The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Lisp / Clojure / Scheme

Stepan Parunashvili

stopa.io

Read Essays by Stepan Parunashvili

Lisp / Clojure / SchemeSoftware / engineering practiceEssays / personal

’15’20’25
Posts
268 from 11 Nov 2012 to 7 Sep 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
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2025 1

  1. iPhone dumbphone

2022 4

  1. A Graph-Based Firebase
  2. What Artists Notice
  3. LLisp: Lisp in Lisp
  4. Bel in Clojure

2021 9

  1. Siren Calls and Compasses
  2. A Love Letter to React Native
  3. Experiments with “AI” and Diet Logging
  4. Founder Diaries: The First 2 Months of Consistent
  5. Observability and Iteration in Nutrition
  6. Database in the Browser, a Spec
  7. The poem
  8. Antifragility
  9. Becoming Silicon Valley

2020 24

  1. Forming Vision
  2. Როგორ გამდიდრე (იღბალის გარეშე)
  3. Agent vs System
  4. What Gödel Discovered
  5. Რას მოისურვებდი რომ გცოდნოდა
  6. An Intuition for Lisp Syntax
  7. How to Pick a Language
  8. Fun with Lambda Calculus
  9. The Interpreter
  10. Simulating RAM in Clojure
  11. Simulating Machines in Clojure
  12. Crafting Functions
  13. Classes are just a fancy way of writing higher order functions
  14. Inventing Monads
  15. The Hacker Way: How I taught my nephew to program
  16. Assessing Abstractions
  17. Thank you Airbnb
  18. Sets and Probability
  19. Why change
  20. Hacker's Paradise
  21. Going multi-region
  22. On the Coronavirus
  23. Blanket Solutions and Microservices
  24. School, Nietzsche, and Comfort for High School Kids

2019 15

  1. The price we pay
  2. Crazy Ideas
  3. Advice on starting out
  4. Macros by Example
  5. Two stories I share with my nephews, to help them take risks and follow their curiosity
  6. How to get those 9s: on improving service uptime
  7. On leadership, self-esteem, and confidence
  8. My strategy for wealth and personal finance
  9. 10 Offers, 100 Days. The Journey
  10. The best advice I received on leadership
  11. Risp (in (Rust) (Lisp))
  12. What to do if you’re embarrassed or make a mistake
  13. Advice for dealing with overwhelm
  14. Out There
  15. Thank you Wit, Thank you Facebook

2018 8

  1. Principled Decision Making
  2. The positive side
  3. How to stack the doe when you’re an intern
  4. How I work
  5. When it’s time to leave
  6. Favorite Rich Hickey Talks
  7. My favorite books
  8. Advice on starting out as an engineer

2017 17

  1. Cognitions
  2. Process
  3. Bottom-Up Goal Setting
  4. On Alternatives
  5. A 2 hour foray into small business
  6. About the craft
  7. Not alone
  8. An Open Source Component Repository
  9. On a brooding mind
  10. On Vision
  11. On Breaking Trust
  12. Allow for the best case
  13. On The Delivery
  14. On Fairness
  15. It’s not about what you want
  16. Why critics think they’re right
  17. On Communicating Clearly

2016 12

  1. See the world clearly Part 1 — Business
  2. On Agency
  3. Proactivity
  4. On the overwhelming warmth and beauty in humanity
  5. Selfishness
  6. Systems
  7. When someone shushes you
  8. A mismatch in standards
  9. Consumption
  10. On expanding scope
  11. Commitment
  12. Be okay with thinking

2015 41

  1. Distributed Systems and Getting Things Done
  2. Now or Never
  3. Empathetic cool
  4. See opportunity
  5. Don’t forget why
  6. Be a Pro
  7. Don’t wallow
  8. On feeling bad
  9. Say it 3 times
  10. Embarrassment is the cost of growth
  11. Two ideas of willpower
  12. fear vs being a person who is afraid
  13. Default State
  14. Try
  15. Do once, have forever
  16. Accidents
  17. The Alarm
  18. 30% done and 90% done
  19. Making fun of legacy code
  20. Always bring up potential screw-ups
  21. The Biggest Lever
  22. An antidote to self-deprecating behavior
  23. The ambitious person’s excuse
  24. To existential fears: the answer is in process
  25. Find comfort in looking dumb
  26. What job do I play here?
  27. Priorities
  28. Constant
  29. On choice
  30. Intentionally sounding stupid?
  31. On criticism and insults
  32. Big wins
  33. To outsiders, everything at the forefront of innovation will look like a fad.
  34. Don’t trust why you think you feel bad
  35. The Buffet Trick
  36. Opaque decision making
  37. Purpose, not passion
  38. Action in Uncertainty
  39. Funny awkwardness
  40. A moment of frustration
  41. Presence

2014 98

  1. Think about the other person
  2. Context
  3. Step by Step
  4. More gratitude
  5. Comfort with ambiguity
  6. Grateful
  7. Preparation
  8. How did you feel before it even happened?
  9. Old for new
  10. What do you want?
  11. Getting pissed off with reality
  12. The saddest thing about large companies
  13. Oh my turn!
  14. Competition
  15. The most profound form of affection
  16. Expensive Lessons
  17. Important and Valuable
  18. boxes and bedrock
  19. How can you help
  20. Show by example
  21. Don’t be daunted
  22. Pattern matching
  23. Everyone is shy
  24. Love the people closest to you
  25. A note on feeling uncool
  26. Sensible person principle
  27. Do If
  28. Feeling alone is a choice
  29. Notes on dealing with bureaucracy
  30. The Dancing President
  31. Love people who tell you the truth
  32. Climbing mountains
  33. Is there any merit to arguments?
  34. how other people view you | how you view other people
  35. 2 types of pride
  36. Weird temperament
  37. Official
  38. Gratitude
  39. Vitality
  40. Jumping thoughts
  41. Presence and Technical Ability
  42. The seed of regret
  43. When you’re cranky
  44. Pete Hunt on React.js
  45. Invest
  46. Impediment to Action
  47. Bound by Uncertainty
  48. The value of congruency
  49. Big stretches of time
  50. SICP, beautifully displayed
  51. The feeling comes first
  52. When to make your move
  53. A Different look at goals
  54. AngularJS Learning
  55. When you say it’s done
  56. Patience
  57. Getting Better
  58. A habit of tracking core work
  59. Choose what bugs you
  60. The Finisher!
  61. The trap of accepting too quickly with high upside endevours
  62. Knowing vs Doing
  63. Expand your sense of belonging
  64. What you don’t know you don’t know
  65. Limit your choice loops
  66. Notes on making choices when you have a complicated decision tree
  67. For better negotation, event out your relative times
  68. Don’t wear trackpants when you want to get shit done
  69. Tubby Sinatra
  70. Youtube on Repeat
  71. What’s under your control
  72. Keep a ‘what’s my answer to this’ file
  73. Control your excitement for more effective conversations
  74. The Football player and the UN Speaker
  75. Unpleasant things as a learning resource
  76. Focus on intention, not words
  77. Watch when you make your choices
  78. The Blank Page
  79. When to fight
  80. My approach to learning MVC’s and all other things programming
  81. Risks in all areas are not the price for living a different life
  82. Another reminder to myself
  83. A new principle on books
  84. Present Evaluations
  85. On dealing with uncertainty
  86. A very interesting learning loop
  87. Nihil Perditi
  88. When you don’t know, work
  89. Find out
  90. Asking for help
  91. Options
  92. Validation
  93. Notes on outreach
  94. Feeling Stupid
  95. On Work
  96. Mistakes of Ambition
  97. The Talent Excuse
  98. Life is not a story

2013 23

  1. The next level from solo
  2. The essential things
  3. The hardest thing about a step forward
  4. The Next Level From Landing Awesome Opportunities
  5. The scary, happy feeling
  6. Do the best you can now.
  7. The Craftsman Mindset
  8. Excellence takes time
  9. The Correct Role Model on Busy
  10. The Uselessness of Guilt
  11. A sunrise above the clouds
  12. Before you speak
  13. On Sprinting To Success
  14. Acceptance
  15. Arguing with my mother
  16. Defining Success
  17. Image and reality
  18. Listening
  19. The Last 10%
  20. Heroes
  21. Depression and Creativity
  22. Waking up just in time to be late
  23. Special

2012 16

  1. When aggravated with others
  2. Be friends with your clients
  3. Even head
  4. For the hustle
  5. An insight from James Altucher
  6. Your own Voice
  7. Making the most you can out of the middle
  8. Constantly Striving
  9. Your perspective has nothing to do with reality.
  10. The reason to make art
  11. The point of breaking down
  12. Trying not to try
  13. Feeling Success, Being Successful, Having other people think you’re successful
  14. You choose how you react to things
  15. On the fragility of beliefs
  16. Best Interests