Szymon Kaliski

Hi!

I'm fascinated by the Incredible Power of The Right Interface — how representations and interactions can enable new, previously unthinkable, thoughts.

I'm an independent consultant, currently prototyping at Google Research ↗ and Google Creative Lab ↗.

Previously, I:

In my free time, I tinker on personal projects, chase my own questions, and make ambient music from deconstructed acoustic sounds.

Reach out: hi@szymonkaliski.com.

You can also find me on Bluesky ↗, and Mastodon ↗.
This website is a part of the Webring ↗, and has an RSS feed.

Newsletter

Subscribe for quarterly updates:

  1. 2026-09-28Q3 2026 — Play with Putty, and a Quiet Summer
  2. 2026-06-29Q2 2026 — Keeping Archivist Alive, and Other Side-Projects
  3. 2026-03-30Q1 2026 — Home Server on NixOS, Sandboxing in MicroVMs, and Feedback Loops for LLMs
  4. 2026-01-05Q4 2025 — Independent Consulting, and Interfacing with LLMs
  5. 2025-09-29Q3 2025 — Bi-Directional State Synchronization in React, and Graphical Notation in Figma
  6. 2025-06-30Q2 2025 — Prototyping Component Re-Use, and the Simplest Whisper Wrapper
  7. 2025-03-31Q1 2025 — Motorizing External Blinds, Dry Filament, and Yearning for a Software Scope
  8. 2025-01-06Q4 2024 — Back at it, Dampening Copilot, and 3D-Printed Organization
  9. 2024-09-30Q3 2024 — I Became a Father!
  10. 2024-07-01Q2 2024 — Generating this Website Statically, the Hard Way
  11. 2024-04-01Q1 2024 — Migrating to the Basement, Smart Home Setup, and Nix on macOS
  12. 2024-01-01Q4 2023 — Improving Replit's Console and a Database-y Creative Coding Environment
  13. 2023-10-02Q3 2023 — A DIY Pen Plotter and the last Strange Loop
  14. 2023-07-03Q2 2023 — Live-Coding Notebooks, SDF Spreadsheets, and a DIY Pen Plotter
  15. 2023-04-03Q1 2023 — Joining Replit, and musings from the Job Hunt
  16. 2023-01-02Q4 2022 — Publications, Appearances, and looking for the Next Thing
  17. 2022-10-03Q3 2022 — Strange Loop, and research at Glide
  18. 2022-07-04Q2 2022 — Embedding VPLs in Existing Contexts, DIY Document Camera, and a New 3D Printer
  19. 2022-04-04Q1 2022 — Sketching, Modeling and Programming
  20. 2022-01-03Q4 2021 — A Dog, Short Ramble on "Programming", MIDI→CV, and a Rabbit-Holing Web Browser
  21. 2021-09-27Q3 2021 — New Home, New Music and Collection Browsing
  22. 2021-06-28Q2 2021 — Executing Incomplete Programs and Magic Glass
  23. 2021-03-29Q1 2021 — MakeSpace, Clay, Ink&Switch, Haze, Freezeframe, and Personal Experiments
  24. 2020-12-28End of 2020

Projects

Check out 58 of them here — some recent highlights below:

Play with Putty — Experiment in Collaborative Vibe Coding at Google Labs
Archivist — Tools For Archiving and Exploring
Cartographist — Web Browser Optimized for Rabbit-Holing
Crosscut — Drawing Dynamic Models
DIY Pen Plotter — Designed & Built from Scratch
FabFungus — Art Installation Inspired by Questions of Digital Life and Cellular Growth

Articles

  1. 2025-02-27Workflows at Replit ↗
  2. 2024-10-15200× Faster, Persisted, Multiplayer-Native Shells at Replit ↗
  3. 2024-07-01Building a Static Site Generator
  4. 2024-04-05Advanced Port Configuration at Replit ↗
  5. 2023-12-07New and Improved Console at Replit ↗
  6. 2023-10-02Building a DIY Pen Plotter
  7. 2023-01-05Untangle ↗ — Solving Problems with Fuzzy Constraints
  8. 2022-12-12Reusable Code Components for Glide ↗
  9. 2022-10-30Inkbase ↗ — Programmable Ink
  10. 2022-03-29Crosscut ↗ — Drawing Dynamic Models
  11. 2020-04-19Memex Dreams — Personal Knowledge Management
  12. 2019-03-31End-User Programming ↗
  13. 2019-03-01Building Dacein — Experimental Creative Coding IDE
  14. 2018-11-27Laboratory Residency — Building Creative Coding Tools
  15. 2018-01-28DIY Monome
  16. 2017-12-04FLSUN i3 3D Printer
  17. 2017-11-10Learning Haskell part 2 — Exploring Tidal and Diagrams
  18. 2017-10-02Learning Haskell
  19. 2017-09-08Building DAS-UI — Keyboard-Based Visual Programming Language
  20. 2017-08-20Teaching Creative Coding in Taipei
  21. 2017-07-07Building Neutron — Self-Contained Node & NPM Sketchbook
  22. 2017-05-31Exploring ReasonML
  23. 2017-04-30Timav — Personal Time Tracking System
  24. 2017-03-31Building Parametrium — Interactive Parameter Space Explorer for P5.js
  25. 2017-02-28Building Wallgen — Evolving Abstract Wallpapers with GLSL
  26. 2017-01-31Building SDF-UI — Node-Based UI for Generating SDF Shaders
  27. 2016-12-29Teaching Creative Coding in Shanghai

Stats

I've been tracking how I spend my time for the last 12 years, using self-made tools which evolve with what I do. The system contains 44719 entries, and the charts below were updated on 2026-10-04.

Below you can see how I divided my time between  work and  personal projects every week, for the last two years. The exact values don't matter, I'm just trying to be consistent with projects, and take regular breaks from work:

I also pay attention to two habits:  reading/writing and  exercising.
Here you can see how well I'm doing, on a daily scale: