About

01 Background

Grew up on a farm in the Latvian countryside — animals, chores, outdoors. The kind of childhood that quietly teaches you to figure things out on your own. Ended up studying computer science, and the farm kid became an engineer. Nobody planned it, it just happened.

That background still shapes how I approach things. Don't overthink it, don't force it. I think about that when considering what kind of life to build.

02 How I work

I'd rather build something straightforward than clever. If it needs a wiki page to explain, something went wrong. I tend to spend more time understanding the problem than writing the solution — the code part is usually the quick bit.

I like building things that don't need me watching over them. Internal tools where the rest of the team can safely manage configs and edge cases on their own — so things keep running while I'm on vacation.

Vue is my framework of choice — pragmatic, stays out of the way, and the ecosystem around Nuxt and the composition API just makes sense. Before that it was Clojure, and before that .NET. The stack changes; the way I pick apart problems doesn't.

I like making things configurable and adaptable. UIs that generate from data instead of being hand-wired, game entities defined as .ron files instead of hardcoded structs. The less you have to touch the code to change behavior, the better.

03 What I care about

I read a lot of stoic philosophy — the real thing, not the internet caricature. The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth is probably the best book I own. Ryan Holiday's daily meditations are a morning habit. Dalio's idea about always thinking through second and third-order effects has stuck with me too — most bad decisions come from only looking at what happens next, not what happens after that.

Long-term over short-term. Own what matters. Don't depend on someone else's platform when you can help it — goes for your infrastructure and your career.

Say what you mean. Latvian default setting.

04 And other things

I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy — from Asimov to Dinniman. Some stoic philosophy and the occasional book on game design.

I have a small vinyl shelf — film scores, classic albums, the odd local pressing. I also shoot film and practice drawing — pencil, markers, digital. Interests come, go, and come back. There's something about analogue formats that I keep returning to.

I play a lot of games — PC mostly, but board games too sometimes. I like thinking about why some games work and others don't. That's slowly turning into actually making one — prototyping a hex-grid town builder in Bevy/Rust after tinkering with Blender and UE5 first.

I run a homelab — Proxmox, Docker Compose, Cloudflare tunnels, automated backups. I'd rather own the stuff I depend on daily than hope someone else keeps their service running.

I do Advent of Code each December — good fun and a nice break from production code.

Away from screens — I grow peppers in a greenhouse with automated watering and climate sensors, and I built an outhouse at the family homestead. Modeled the whole thing to scale in Blender first to figure out exactly how many planks and beams to buy. The farm kid and the engineer don't stay separate for long.

05 The two sides

The technical side and the creative side aren't a persona thing. The person who ships software and runs a homelab is the same one who buys vinyl, shoots film, and reads sci-fi until 2am.