logo

hello.

I'm Pavel Zolotarevskiy, a developer & a senior high school student from Moscow, Russia. Online I go by flexagoon, or fxgn for short. I'm interested in many aspects of full-stack software development, however, I'm mostly known for not having any meritable projects in any of them.

Once in a while I'm struck by the blessing of hyperfocus, which grants me the ability to work on a single project for about 5 days before I get bored again. Sometimes I even manage to finish a small project in those few days. Other times I don't, and I have to begrudgingly add the task to my to-do list and get sad every time I look at it. Here are some of the most interesting projects that I managed to complete without abandoning:

  • ream is 1:1 standalone re-implementation of Telegram's export functionality. This project was fun to write because it required me to sift through Telegram's messy C++ code and figure out what's going on. It was NOT fun to write because I, for some reason, decided to write it in Python.
  • automenu is a script I wrote for myself to parse my school cafeteria menu and generate a meal plan for me using linear optimization. I no longer use this since I no longer have a fully in-person school schedule, but this was something I enjoyed making.
  • RWC reborn is a GNOME extension that adds rounded corners to windows. It is technically a fork of the original RWC extension, but most of the code is rewritten from scratch since the old code was terrible. I hated working on this, but hey, at least it helped me learn a lot about GNOME.
  • med? is a web tool that accepts a name of a medicine and automatically checks the number of research on it, also generating a summary of the research using Claude API. I decided to write this project because medicine in Russia is basically unregulated. I'm writing it in Elixir, so I don't hate it.

this…

This website is a codebase I work on to relax; a zen garden of sorts. I don't know what it is about front-end development, but for some reason it's an area that I would never want to work in, but really enjoy toying around with.

I've re-written this site about 4 times in different stacks, and finally settled on Astro, which is absolutely fantastic. I've also tried multiple different designs before making this monochrome version. The current design is somewhat inspired by Gwern, and is essentially trying to be "Gwern but sans-serif". I'm not sure if it's succeeding, since the biggest part of Gwern's brand is the sheer volume of content on his site, and I can't write this much because I'm too busy worrying about all of the other stuff I could be doing right now.

…and that

Despite this page inadvertently sounding like a lament of a sad lonely programmer, I'm actually not like that in real life. My personal life details are probably too private to be put on a public CC0-licensed website, but I'm generally a very happy and extraverted person. As a proof that I have real friends, here's a website of one of them. I forced him to learn Astro just for that, so I hope you enjoy it.

I enjoy many things outside of programming. My biggest interests include economics, philosophy, some branches of biology/chemistry, fun branches of mathematics like formal logic, and having a lot of overly nuanced opinions no one cares about. Maybe someday I'll put some of those opinions in my blog, that way at least Googlebot will read them.


Thanks for stopping by, wanderer. The road ever beckons.