Mikhail Simanian

Theme:

cat ~/random/lore.md

lore

(my life's faqs)

LIFE

honestly i never planned on it. I been on computers since i was like eight. spent a lot of time in minecraft building redstone contraptions - hidden piston doors, following tutorials, making my own stuff. sort of like forking repos before i knew what that meant.

took my first cs class in high school and it clicked. not love at first sight, but i realized cs lets you build solutions in almost any discipline. that's still what i believe and it keeps proving itself. it's not really the coding i enjoy - it's being able to make things people can actually use and see the impact.

Buying motorcycles that 'only need a simple chain adjustment' or 'some basic work' and then spending three weeks in the garage completely rebuilding them. It turns out my estimation skills for mechanics are just as optimistic as my estimations for software projects. I say "this should only take a weekend" way too often, and then it doesn't.

honestly? no idea. probably still building stuff and figuring it out as i go. that's worked so far.

Building and gaming on PCs, wrestling and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ), and traveling.

Traveling in Spain and being challenged to a chess game, I won btw ;)

Me and my wrestling team

My most recent mini PC build that I will be using for a new project

BUILDING

Currently, I'm splitting my time between two major engineering projects:

Autonomous Racing Go-Kart: Combining my love for cars and motorcycles with robotics. I'm building a self-driving go-kart and writing the path-planning and computer vision algorithms to optimize its racing line, with the ultimate goal of matching or beating human lap times on a predetermined course.
Home Server Lab: An on-premise home server to practice system administration, networking, and cloud architecture. I'm configuring a centralized NAS for backups, network-wide ad blocking (Pi-hole), and hosting local development services over a secure LAN connection.

hands-on implementation. i read the documentation, build a minimal viable script, break it, and fix it.

python (uv, flask, pandas), rust, typescript (next.js, react), tailwindcss, git, docker.

RANDOM

around 120 wpm. but can you beat me?

0 wpm 0.0s

Where do I even start? If you look at the photos below, you can tell I take food very seriously.

But in full honesty? My absolute favorite is my mom's Mantu—a classic Kazakhstan dish of large dumplings filled with spiced chopped meat, served with chili oil.

My absolute favorite: Mom's Kazakhstan Mantu with chili oil

watermelon with bread. (wait, watermelon and bread? yes, with bread.)

cat README.md

Source code on GitHub