Artem Tyurin

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Last post: Sep 2, 2024
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Taking a break
Sep 2, 2024 · original
I'm doing fine. Somehow writing monthly lookbacks has turned from a pleasurable habit into a crushing obligation. Sometimes personal rules need to be overturned, so I'm putting lookbacks on hold for the time being. Perhaps I'll try a different format one day.
June 2024
Jul 2, 2024 · original
Investing in a good frying pan and kitchen knife has paid off and made cooking even more enjoyable. No steaks yet, as June was a pescatarian month. I also now possess a pan for tamagoyaki and after many attempts, I'm beginning to grasp how to properly roll it up. Certain albums have been with me longer than I can recall myself. Albums that shaped the way I feel the world around me. Moon Safari by Air is one of those. Therefore, it was absolutely incredible to hear and see the band playing this album live in Paris. The minimalistic stage reminiscent of the Solaris scene was illuminated by cosmic visualizations. It was a bit of a shame they didn't have Beth Hirsch with them for the two tracks with her lovely vocals. The two encores featured the tracks from other albums. [Your browser does not support the video tag.] Sometimes all you need for motivation is a question. In May I couldn't exp
May 2024
Jun 16, 2024 · original
May has been a tricky experiment in balancing work and a long journey. My fantasy of living a peaceful life for a month in some warm European city like Barcelona turned out to be a fast-moving trip across the couches of welcoming friends. I managed to be satisfied with my work on nearly all days of the trip, but not all of them had enough energy for social interaction. In Berlin, I became an avid reader and subscriber to the Schön magazine , which reports on everyday Berlin in the familiar tone of the Afisha magazine of the early 2000s. Thanks to a tip from the magazine, I found myself in a former crematorium building at the animation festival. Dozens of booths where artists were showing their ideas. It seemed like a marvelous secret world that existed nearby all the time. I was captivated by flying super sausage and the animation short about competitive spirit . While we were sitting on
April 2024
May 12, 2024 · original
You can tell by the date of this lookback that I am busy with work again. After countless interviews, I made a rather adventurous and exciting choice. I now work at Gitar , a small startup founded by my former colleagues from Uber. The position attracted me due to the opportunity to work on developer tools by applying compiler-based techniques, as well as the Rust programming language, which I now wrestle with every day. A regular get-together with friends took place in Bulgaria this time. We wandered around Sofia and Plovdiv, admired delicious local cuisine and captions in the familiar Cyrillic alphabet, listened to live jazz, and hiked up a snowy mountain. I wrote a slightly more extended report in Ogorod . Gotta find time now to edit a trip video. Peter took me to the YC Startup School meetup, a sort of DIY event where people present their projects. Of interest to me was a note-taking
March 2024
Apr 8, 2024 · original
Saw living legends, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood at The Smile concert in Brussels. The giant Greenwood impressed by his virtuoso switching between bass guitar, piano, harp, and bow playing on the guitar. I still didn't finish listening to their second album, but I was still delighted by the amazing sound. Now I would like to see Radiohead live at least once. Rainy Brussels didn't give me any positive impressions as a city. March 17 was exactly 10 years since I moved to the Netherlands. I symbolically spent the entire day in a queue to vote at the Russian embassy in The Hague. Despite the meaninglessness of the action, Russian people came to protest against dictator Putin and his war. After standing in line since the morning, we managed to vote just 10 minutes before closing time and went to eat pancakes at a friend's place, then left back to Amsterdam on the last train. I've made both
February 2024
Mar 5, 2024 · original
An exhausting month. After getting sick in the first few days of February, I sat with a cough for the rest of the month. The rest of the days I was either interviewing or preparing for interviews. This is also an exhausting process, which in my case fills up all my free time. Often it's not clear what exactly to prepare for, so I bounce between textbooks, various talks on YouTube, and the regular LeetCode practice. Navalny's murder in prison was a shock to me. In 2012, I went to work for LiveJournal, a blogging platform that its original creator Brad Fitzpatrick (later known for Go and Tailscale) had sold to the Russian company SUP Media in 2007. I was proud to work for a service where Alexei Navalny blogged about corruption in the Russian government. I saw him several times during the protests in Moscow. After his imprisonment, when he returned to Russia, I helped organize several local
January 2024
Feb 4, 2024 · original
January was a very social month. In Berlin, Valera took me to a Ukrainian place with excellent borscht. Back in Amsterdam, I was happy to see former colleagues from Uber over a few beers. With Asya and friends, we went to the sea in Zandvoort to feed seagulls, wander against the sweeping wind, and then warm up with fish soup. Igor stayed with us for a couple of days – I'm still winning at Mario Kart, but it's getting harder each time. We went bouldering and the price of my irregular training schedule was a bruised rib. It was also good to see my Japanese friend Ryu, who stopped by Amsterdam on his European tour. Asya took me to a theatrical production created by the СБПЧ band, whose concert we attended last summer. The script is based on a text by the writer and artist Pavel Pepperstein. The play itself, childlike in form and charmingly sweet, gathered a huge audience in Amstelveen, I di
December 2023
Jan 4, 2024 · original
December was about searching for presents and meeting with all local friends, before departing to Berlin for the holidays. I am not that into Berlin as a city, but the amount of good friends there makes it one of the top candidate cities if I ever decide to move. During the holidays we played Tetris, rewatched Home Alone, and visited Munch exhibition. New Year's Eve was spent eating vegan salads and singing karaoke. Turns out everyone knows only the Wake me up before you go-go line from that song and all other lyrics are quite hard. Kolya kicked my ass in Tetris and showed me DJ-ing and music production basics. To sum up the year, I was inspired by the 40 questions to ask yourself every year list. It was very enjoyable to reflect on these questions and read the answers of close friends. I've posted my answers in a private place, so if we know each other and you are interested in reading
November 2023
Dec 5, 2023 · original
Having visited Japan for the first time in 2019, I was excited for the country to finally reopen for tourism after the pandemic. Due to the aging population, this didn't happen until September 2023. My annual sabbatical was starting to come to an end and I spontaneously decided to spend the entire month of November in Japan. On my first trip, I had only been to Tokyo and the surrounding areas, now I wanted to see the rest of the country. Having only planned the beginning of the route in Osaka and the end in Tokyo I planned the route on the go. The final route was as follows: Osaka → Hiroshima → Itsukushima → Fukuoka → Nagasaki → Himeji → Arima Onsen → Kyoto → Nara → Kanazawa → Tokyo. As usual, here is the whole voyage compressed in video form. There are chapters, so you can watch it over several times. About 450 years ago, the Dutch ship named Liefde (Love) was shipwrecked around the isl
October 2023
Oct 31, 2023 · original
Dear friends Kolya and Yasya visited us from Berlin, gave me and Asya a bouldering lesson, and introduced us to the wonderful new world of vegan cheese and vegan ramen. Ramen Impossible in the city center is a delight. With Kolya's help, I managed to climb my first blue route (roughly level 3). We also walked around the NDSM, the artist studios inside the shipyard never cease to amaze on every visit. The rest of the time we played competitive Tetris and watched new Wes Anderson short films. A small successful experiment involved posting a personal to-do list for the month in advance to a small group of friends at the start of the month. I found that it added focus and more energy to my efforts. Will definitely continue to do this. A real hidden gem in Amsterdam is the Het Schip Museum, dedicated to the architectural movement known as the Amsterdam School. With the fast-paced industrializ
September 2023
Oct 1, 2023 · original
The first trip on the new passport had been to London. No more visa forms where I have to list all my travel history for the last 10 years and answer if I am a terrorist. After going through passport control it felt like doing something illegal and just no one noticed. London is fantastic. A powerful concentration of culture, history, and interesting places. Only after walking along the too-narrow canal from Regent's Park to Victoria Park did I finally have the geography of north London more or less settled in my head. I visited my favorite Barbican, saw some great art at the National Gallery, explored the Camden Town area, and went to worship the Blue Plaques on houses where David Bowie and Sylvia Plath lived. It also turned out that bouldering with friends is even more interesting than doing it alone. Unfortunately, there was no time to go and try the jellied eels , next time. At the e
August 2023
Sep 3, 2023 · original
Celebrated my 32nd birthday with a wonderful group of friends. I have a hard time organizing big events, but I love being at them, especially if I know everyone there. It's a special joy to introduce friends to each other, an activity I used to find unnecessary before. Artur and Lena invited us to visit them in Switzerland, and our mutual friends Aziz and Nilyu made it to the reunion from Tashkent. The wooden attic of the house in Zug where we lived, daily lake swimming, and reading books on the beach made it feel like a true country house experience. In the Interlaken area, we climbed steep forests, rode mountain trains overlooking the Jungfrau, and hiked the ridges of mountains with the appealing goal of having lunch at the top. In Zurich, we visited the lovely botanical garden at the university and once again glanced at the excellent 19th- and 20th-century collections at the art museu
July 2023
Aug 2, 2023 · original
This July, my first travel-free month of the year, marks 3 years of writing these monthly lookbacks. One more way to capture fleeting time. The word release means publication, but also setting free and letting go. The ritual of releasing a lookback helps me to digest, pack up, and archive the past. There are times when I have to force myself to compose this text, but after completing the work, I am satisfied with the result. Another major milestone is that I received my Dutch citizenship. As the Netherlands does not allow dual citizenship, it took me a while to come to terms with giving up my Russian passport, but I made a final decision after February 2022, when Putin started his terrible war. Nine years ago I took a flight to Amsterdam from Moscow Sheremetyevo airport in the kitsch ushanka hat. And Amsterdam has been my home for those 9 years. I met many of my good friends here, two of
June 2023
Jul 2, 2023 · original
There are few places you can fly to from Amsterdam and get worse weather. One of those places is Iceland. We had 2 cars, 12 days, a 2500-kilometer drive around the island, a shared playlist of about 200 songs, and a countless number of green apples most of which were fed to the horses. At first, the scenery seems like an intriguingly gloomy version of Switzerland in summer, but pretty quickly turns into an alien wasteland unlike anything else. Waterfalls, geysers, volcanic rocks, black sand beaches, deceptively close mountains blunted from above by glaciers, the softest moss. While the rest of the world was going through the Cold War (Gorbachev and Reagan negotiated in 1986 in Reykjavik), Iceland fought a Cod War with Britain. The country without vegetables and trees, which was effectively a colony of Denmark until the 20th century, made an economic breakthrough after World War II thanks
May 2023
Jun 1, 2023 · original
I met my good friends Aziz and Artur through mutual suffering while working at Booking.com . Our names provided the title for the AAA club . We often met just three of us or invited guests. Since then Artur moved to Switzerland and Aziz to Uzbekistan. This May Aziz invited us to visit and Artur and I were excited to head to Uzbekistan. Tashkent, full of green trees, parks, fountains, and broad avenues, struck me as a very modern city. The scorching sun in Bukhara transported us back to the 12th century. Samarkand is about midway between Tashkent and Bukhara, both geographically and culturally. We ate lots of pilaf ( plov ), drank tea inside the madrasah, and hiked along the ridge of the Tien Shan Mountains. Because of the constantly present Russian language, I often recalled Moscow, where I do not know the next time I will be. I edited a short film about the trip: Reading Tarkovsky's d
April 2023
May 3, 2023 · original
My first visit to Italy exceeded all expectations. We were in Florence, Siena, San Gimignano, Pisa, Bergamo, and Milan. The strength of the impression of Siena can be compared to my first visits to New York and Tokyo. In the 15th century, Siena was a major rival to Florence, but after the defeat in one of the battles, the Florentines forbade the city to sprawl. That's why Siena is perfectly preserved – there are no billboards and almost no cars in town, isn't that wonderful? The competitive spirit was turned inward and expressed in the form of horse races in the main square, which have been held every summer since the 15th century. Local restaurants skip the menu and simply offer two choices of great pasta. Contrary to the state of "ignorance is bliss" that I was in before visiting Italy, I am now excited about the many other places I need to visit in this magnificent country. In Florenc
March 2023
Apr 2, 2023 · original
Three hours on the train fly by in the blink of an eye, and we're in Paris. Most central Parisian streets are filled with piles of garbage bags because of the ongoing strike. Behind our window is the Castle of Vincennes, where in the early 20th century the French executed Mata Hari, the famous spy of Dutch origin. Industrial scaffolding gives Notre Dame cathedral a sort of steampunk look. Parisians don't miss a chance to mock you for not knowing French. There is a long line at the entrance to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore, which I try to visit whenever I'm in town. We nearly accidentally met up with our friends Tyoma and Adele and had a wonderful walk around the city. In Paris, we went to Kirill Serebrennikov's play The Black Monk based on Chekhov's short story. The plot revolves around a burned-out man of science going to the village where he grew up. As he marries the daughter
February 2023
Mar 1, 2023 · original
I had coffee with my friend Razvan and described my feelings about the ongoing sabbatical. He summed it up well, saying that I could now see the future in terms of the projects I have the opportunity to work on. The city I live in is quite important to me. Digging into the history of the neighborhood and the city helps me take my mind off the daily routine and appreciate the world at large. I took note each time I saw a cityscape painting of Amsterdam. The collection grew, and so I created a map showing all viewpoints of historic paintings of Amsterdam. With this project, I want to encourage urban dwellers to learn the history of the city by exploring the historical context of some iconic buildings. This is my small ode to Amsterdam. Inspired by the fluency of Catalonian-speaking expats I've met in Barcelona last month, I've restarted learning Dutch. I am using Memrise to get back on tra
January 2023
Feb 3, 2023 · original
The day after my return from Berlin, I turned in my work laptop. It was my second and last visit to the Apple office during two years of remote work. I had been fantasizing about quitting and taking the sabbatical for the past three years and finally made up my mind. It wasn't an easy decision, given the high volume of layoffs and the declining economy. But the more difficult the decision seemed, the more I realized I needed to commit to it. The main reason for leaving was the company's hostility to remote work. The most interesting projects are in California, outside of US the only major development office is in London and if you're not there it's very hard to find an interesting remote position. My project throughout my time at Apple wasn't that bad, I just wasn't doing anything new or exciting. I tried to change teams throughout the year and after successfully passing interviews I was
December 2022
Jan 1, 2023 · original
For Asya's birthday we went to Middelburg to meet alpacas. These space beasts are relatives of camels, smaller than llamas. I got an alpaca with a temper named Arena, who kept making a disgruntled sound and always wanted to go the other way. Other alpacas were quite obedient. Despite the promise of alpacas being curious, Arena didn't care about me and only craned her neck when I blocked her view. It was fun. Walking along the shore, we learned that alpacas here, just like humans, also lack sun and need to eat vitamin D. Igor and Tyoma came to Amsterdam. I caught a cold walking with the alpacas, so we didn't do much outside, but we watched two great crime/gangster movies: Good Time and La Haine. Igor continued the tradition of ordering chicken korma and thus earned the nickname Kormack (a tribute to the great John Carmack). Before Aziz left for Tashkent, we decided to visit Artur and Lena

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