I'm a generalist engineer who enjoys tooling, performance work, and the odd problems that don't fit neatly inside one specialty. I've been building software for 20+ years, hold a Master's degree in Software Engineering, am a Free Software Foundation contributor (Emacs), and mentor at Toptal.
Website: xlii.space
Email: alexander at kaminski dot se
Diagrams as source files. Write and preview Pikchr or Svgbob, compose reusable fragments, generate diagrams with Prolog, Tcl, or Ruby, then export SVG or PNG. DiagramIDE is the main app; pikchr.pl and pikchr.pro live alongside it as satellite projects. Source
The coding agent you summon with a comment. Leave a rik: note exactly where the work belongs; rik reads the surrounding project, makes the change, and gives you a diff—no chat pane required. Source
A native, keyboard-first editor for drawing connected Unicode diagrams on an effectively infinite text canvas. Build shapes, edit rectangular regions, and export clean text or PNG without reaching for the mouse.
A Neovide-inspired native GUI for Kakoune, built around kak -ui json. It brings Kakoune's editing model into a polished desktop window with rich rendering, overlays, mouse support, and multiple windows.
Zero-fuss project scaffolding from a single .tmplr file. Describe a directory tree, add {{variable}} placeholders, and materialize it with a fast CLI and interactive fuzzy finder.
A small Rust layer over Anthropic, Gemini, OpenAI, and Ollama. It packages the client setup, structured output, caching, persistent configuration, and egui provider selection I kept needing in other tools.
A browser playground for fitting and cleaning up SVG curves. Marching squares, simplification, genetic algorithms, morphology, and color analysis all run locally through WebAssembly.
A PostgreSQL-backed async job queue for Rust with a deliberately straightforward handler API. It covers scheduling, retries, crash recovery, concurrency limits, stalled jobs, archives, and dead letters.
A tiny Rust macro for declarative event routing without the usual handler boilerplate. Small, focused, and rather neat.
| Project | Description |
|---|---|
| microdiagram.com | Tiny Haskell DSLs for domain-specific diagrams |
| hn-jobs-evaluator | Finds the promising entries in HN's “Who's Hiring?” threads with an LLM |
| codelooker | Turns code reviews, PRs, and technical discussions into readable standalone HTML |
| generate_pdf | A configurable sample-PDF generator for testing visual quality and file size |
| ssort | A Go stream sorter that lets the most relevant results bubble up |
| vibe-coded | A playful CLI guess at whether a repository was vibe-coded or crafted by hand |
| rust-signatures-mcp | An MCP server for extracting Rust signatures from crates and source trees |
| cuelsp | A language server for CUE, written in Go |
| datafuck | A tiny esoteric data format inspired by Brainf*ck |
| zax | Handy utilities for Zig projects |
Rust · Ruby · TS/JS · Elixir/OTP · Go · ❤ Haskell · Zig · ❤ Prolog · ❤ CUE · OCaml · Tcl · Emacs Lisp
PostgreSQL · Distributed Systems · Event Systems · MQ Systems · Kubernetes · TLA+ · WebAssembly
I write about engineering, language design, debugging, and the occasional strong opinion at xlii.space/blog.