also remembered articles about web bloat, how the average web page size was approaching several megabytes! So all this time I was living under impression that, for example, if the average web page size is 3 MB, then JavaScript bundle should be around 1 MB. Surely content should still take the majority, no? Well, the only way to find out is to fuck around. Let’s do a reality check!”

featured in #492


In Loving Memory Of Square Checkbox tl;dr: "But despite all this chaos and temptation, operating system vendors knew better. To this day, they follow The convention: checkboxes are square, radio buttons are round. Maybe it was part of their internal training. Maybe they had experienced art directors. Maybe it was just luck. I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter but somehow they managed to stick to the convention. Until this day."

featured in #484


Emoji Under The Hood tl;dr: "I thought it might be fun sharing a few nitty-gritty details of how this “biggest innovation in human communication since the invention of the letter” works under the hood." Nikita shows us the various ways in which emojis can be encoded. 

featured in #277


Good Times Create Weak Men tl;dr: Minor bugs in both Apple and Amazon's products highlight a systemic organizational problem. New generations of programmers in larger institutions aren't transferred relevant information about previous projects that are the basis of current ones. 

featured in #167


How NOT To Hire A Software Engineer tl;dr: Common mistakes include not giving interviewees enough time to solve problems, judging if a problem is solved but not the method it was solved by, not assessing how mistakes are handled, conducting multiple shorter interviews, whiteboarding and not tailoring to the interviewee's background.

featured in #135