Kyrylo Silin

About me

Software engineer, web developer, and entrepreneur.
From Kharkiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦
I am an alumnus of Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, in the Department of Information Control Systems (ICS). (MSc. 2015)
Get in touch: silin@kyryl(o.o)rg

Just love the craft, not what you earn,
As years of practice will confirm.
That's how it goes — you can't succeed,
Without some dirt beneath your feet.

simple ≠ dumbed-down
simple = Σ ( max(signalᵢ) / min(noiseᵢ) )

Where to find me online

GitHub — kyrylo
X — @kyrylosilin
Bluesky — @kyrylo.org
Mastodon — @kyrylosilin
LinkedIn — Kyrylo Silin

What I'm working on

Telebugs: A lightweight, self-hosted Sentry alternative without a subscription.
F**k This Page: Take revenge on any website you dislike.
The HTML Maze: Explore the HTML maze, leave drawings and messages, and find your way out. A playful, interactive web experiment.
Tech Debt: A fast-paced, keyboard-driven text game where you work to launch a bug-free programming language before the looming '95 WEBFEST deadline.
The Em Dash: Supercharging your game-changing posts and comments since 2022.
Just **** Use HTML: My take on complexity in modern web development.
Docker Name Generator: Generate random Docker container-style names for any purpose.
Flag Match: A fun and educational game to learn flags of countries and their capitals.
We Use Rails: Discover web apps built with Ruby on Rails.
Coffee World Rush: Track your coffee consumption and help bring your country to the top of the leaderboard.

My chest of drawers

SeaSick Simulator: Experience the queasy charm of rough seas on any website.
Life Calendar: Every week is a gift. Make them count.
The Catipede: An emoji-based online game inspired by Tamagotchi.
CSS Color Names Reference: Complete reference of all 147 standard CSS color names with hex codes, RGB values, OKLCH, and HSL values.
Tailwind CSS v4 Color Palette Reference: Complete reference of all default Tailwind CSS v4 colors with hex, RGB, HSL, and OKLCH values.

What I write about

August 7, 2025 – Not everything needs an update
July 10, 2025 – AI will take your job (and your boss's job too)
July 2, 2025 – I vibe-coded Tech Debt: a game written in pure HTML/CSS/JS
June 15, 2025 – Your idea probably sucks
May 1, 2025 – How the pay-once business model saved my *aaS
Mar 28, 2025 – Learn to code, ignore AI, then use AI to code even better
Feb 27, 2025 – You know how it ends
Feb 10, 2025 – OKLCH CSS variables for Tailwind v4 colors
Jan 22, 2025 – The vertical bar (|) is the best HTML page title separator
Nov 25, 2024 – How to build a dropdown menu with just HTML
Nov 17, 2024 – How Counter-Strike introduced me to the world of programming
Nov 17, 2024 – Hyperlinks existed before the web
Nov 15, 2024 – How to self-host Plausible Analytics with Kamal
Nov 7, 2024 – There's no place for test-driven development (TDD)
Oct 25, 2024 – Why does "target=_blank" have an underscore in front?
Oct 23, 2024 – Writing software is like spreading butter on bread
Sep 27, 2024 – Notes from the opening keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson at Rails World 2024
Aug 7, 2024 – How to add Mission Control to your Rails app and protect it with basic auth
Jul 18, 2024 – I built a flag-matching game in 6 days, and it was played more than 45k times in 2 weeks
Jun 2, 2024 – How to deploy a Telegram bot with Kamal
Mar 31, 2024 – Cloudflare Tunnel: a free Ngrok alternative for developing Rails apps locally
Mar 20, 2024 – Coffee World Rush: a leaderboard for all coffee drinkers around the world
Feb 21, 2024 – I built a word-matching game called Matcharoo
Feb 20, 2024 – Using Overmind with Foreman as a fallback for Rails 7.1 apps
Feb 16, 2024 – How to generate sitemap.xml for your Rails 7.1 app with Kamal
Jan 21, 2024 – How to opt-out of the cache with Hotwire Turbo Drive in Rails
Jan 21, 2024 – How to enable the Traefik dashboard for a Rails 7.1 app
Jan 18, 2024 – Making PostgreSQL work with Kamal and a new Rails 7.1 application
Jan 8, 2024 – How to run your Turbo Native Android app on a physical device locally
Nov 9, 2023 – Embarking on an indie dev journey
Jun 21, 2018 – Untangling the love Ruby tongue-twister
May 23, 2015 – A bit of bacon, lettuce, and tomato
Dec 31, 2014 – Ruby's exception to message mapper
Dec 15, 2013 – JavaScript eval tricks
Aug 24, 2013 – Ruby eval tricks
Aug 13, 2013 – Various ways to count digits in a Ruby integer
Aug 9, 2013 – Blocks in Ruby are always there
Aug 2, 2013 – How to safely enter passwords in a terminal
Jul 15, 2013 – How to say "I love you" in Ruby
Jul 3, 2013 – Pulling through a Ruby exception
Jun 3, 2013 – Difference between frozen Ruby objects across versions
May 30, 2013 – So, what is binding.pry exactly?

Past work

Matcharoo: A word association game where you match similar words, learn new words easily, and have a blast with friends as you discover who knows the most (blog post).
Pry REPL: The featureful development console for Ruby.
Airbrake Ruby and Airbrake: The notifier libraries for the Airbrake error monitoring service, which I rewrote from scratch and maintained for many years.
netstring: A Go package for formatting byte strings using declarative notation to indicate the string's size.
linenoise-rb: A Ruby wrapper for Linenoise, a small self-contained alternative to Readline and libedit.
System Browser: A desktop app for browsing Ruby code, inspired by Smalltalk. Click to view details about a module or class, explore its namespace, or see the source of a method.
Fast Method Source: An extremely fast Ruby C extension for querying methods, procs, and lambdas for their source code and comments.
System Navigation: A Ruby library that provides navigation and introspection capabilities for Ruby programs, similar to those in Smalltalk.
RMarshal: An Erlang library for deserializing Ruby objects dumped by Marshal.dump into Erlang terms.
multitrap: A Ruby library that allows Signal.trap to execute multiple callbacks
Pry Theme: A plugin for the Pry REPL in Ruby that allows customizing Pry colors using prytheme.rb files.
Patience: Solitaire card game built in Ruby with the Ray library.
Pixelate and Pixelnine: Skins for the KDE terminal emulator, Yakuake.
OpenRA maps: A collection of maps for the OpenRA real-time strategy game. Some of the maps were included in the official release.
openra-microcontrol: A minigame for the OpenRA real-time strategy game written in Lua.
Entooru: Translations of random English articles about Ruby into Russian.
Your tea, buddy: A KDE splash screen with a white background, red text, and a small loading progress bar beneath the text. Pairs well with the Already awake? KDM4 theme.
Already awake?: A KDM4 theme with a white background and red text. Pairs well with the Already awake? splash screen.
bash-completion-subtle: Bash completion scripts for Subtle WM and its tools.
zsh-completion-subtle: Z Shell completion scripts for Subtle WM and its tools.

Where I've been

2021 – Dubai, United Arab Emirates 🇦🇪
2019 – Cebu, Philippines 🇵🇭
2019 – Lviv, Ukraine 🇺🇦
2019 – Amsterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱
2019 – Rotterdam, Netherlands 🇳🇱
2019 – Manila, Philippines 🇵🇭
2019 – Legazpi, Philippines 🇵🇭
2019 – Bohol, Philippines 🇵🇭
2018 – Cavite, Philippines 🇵🇭
2018 – Baguio, Philippines 🇵🇭
2018 – Tagaytay, Philippines 🇵🇭
2018 – Manila, Philippines 🇵🇭
2017 – Bangkok, Thailand 🇹🇭
2017 – Manila, Philippines 🇵🇭
2017 – Kyiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦
2016 – Lisbon, Portugal 🇵🇹
2014 – San Francisco, United States 🇺🇸
2013 – Kharkiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦
2012 – Donetsk, Ukraine 🇺🇦
2011 – Odesa, Ukraine 🇺🇦