brachkow

  Location: Warsaw, Poland, EU
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: anything frontend, node.js & worker backends, Vue, React, Inertia.js, Cloudflare Workers
  Résumé/CV: https://www.brachkow.com/hire/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/brachkow/ + more formal CV upon request
  Email: hn [at] brachkow.com

My name is Timur.

In the past 10 years, I was a founding engineer at a Y Combinator startup and built many products as an engineer-for-hire for VC and privately funded startups.

I'm a remote-native worker who has never been to an office – I know a lot about asynchronous, proactive, and autonomous work.

What I can do:

- I can act like a CTO or founding engineer. I have overseen the launches of many products, and I know the caveats outside of code, like marketing.

- Product engineering. I build your product and work with you and your customers directly.

- Frontend and design engineering. This has been my main focus for most of my career.

I also have a lot of niche knowledge: I've been using the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since its early days, know a lot about making Telegram bots, and am

While it is a popular theory, I don't think that Saudi Arabian guys who are trying to diversify their oil-bound economy care about virtual human relations as much as US/EU tech puritanists that already rule tech, assessing every ownership of every nipple in Instagram stories

Even without that, Withings devices were terrible!

Maybe they have good sensors and stuff (I don't know), but they are disgusting to use.

I have their base body composition scale. To make it actually save my data, I need to carefully balance my body with the precision of a tightrope walker. The balancing style depends on the type of hard-floor, too.

If I am unable to do this, it will jiggle my weight numbers here and there on a very pixelated, low-quality screen, and eventually shut down erasing all data which took a minute of recording + a minute of balancing.

And yeah... that screen... Cheap vapes, soldering irons, and even chargers produced the same year had much better screens than my "premium body composition scale" (why all these have a screen at all is a different question, lol!).

I paid a huge premium for this scale in comparison to, for example, Xiaomi scales, just to find out that the Xiaomi scale is way easier to use.

While it doesn’t make sense for software, it makes sense for paid publications (and for other stuff where text is THE goal)

In case you are all-Apple, there is no reason to use either 1Password or Bitwarden – since a few years ago Apple Passwords have everything you need

If you gear up with a translator, you may read this in-depth post on the events made by well-known Ukrainian tech executive Sergiy Petrenko, who also happened to be the CEO of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex in its early days:

https://blognot.co/ataka-na-yandeks-v-sasovo/

Because Deno turned into some quirky serverless technology.

CF has its own quirky serverless technology and has no interest in funding any competition, even/especially in such sad shape as Deno is

+1, Sublime has great search and instant startup time, which makes it perfect for doing small patches around AI-written code

At the beginning of the AI race, JetBrains had:

- top-tier language intelligence

- all sorts of applications for building software, from IDEs to task trackers

- a huge, loyal user base

- being big enough to have deals with leading AI providers

They had the potential to lead the AI devtools race. Right now, good but quite basic tools like Pi, Conductor, or Herdr are getting good funding.

But JetBrains just failed to adapt. Their biggest AI attempt – Air – was way worse than Conductor, which is built by a team of few people.

I feel like there are just a few shortsighted people in leadership behind this flop. I will not be surprised if JetBrains will be defunct/shrinked in 5 years.

I use React, Vue, and Svelte extensively, and I don't think that there is any problem with integrating 3rd party JS libraries in any of these frameworks.

React, as the most bare-bones framework, might be simplest to integrate, and you can see that by the enormous size of its ecosystem.

Vue and Svelte will have problems with integrating various devtools, due to the fact they use custom syntax to mimic native web tech. In Vue, this problem is solved by framework popularity and the fact that the Vue team produced most of the key devtools, so Vue is, of course, supported.

Svelte, on the other hand, still works badly with Storybook and linters.

A good counterexample to your take will be that I was unable to use the JS version of Framer Motion with Svelte without huge caveats that made making any complex animation impossible. I wasn't able to do so with Vue, for roughly the same reasons, but Vue, as a big framework, got 1st party support.

In early 2026 I struggled a lot with models messing Svelte 4 and Svelte 5. I'm sure same thing will occur with load function vs remote functions, once they will be released

I do. I wrote on this extensively there – https://www.brachkow.com/notes/my-experience-with-svelte/

In short:

1. Svelte is a good framework, but most of the DX praise comes from React folk. In my experience, Svelte is less polished and less comfortable to work with than Vue.

2. The biggest problem with Vue is that your choice of SSR frameworks is limited to Nuxt, and Nuxt is, to put it mildly... not a good framework. It is full of reinventing the wheel, ambiguity, and foot guns. In my experience, I regretted every project I used Nuxt for.

As I needed good SSR, SvelteKit was a breeze: everything just renders on the server when I want it to, proper client/server separation, MVC-looking code.

3. Svelte has way lower adoption than Vue, not to mention React. So there are not many 3rd party libraries, and even important tools like Storybook or ESLint struggle with it.

It also tends to switch syntaxes a lot. Even this announcement contains a mention of switching from +page files to queries. This hurts AI usage a lot.

As a conclusion: A year ago, I would say that you should pick Svelte where SSR is critical, and stay on Vue for the rest. But as we have https://inertiajs.com/ right now, you can do SSR of any complexity in Vue + any backend you have.

Many popular HR portals require mandatory LinkedIn profile in application form

Because of that you either use LinkedIn, or a lot of jobs are inaccessible to you

It's HR version of "living without an ID"

I'm reading "Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style". This is a book on how Japan became leading power in western menswear.

Apart from being an interesting book on fashion history, it also draws a lot of interesting connections & facts.

For example, that renowned Japanese magazine Popeye has this weird, almost construction catalog structure because it was inspired by... "The Whole Earth Catalog."

Or how in post-war Japan western formal wear was a punk-like form of protest of teens against elderly.

biege, biege & biege

This very shortsighted opinion. Because:

1. Not remotely everyone properly educated will be able to write properly due to personal/health traits

2. Not remotely everyone speaks English as a native tongue

3. Most people in the world speak languages of a different family (and grammar) than English

It’s crazy that back in Belarus in 2021 we laughed off our friend who gave his phone & password to search to a solider who approached him during his commute to university.

We couldn’t expect that it will became a norm in our country, not to mention “civilized world”. But it did…

Just five year later same practice is OK in US. Same US that was busy with ethical question of unlocking or not unlocking terrorists iPhones in past decade.

Tech is going from Wild West to Cyber Gulag.

What's interesting (and kind of sad) here is that while AI drastically increased product count, more than 50% are now composed of dev tools and AI

Some kind of golden shovels situation. I wish there were more games, personal apps, and open hardware – more fun stuff that became affordable due to AI

lol, can't imagine how much this domain cost

Company is called AutoMATTic, btw

mise also can manage brew

My quirky wishlist app https://thingstohave.app is finally done and heading to public launch this or next week.

I already partially covered the last few months of app development in this topic. But actually, its development took way longer, as only this iteration started in 2024. So it is the end of a long milestone— this launch date initially was to be a year ago, but I procrastinated and missed important for such apps holiday season

This year I was able to go way beyond last year’s backlog, and now I’m releasing a fully finished app instead of early access.

I’m proud of the result — a lot of overengineered stuff that is not viable in any commercial product, especially in what appears to be a simple CRUD app. For example: image loading from blur, unadvertised but very advanced DnD everywhere, natural language currency inputs with sorting, platform-agnostic quick add, and many more.

Its stack is also very fun: it has been running on the Cloudflare Workers ecosystem since 2023, and is powered by a custom Inertia.js adapter for Hono (that predates the official adapter by one month, lol), with Vue SSR. That all enables me to write old-school MVC with Vue as a template engine for views. It also proved to be very easy to work with and cheap to run.

With a tsunami of vibcoded beige wishlists, my weird app stands apart, for sure, but I’m unsure about its appeal to the average customer.

This is not a topic im fluent with to properly argue, although I did fact check extensively.

What I know is that it is listed as Unix by Opengroup https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/apple.htm and it is Unix enough to get all fun benefits that make Linux great for programming

Quick reminder: Somewhere just around three years ago, we were able to access all Twitter data via API

And at that exact same time, we could access Reddit without login/app

I like how some hardware brands, Keychron for example, are making it's software browser based via WebUSB – https://launcher.keychron.com/

You can configure and update your stuff anywhere where modern browsers can run, and have 0 spyware on your computer

API is highly overpriced and keeps Anthropic profitable or at least close to break even, as was reported recently. Why would you think they will be interested in advising enterprises in cutting their bills pre-IPO?

Considering that I'm mostly unable to reach the limit of my X5 subscription and we have 1M context, it is a guide to maximize Anthropic PnL pre-IPO

The bane of Tailwind is that to appreciate it, you should have in-depth experience with regular CSS. Negative opinions mostly come from people who show no understanding of CSS and pre-existing methodologies of writing it at scale. This author, as all authors of similar articles, shows quite limited CSS knowledge, judging by his points.

Answering every point of the author:

1. You have to learn dozens of classes – these classes are named after dozens of CSS properties. So you already know them. You also take this knowledge to other projects that are using Tailwind.

2. It breaks the separation between structure and design. Also, in HTML, you put scripts and CSS into files by design. Separation is a made-up thing. And writing Tailwind with @apply is still a valid way to write it – you lose code size benefits, but design system enforcement stays.

3. Its names are not consistent. See https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/mistakes/

4. The design system is not enforced as much as it seems – you can literally detect deviations from the design system by the [] pattern, and you can force it with linters.

5. It is not a good gateway to learning CSS – Why should it be? It's a framework, not a CSS learning resource. BTW, it is still a better way to learn CSS than with auto-scoping modules.

6. It is hard to read – The author neglects clsx that is the default/available way to write CSS in most frameworks, that allows to group classes via arrays and objects.

7. The HTML lies to you about priority – Cascade is way harder than the author thinks, and by the way, one of the selling points of Tailwind is what makes complex cascade situations completely avoidable. What if color-red and color-green are in separate unscoped modules bundled up by webpack?

8. Working with Dev Tools is not comfortable. Agree, but it's how browsers devtools work.

P.S. I write CSS by hand via BEM on my own projects, and use Tailwind when I work with frontend and design teams. BEM is great, but it is much harder to onboard engineers to a BEM codebase, and no-methodology is a disastrous approach that sinks many frontend projects in bloat and cascade hell. Tailwind makes everyone familiar with code, and also Tailwind keeps our agreements with the design team in code.

In Eastern Europe, a lot of computer-savvy people write with em dashes. I see two reasons behind that:

1. There is a highly popular Cyrillic keyboard layout with an em dash made by design educator Ilya Birman – https://ilyabirman.net/typography-layout.

2. His colleague, Maxim Ilyahov is the author of an extremely popular book on writing good copy. Somehow, this book was a bestseller for years and was read by all kinds of common folk. I once saw a janitor reading it on a break!