I am Chris Chinchilla 👋

Four years into a full-scale invasion and a decade after Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine’s tech ecosystem continues to flourish at home and in exile around the world. After celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2024, Ukraine’s premier tech event, IT Arena, returned to the Arena Lviv Stadium for the first time since 2019.

Surrounded by digital devices, it's all too easy to use any number of them to access a world of distractions, rather than focus on doing what you need to get done. In a strange, ironic twist, many of the devices and operating systems now offer tools to help block and filter these distractions. When I split myself between macOS and Android, I had focus modes set on both (conveniently, both OSs call them the same thing), but I never found them to be that effective, as I'd have to keep remembering to keep the equivalent modes the same on both devices. Then I bought an iPhone and discovered that the focus modes mostly sync between devices. With the arrival of the "Reduce Interruptions" focus mode in the 2024 operating systems, I went all in on optimising focus modes to work as efficiently as possible, not only blocking and filtering as many distractions as possible, but also automating them as much as possible.

Have you ever tried programming with a language that uses musical notation? What about a language that never runs programs the same way? What about a language where you write code with photographs? All exist, among many others, in the world of esoteric programming languages, and Daniel Temkin has written a forthcoming book covering 44 of them, some of which exist and are usable to some interpretation of the word “usable.” The book, Forty-Four Esolangs: The Art of Esoteric Code, is out on 23 September, published by MIT Press.