I am Victor Shepelev aka zverok. Since March 2023, I am part of Armed Forces of Ukraine amidst Russian invasion.
Besides that, I am a software architect at Hubstaff, committer of the Ruby programming language, author of several open-source projects, and writer.
In tech, my main areas of interest are open data and writing lucid code. I approach the code—and the world in general—as a text that we should learn to read and write better. More about me →
Follow me on Twitter and Substack.
→ Support on “Buy me a coffee” (Till the war end, all donations go to Ukrainian organizations supporting the military, or for my own equipment when necessary.)
Writing
When my other duties allow, I am writing a blog/substack, mostly dedicated to the programming languages’ evolution, writing and reading code; mostly (but not exclusively) based on my Ruby experience.
Before the full-scale Russian invasion, I was working on an ambitionus Ruby book, titled “41 Ruby Intuitions”. This project is postponed till after the war, but some smaller book is in the works now. Stay tuned.
Recent posts
- Seven things I know after 25 years of development ()
- The short outburst of activity during Ruby Changelog preparation—2025 edition ()
- Elixir-like pipes in Ruby (oh no not again) ()
Featured older posts
- That useless Ruby syntax sugar that emerged in new versions (an intro + ToC of a long series on various new Ruby syntax elements, their justification, and consequences)
- A series on writing Ruby Changelog and observing the evolution of the language:
- Grok {Shan, Shui}*: Advent of understanding the generative art
- Game of Life in one Ruby statement… inspired by APL
- On sustainable testing
All posts →
Projects
Current
Other notable
- Spylls – Pure Python spell-checker, “explanatory” full port of Hunspell;
- WikipediaQL: an experimental query language for expressive parsing of Wikipedia and other wikis;
- Rails libraries:
- the_schema_is – Rails DSL for model annotation with DB schema, done right;
- Ruby libraries
- saharspec – a set of RSpec addons for DRY-er specs;
- time_calc – Simple time arithmetic in a modern, readable, idiomatic, no-“magic” Ruby;
- whatthegem – information about any Ruby gem in your terminal: general information, usage examples, popularity stats, changes and more;
All →
Talks
- The struggle for better documentation (for Ruby itself) at NoRuKo’20 (slides)
- Language as a tool of thought at RubyConf Nashville’19 (slides)
- Towards the post-framework future at WrocLove.rb 2019 (slides)
- When the whole world is your database at RubyConf India 2018 (slides)