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Nikita Prokopov — Software developer and creator of Fira Code

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Essays on typography, performance, and critical takes on software design.

Sharp, opinionated essays on software quality from someone who clearly can't stand when things are broken. Nikita writes about typography, UI design, and performance with the exacting eye of a craftsman — his posts on font rendering and interface consistency have become widely shared references. When he finds something wrong with how software works, he'll write 5,000 words explaining exactly why.

Written by Nikita Prokopov since 2014.

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Design Programming

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Podcast: На Маке нет никаких шкафов @ Думаем дальше

January 15, 2026

С Ильей Бирманом провожаем Алана Дая, вспоминая, в чём состоят достижения Мака, Джобса и ХИГа (но и Винду добрым словом тоже вспоминаем).

It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons

January 5, 2026

Translations: Chinese 1 Chinese 2 Russian I was reading Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines from 1992 and found this nice illustration: accompanied by explanation: Fast forward to 2025. Apple releases macOS Tahoe. Main attraction? Adding unpleasant, distracting, illegible, messy, cluttered, confusing, frustrating icons (their words, not mine!) to every menu item: Sequoia → Tahoe It’s bad. But why exactly is it bad? Let’s delve into it! Disclaimer: screenshots are a mix from macOS 26.1 and...

Statistics made simple

December 15, 2025

I have a weird relationship with statistics: on one hand, I try not to look at it too often. Maybe once or twice a year. It’s because analytics is not actionable: what difference does it make if a thousand people saw my article or ten thousand? I mean, sure, you might try to guess people’s tastes and only write about what’s popular, but that will destroy your soul pretty quickly. On the other hand, I feel nervous when something is not accounted for, recorded, or saved for future reference. I mig...

How to get hired in 2025

November 26, 2025

It’s 2025 and you are applying for a software engineer position. They give you a test assignment. You complete it yourself, send it over, and get rejected. Why? Because it looked like AI. Unfortunately, it’s 2025, AI is spreading like glitter in a kindergarten, and it’s really easy to mistake hard human labor for soulless, uninspired machine slop. Following are the main red flags in test assignments that should be avoided: The assignment was read and understood in full. All parts are implem...