Category: Software

From MS-DOS to Modern CAD: My Journey with Bazis Soft | March 06 2026, 17:43

My first job as a programmer, with an office in Kolomna and for money. It was 1993, or maybe even a year earlier. 10th-11th grade of school. And this company still exists, and the guys I worked with are still there! Natalya Bakulina, Pavel Bunakov, Nikolai Kaskevich. Imagine that. Moreover, they started back in 1986, that is, 40 years ago already! I can hardly remember other commercial companies of such age in Russia. When I came to work there, there was MS DOS, they wrote in Turbo Pascal, but they had started many years before me on the SM-1420 computer, though back then, the company was not entirely commercial. At the time of my arrival, their system was a competitor of AutoCAD in the market, locally also competing with “Kompas”. I made an installer from 5.25″ and 3.5″ disks – to capture the spirit of the era. Later they switched to Delphi and Windows. After that, they narrowed down their focus, transitioning from CAD for engineering to CAD for furniture, where they still hold very strong positions.

Seeking Alpha Testers for a Revolutionary Text and PDF Management Tool | March 03 2026, 03:02

Looking for alpha-testers. As part of R&D and for my own tasks, I wrote a productivity tool (I actually wrote about this in my last post, but Facebook said that because I put a link in the post, only 12% saw it). Now I want to check if it will be useful to anyone else. If the idea resonates with you — let me know, and I will share access.

Website smartfolio dot me. What’s the main idea?

It’s an online notebook for working with text and PDFs, organized as a graph. It looks like Google Docs, but there’s an important difference: you can attach “child” documents to specific parts of the main text to expand on details or clarify concepts. These “comments” themselves are full documents and can have their own nested branches.

If there’s a fragment in the text that is unclear, you can ask the system to explain it (this will require your Google Gemini API key).

The system uses the full context of the document to generate a response.

Explanations are permanently attached to a specific place in the text.

This is super convenient when reading complex scientific articles. For instance, you can highlight the authors’ surnames in a PDF and instantly get a background on them — the information will be attached right to that fragment on the page.

Typical workflow

Upload a complex text and read it right in the app from either a mobile or a computer. As you go, add manual or AI-generated notes to important or unclear sections for future reference.

I do not store your documents, PDFs, images, or API keys on my servers. All data is stored in Turso DB (SaaS, free up to 5 GB).

Screenshots on the website’s main page best describe the project.

How to try?

To register in the app, you need an invite code. Just write me in the comments or in a private message, and I will send it.

Website smartfolio-dot-me

Navigating the Tricky Path of Online Donations: A User Experience Dilemma | February 20 2026, 19:02

Here we have the ultimate tricksters. If you accidentally choose an answer for “would you like to donate?”, getting to “oh, I don’t want to yet” takes about 10 minutes and is fraught with the risk of losing your seats. Because 1) there is no option for ‘don’t want to’ 2) any selection ranges from $5 to $9.60 3) refreshing the page results in an error, forcing you to reselect seats and try not to hit those radio buttons again. And by the way, these were the last two seats in the auditorium. They weren’t available yesterday, but showed up today.

Revolutionizing Research: Introducing a Web-Based Notebook Integrated with AI and PDF Support | February 19 2026, 16:19

I’ve further developed a new tool for myself for working with information and organizing it. The main idea is a web-based notebook for research, studying subjects, working on them, integrated with AI and PDF support.

The main problem with typical PDF readers and notes is that the context is lost as soon as you switch to a new tab. In my tool, each text fragment or PDF becomes a node in a “live” hypertext tree, which I can access from multiple computers at any time.

Work process:

– Contextual AI. I can ask the AI to clarify complex passages right within the document. The explanation stays right where the question was asked. Moreover, it is a separate document, linked to the specific spot in the source. When clicked, you see both the original and the explanation on the screen at the same time.

– Panels instead of windows. If the explanation itself requires clarification, a new panel opens to the right. This allows for an endless chain of queries, never losing the place in the original text. That is, you see several panels at once, and unnecessary ones can be closed.

– PDF support. I can upload a PDF, select an area on the page (e.g., a complex diagram or a list of authors), and the LLM instantly extracts data, supplements, or explains them. The explanation is attached to the spot where it was requested, just like with non-PDFs.

– Nested annotations. My comments are not just static text. They can contain their own PDFs, links, and further sub-tasks for AI, maintaining a depth of nesting that reflects how we actually think.

This is not just a file storage system, but an “engine” for building knowledge.

The tool suits me personally very well, but perhaps it only solves my specific tasks. What do you think, would something like this be useful to others? Would it be useful to you? Should I develop the project into a fully-fledged product and give it to other users for testing?

Interactive Text Enhancer: A Tool for Embedding Clarifications | February 12 2026, 16:11

I whipped up this thing in just an hour. Do you think anyone besides me needs it?

Here’s the idea. Take any text – a Wikipedia article, for example. Highlight any segment, say something unclear. The LLM gives us an explanation, and instantly inserts a box right in the text which you can click to open the explanation. In this explanation, there might be something unclear too. We highlight it with the mouse from this explanation, and a box appears there too. This continues until everything is clear. All the boxes remain in the text, so you can always return to them. So, if the idea was unclear to me, maybe it will be to others, and then a ready link with explanations will come in very handy. The result can be shared with colleagues.

For explanations, not just the fragment is used, but also the context. For example, otherwise, the highlighted word Terrier would yield text about a dog breed, not about the search system.

Exploring Algorithmic Stylization in Plotter Art: A CMYK Fractal Journey | February 01 2026, 04:18

Now that I have a plotter, I am fully experimenting with ways of algorithmic image stylization. To achieve what is attached, a Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm was used. Essentially, it converts an image into stochastic rasterization – that is, where it’s darker, there are more dots, and then connects the dots with lines so that all points are connected in a single network, the total length of all lines is minimal, and there are no closed loops (meaning it’s precisely a “tree” with branches, not a “web”).

And this is what I do with each of the CMYK channels, then combine the result into a color picture. On this picture, there seem to be no other colors except for these four CMYK ones, but in reality, there is a bit because some smoothing has crept in.

Printing such on a plotter, of course, is difficult, I will be waiting forever, but I am getting the hang of it, I have already printed the first color picture (it turned out so-so. Well, the first pancake is always lumpy. Comments below)

A Decade at EPAM: Thriving Through Change and Challenge | January 05 2026, 13:43

10 years at EPAM.

I would have never thought that I would enjoy working in the same place for an entire decade. What’s the secret? At EPAM, I am always evolving: projects change one after another, never letting me get bored.

I am currently on a project at a giant company: over 100 thousand employees and revenue of 30 billion dollars. Before this, it was the automotive industry — a behemoth with a staff of 175 thousand and a turnover of 150 billion. Somewhere around, there was a contract with a company of 80 thousand employees and 35 billion in revenue. True scale and genuinely serious challenges. And earlier, there were cosmetics brands, biotech, and the oil sector. In total, more than 20 projects of various calibers. Despite having over 100% workload every single day. And it seems that this year, I had more vacation than usual, yet still less than I could have taken. I traveled to Costa Rica, Mexico, Seattle, Antalya.

The point is, at each new place you learn something, sometimes from scratch. And that’s freaking awesome. It gives much more energy than if I had been “rooted” in any of these corporations for all 10 years. Perhaps, from a purely financial standpoint, people who stayed in one place at these companies earned more than me, but money isn’t the priority if it means sacrificing interest and enthusiasm. Living life at a job from which you are utterly exhausted is a questionable pleasure.

Last year at EPAM was maximally intense, and I sincerely hope that 2026 will not slow down.

How Gemini Transformed Low-Resolution Previews into High-Quality PDFs | January 03 2026, 14:18

How unexpectedly useful Gemini turned out to be in a simple task – to create a high-quality PDF from a low-resolution preview. Nano Banana Pro was used, meaning, the output was raster, not vector. Look at the difference. Very often it is impossible to even make out the text, so from time out it turned into time dute;-). But overall, not bad.

Visualizing Volleyball Plays: A Glimpse into My App’s Functionality | January 01 2026, 21:37

Here is actually a quick screen capture of how my app for creating and visualizing volleyball schemes works.

Implementation details here: https://www.facebook.com/raufaliev/posts/pfbid0njrqH8oLcWGFsZcgE5o2pj3NcDNaYSQeCMY6twXNbZn6dc38m9kjhsBqA4YsMozcl