Yurij Mikhalevich - Yurij Mikhalevich

Minerva, a GPT-Powered Discord Bot Built to Help Students Learn Software Development

May 7, 2023 • 2 min read

Meet Minerva, a GPT-powered Discord bot I built to help students in the study group I mentor learn software development and machine learning. Since 2021, I have been leading a pro-bono study group where I help students from my alma mater develop their skills and learn how to build and

Tech

Goodbye Amazon Halo

Apr 29, 2023 • 1 min read

It's official: Amazon is sunsetting the Halo fitness tracker. The news came as quite a surprise to loyal users like myself who have come to rely on the device as part of our daily fitness routines. The Halo tracker is set to stop working on August 1st, and I must

Bookshelf

Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland

Apr 22, 2023 • 2 min read

Scrum is an Agile framework that aims to deliver high-value products with minimum waste. As a software engineer, I've always been interested in becoming more efficient at what I do. During my over decade-long career, I have worked with different teams using different processes. Currently, my favorite is the Shape

Tech

Amazon Halo Band One Year Later

Mar 19, 2023 • 1 min read

It's been over a year since I started using the Amazon Halo fitness band. It's a good time interval to reevaluate and comment on whether my assessment of the fitness tracker made a year ago still holds. Let's reiterate why I chose Amazon Halo a year ago and see whether

Bookshelf

My 2022 in Books

Jan 15, 2023 • 4 min read

Hi. I will keep this post simple and stick to the last year's format. Let's proceed with the reviews. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel and Blake MastersThis was the first book I read in the year 2022, and, to be

Tech

A Conversation With ChatGPT

Dec 10, 2022 • 5 min read

The following is my conversation with ChatGPT with no edits. — Hi, ChatGPT! 👋 — Hello there! I'm Assistant, a large language model trained by OpenAI. I'm here to help answer your questions to the best of my ability. Is there anything you'd like to talk about or ask me? — I am writing

Bookshelf

Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky

Dec 2, 2022 • 2 min read

The book is an interesting read, is well-written, and shares facts and stories about Apple that I hadn’t heard before. I loved the many ideas presented in the book, but I also didn't like a few. Among the many I loved are the following: focusing on the result, not

Tech

Amazon Halo Band Review or The Best Minimalistic Fitness Tracker Of Early 2022

Feb 6, 2022 • 5 min read

At the beginning of last year, my Oura fitness ring died on me for the second time within 26 months, just outside of the warranty period of twelve months, which meant that Oura wouldn't replace it this time. Both times, it was the battery. I've been with Oura from the

Bookshelf

My 2021 in Books

Jan 19, 2022 • 6 min read

Back in the days, I used to read a lot. I would have a book in my hands every chance I had. Then came the period when I started reading much less for various reasons; this period lasting a while. A few years ago, I decided to fix this by

Software Engineering

rclip: An AI-Powered Command-Line Photo Search Tool

Aug 25, 2021 • 2 min read

I have 72,769 photos stored on my NAS and organized into subfolders named according to the pattern "YEAR.MM.DD - Event description." This organizational approach is software-agnostic and creates a structure that is easy to navigate. I have followed it for more than a dozen years. However, there

Bookshelf

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Jul 14, 2021 • 2 min read

The cover picture was taken at Universal Studios Japan. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, by far, the best fanfiction I have ever read. And it is also one of the best science fiction books I have ever read. The story is set in a world familiar to

Bookshelf

Books by Basecamp

Jun 25, 2021 • 5 min read

I've recently finished reading the last book of five written by those behind the Basecamp company. I read some of them a while ago, so my memory about their content could be better. Still, I'll compensate for that by describing my impressions. I'm going to list the books in the

Software Engineering

Efficient Routing on a Scale: Winning Solution of the Machine Learning Prague 2021 Hackathon

May 10, 2021 • 20 min read

This post is a walkthrough of the winning solution for the ML Prague 2021 Hackathon problem that my teammate Michał and I came up with. We were given anonymized data containing approximately 524k Czech policyholders, 44k clinic departments of 273 different types, and 332 ambulance stations. We were tasked with

Software Engineering

Running tfjs-react-native in Android Emulator

Mar 13, 2021 • 1 min read

You are developing a react-native app with Tensorflow JS? Then you may have tried using the tfjs-react-native backend in Android SDK Emulator only to find that it doesn't work. This happens because tfjs-react-native requires GLES 3 / WebGL 2. You can enable it in Android SDK Emulator via: echo "GLESDynamicVersion = on"

What to Watch?

Just Wake Up!

Feb 3, 2021 • 1 min read

Waking Life is a very unusual animation movie created in a unique style and full of almost random philosophical dialogues that leave you with a lasting impression which is hard to describe. I can say with a high degree of certainty that most of you'll feel dizzy while watching it,

Software Engineering

A Good Place to Get Started With AI and Neural Nets

Dec 16, 2020 • 1 min read

People often ask me for a good place to get started with AI, machine learning, and neural nets. course.fast.ai — this is a pretty good place. It's modern (the current version of the course was released this August), centered around the relevant practice, teaches you by doing, going deeper

Bookshelf

On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of Psychotherapy by Carl R. Rogers

Dec 5, 2020 • 4 min read

TL;DR: 10/10, highly recommend. The book is a collection of the most impactful papers written by Rogers over the course of decades centered around the idea of becoming. Life is guided by a changing understanding of and interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming.

Creative Writing

Have You Ever Eaten Seagulls?

Sep 29, 2020 • 1 min read

A strong gust of dry, warm salt-smelling air blows into my face, making my hair flow all over the place. I stand still paying attention to the surf's sound crashing into my ears, mentally moving me before falling down to my heart, resonating deep inside. A few seconds pass before

Bookshelf

A Mathematician's Lament (Article) by Paul Lockhart

Sep 16, 2020 • 1 min read

The fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art,

Creative Writing

An Unusual Evening

Jul 13, 2020 • 3 min read

Usually, I leave my small apartment around six-thirty in the evening when I'm done with work. It's a calm neighborhood with a lot of single-story traditional buildings showing off their facades made of charred wood. Usually, I'm quite hungry by that time, and I proceed by heading directly towards the

Creative Writing

Morning

Jun 27, 2020 • 2 min read

You woke up, the summer sun ruthlessly frying you through the window blinds. You slowly open your eyes to find out that the white sheet you were supposed to cover yourself with is a messy waistband. You close your eyes and open them one more time to double-check that it's

Creative Writing

An Arrow

Jun 8, 2020 • 1 min read

He stretched his elbow backward a bit further from the bow, and the tension in the bowstring increased noticeably. A red synthetic string cut deep into his fingers, causing a few micro-fractures to appear on the skin. The archer pulled the bowstring a little bit more and let his grip

Creative Writing

A Trade

Mar 23, 2020 • 3 min read

"Did you bring it?" said a familiar voice. "We have what you requested," a cold, inhumane voice slowly responded. "Did you deliver on your part of the agreement?" "Sure, I did. Still, I don't understand why you may need this." I slowly peeked around the corner and was shocked by

Creative Writing

The Writer

Mar 19, 2020 • 1 min read

The guy sitting at the window in a coffee shop on the corner of Church Street and Left Side Street got up from his table to get the order. The pen that he dropped, when standing up, rolled to the edge of the small, wooden square table and stopped there,

Creative Writing

Always a Race

Dec 27, 2019 • 3 min read

I set the spaceship on course to the universe's most delicious edible and maxed out the engines. "Treat of the ages, here I come." I had been waiting for it long enough. "What's up? Are you down for a race?" — The communicator went alive. "It looks like he got the