Hi! 👋
My name is Lev. I live in Emeryville and work in the tech industry. I am passionate about building teams and helping people solve complex business problems. I'm currently working at Dagger where I get to work with an amazing team and spend my time helping developers remove toil from CI/CD.
Outside of work I enjoy cooking, eating, chess, reading, writing, music, peloton, traveling, and public transit. I spend a little bit of time every day studying Chinese. I am surrounded by great friends and a wonderful family. I am traveling on a journey through space and time with Aosheng, who is a brilliant designer and my favorite person in the world.
Recent Posts
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Chinese Bio
I’m taking an in-person Chinese class in San Mateo and our final assignment for this block is to a write a biography in Chinese and then stand up in front of the classa and read it. Here it goes.
大家好！我姓Lazinskiy叫Lev. 我是俄国人。我是三十六岁。我有一个哥哥。我哥哥和他的妻子有四个孩子。三个儿子和一个女儿。第一个儿子六岁。第二和第三个儿子都四岁。他的女儿六月。他们都说英语和俄语。他们住在Ohio。我爸爸妈妈也住在Ohio。我住在加州。
我在Florida上大学。Florida 夏天太热了。二零一一年我毕业了。二零一五年我搬加州。我十个年住在这里。二零二零我结婚了。因为我的丈夫是中国人，所以我正在学习中文。我和我的丈夫今年买了第一个房子。我们还没有孩子。
我现在在电脑公司工作。我每天很忙。虽然我的工作有一点儿累，但是我喜欢我的工作。周末我喜欢走路，做饭，看书，和休息。我想去中国放假完。在中国的时候我会吃好吃的菜。
同学们，我喜欢跟你们一起学习中文。谢谢你，下个月见！
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Rules for joining a startup
Hot takes that I’ve learned along the way.
Do’s
WIP
Dont’s
- Don’t join a stealth startup.
- Don’t join a role where you title is “founding X”, the longer the X the more urgent this warning.
- Don’t join a startup run by siblings, the more siblings the more urgent this warning.
- Don’t join a startup with a solo founder.
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Everything wrong with developer tools in a single paragraph
I’m working on making a Dagger module for Wrangler, a CLI from Cloudflare that allows you to manage worker projects.
In their docs it feels like they summarize everything wrong with modern dev tools in a single paragraph:
To install Wrangler ↗, ensure you have Node.js ↗ and npm ↗ installed, preferably using a Node version manager like Volta ↗ or nvm ↗. Using a version manager helps avoid permission issues and allows you to change Node.js versions. Wrangler requires a Node version of 16.17.0 or later.
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Urge to Edit Old Posts
HouseRat Zero wrote about resisting the urge to edit old posts.
https://houserat.net/resisting-the-urge-to-edit-old-posts/
This one really spoke to me because last year I started the (still unfinished) work of moving and consolidating 20 years of blogs into this one.
It was a huge effort that was mostly positive. I didn’t rewrite history, but I did add some additional context to the top of some posts. I’ll also admit that there were a handful of posts that I did not bring over because they were angry, hurtful, and don’t represent who I am. Although I was sad to realize they likely represented who I was.
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Reinstalling Windows at 1am
I took the HSK Level 1 Chinese Proficiency Test in the middle of November and passed it with flying colors. I was well prepared for it, but it almost felt too easy. I thought it would be fun to knock out the HSK Level 2 test before the end of 2024 as well. Unfortunately there were no more test dates left for this year. On a whim, I checked into the website one time in early December and saw that all of a sudden one final test date appeared for December 21st. Even thought I was not as prepared for this one I decided to give it a shot. The only problem is that this test would be taken remotely with a remote proctor and I would have to use Windows.