About

Uģis Bērziņš, Riga. Software engineer by trade, but that's not the whole picture. This site exists because I got tired of the placeholder GIF that had been sitting on my domain for years.

Background

Grew up on a farm in the Latvian countryside — animals, chores, outdoors. The kind of childhood that quietly teaches you to figure things out on your own. Ended up studying computer science, and the farm kid became an engineer. Nobody planned it, it just happened.

That background still shapes how I approach things. Don't overthink it, don't force it. I think about that when considering what kind of life to build.

How I work

I'd rather build something straightforward than clever. If it needs a wiki page to explain, something went wrong. I tend to spend more time understanding the problem than writing the solution — the code part is usually the quick bit.

I like making things configurable and adaptable. UIs that generate from data instead of being hand-wired, game entities defined as .ron files instead of hardcoded structs. The less you have to touch the code to change behavior, the better.

What I care about

I read a lot of stoic philosophy — the real thing, not the internet caricature. The Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth is probably the best book I own. Ryan Holiday's daily meditations are a morning habit. Dalio's idea about always thinking through second and third-order effects has stuck with me too — most bad decisions come from only looking at what happens next, not what happens after that.

Long-term over short-term. Own what matters. Don't depend on someone else's platform when you can help it — goes for your infrastructure and your career.

Say what you mean. Latvian default setting.

The two sides

This site has a technical side and a creative side — different fonts, different colours, different feel. It's not a persona thing. The person who ships software and runs a homelab is the same one who buys vinyl, shoots film, and reads sci-fi until 2am.