It turns out there are quite a few such places here in Moscow, and the first on my list was Local Time (in the photo above) which is around an hour away from where I live. It’s not very big, but according to the owner, can easily host up to a hundred visitors.

Tea with fresh lemon, and then some good coffee, that’s what got me started working. It wasn’t very crowded since it was a weekday and it was early. A few folks were busy working on the other side of the big room, and a couple folks were playing a board game nearby. I didn’t seem to notice them though, as I was busy doing my work, and quite productive actually!

More people arrived after lunch, it started to get a little noisier. I spent a total of three hours (that’s 180 minutes) at Local Time and had to pay 180 rubles ($6) when I left. I loved the place overall, just wish it was closer to the place where I live, since a one-hour metro drive in the morning is not the best way to start your day.

I’m also thinking about organizing a WordPress Moscow Meetup there in mid-March. They have a big screen, sound, comfy chairs and sofas, and I got a discount price for making it on a weekday. More about the meetup later, in a separate blog post. Back to Local Time.

I’ll be visiting other similar places throughout this month, I’ve got two others on my list: Циферблат (Clockfacer) and Anticafe Babochki. Both are a little more expensive, but look bigger on the photos, worth giving them a try anyway :)

What do you think? Do you have a similar place in your area? If you don’t, would you visit one if you did, and how often? Do you think charging by the minute is fine? I noticed none of them say anything about membership cards, I’d get a monthly pass if it gave me unlimited access for a fixed price, which is also a certain guarantee for them. Share your thoughts in the comments below!

I didn’t take me long to find a good spot where I can sit with my MacBook, so I had a couple hamburgers and of course coke. It did take me a while to get used to all the noise around, but eventually I stopped noticing it, and what’s best — I stopped feeling weird.

The time flew by (and so did the hamburgers) and since I didn’t need any voice or video, I was quite comfortable writing and committing actual code :) There were a few distracting moments though: the wifi spot was made to disconnect every 30 minutes, so I had to reconnect and relaunch proxy and SSH every half an hour; and people came by once in a while, asking if they may sit next to me. The last time that happened I didn’t even look — I just nodded.

The funniest thing, though, is that I met a person who was sort of starting his own business in Moscow, and he wanted to hire me to make him a website for $100. And I didn’t say “no”, I just pointed him to the right direction (a freelancers job board.) I thought of telling him about WordPress, but I had more important things to focus on at that moment :) Maybe next time!

Another funny story is that I asked a friend of mine whether he ever worked from McDonald’s, and that I’m willing to give it a try. He was shocked because he thought that I was applying for a job at McDonald’s. To better understand this, the Russian “from” and “at” in that context, can easily mean different things. Like “working at home” and “working at a cafe.”

To wrap up, it did feel a little weird working from a cafe, but I loved the fact that I didn’t have to stay home. Next time I’ll try to pick a different spot, maybe one that’s not so crowded and with a better Internet connection. So what about you? Have you ever worked from a cafe? What places can you recommend for the best productivity?

So… Starting today, I’ll be working on some really cool stuff with some of the most talented minds on earth. I’ve already met with some of the folks online and the energy is incredible, they got me even more excited, and now I can’t wait for my first meetup and of course WordCamp to meet everybody in real life.

This is a dream come true for me, thank you so much Automattic! Looking forward to “make the web a better place.” :)

You know what the worst thing is during the process of learning the Dvorak keyboard layout? You quit applications when trying to cut (Cmd+X)

— Konstantin Kovshenin (@kovshenin) January 7, 2012

I wrote earlier that I’ve been training myself on the Dvorak keyboard layout lately, so the fun part is that the Dvorak Q is right where the Qwerty X is and I’m a crazy user of shortcut keys, so there you have it! Can’t wait to make the full switch. By the way, I’m using this plugin to embed tweets.

Matt Mullenweg’s On the Dvorak Keyboard Layout (written back in 2003) explains the advantages, why and how he switched to the Dvorak layout. Matt also quoted:

I knew that however long it took me to learn it would be incrementally paid for by the increased productivity and comfort in the future.

Quite inspired by all this, I made a 2012 resolution to learn touch typing on Dvorak at least as fast as I can touch type on Qwerty (around 100 words per minute.) I can also touch type the Cyrillic keyboard layout at around 80 words per minute but that won’t change with Dvorak ;)

For those of you who missed it, I got married last Wednesday :) You’re probably not used to seeing it, but the wedding ring goes on the right hand in Russia.

Kym Huynh talks with Konstantin Kovshenin about his work with robotics and his passion for WordPress, WordPress Plugins, APIs, and the WordPress Community he hopes to ignite in Russia.

We spoke with Kym last year when WordPress 3.0 was sexy with all it’s new features and stuff, so you might feel it a little bit updated. Perhaps I should ask Kym to record a follow-up ;) Anyways, the rest of the interview is all about me, my story, hobbies, what I do and how I write code. Mentioned are Visual Basic, C++ and ASP (who would have thought?). I still have those blog posts on my first .NET MVC project, I would have spoken about it and about Python too. But anyhow, was great being on the show!

So head over here to listen to the episode, then head back and let me know what you think about it. Oh yeah, and don’t forget to retweet this post. Cheers!

Well that’s not the only reason, but I’m now quite comfortable with (mt)’s services, except their tech support, but that’s not what this post is about. I must have flooded my Twitter with messages about Django and Python. Honestly, I fell in love with Python a few months ago (in theory) then started scratching code in the beginning of October, but then again, this is not what the post is about (can somebody tell me why I’m going off-topic today?)

Back to AWS. The news is good, but the fact that they mention “new customers” frightens me:

These free tiers are only available to new AWS customers and are available for 12 months following your AWS sign-up date. When your free usage expires or if your application use exceeds the free usage tiers, you simply pay standard, pay-as-you-go service rates (see each service page for full pricing details).

I’ve been with them for over a year, paying a bunch of money every month, so I’m not a new customer for them anymore, unfortunately. So they’re not really targeting old customers which were unsatisfied with something, but new ones which have never tried EC2 (S3 and all the rest). Again, this is only a trial, unlike Google AppEngine, which happens to love Python code.

So my thinking is – is this all a coincidence, or is it a light for me towards AppEngine, Python and Google? Stay tuned: @kovshenin :)

Let’s start with Python.. After reading a very popular book called Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran (review coming later), I had no choice but to peek at how Python is doing. I didn’t carry out much of the excercizes in the book while reading it, but I did run a few experiments afterwards. Some of the code examples were translated into PHP to immediately implement into my Twibots project, the juice was left for later.

This weekend I decided to gather some data from the Twitter Streaming API for some experimental purposes, and I decided to do this in Python. Of course I hadn’t had much time to read good books (still waiting from Amazon), but the plenty online tutorials, guides and articles out there are quite okay. So with a little trial and error I managed to write a script which gathers a little over 10,000 tweets in 30 minutes and dumps them into a database. That’s 20,000 tweets an hour, ~ half a million tweets a day. What am I going to do with those? I’ll give you an insight on this project a little bit later ;)

Twitter. I finally got #newtwitter. I thought it was a joke. It’s not a secret that I have multiple Twitter accounts, but I use them for development purposes, and guess what, those accounts were switched to the new Twitter three weeks before my account was. So yeah, I’m a little mad at Twitter, but their new look really rocks. They also need some updates to their mobile version.

.NET MVC. Some of you might be wondering (or not) what happened to that .NET MVC project of mine. Well it’s 99% finished, but we’re constantly coming up with changes to the content part, switching images around and other dirty work. Latest comment from the client was – okay so I open up Safari, click View and check the Zoom Text Only option. Then I zoom in and the whole design breaks! You guys promised me nice-looking XHTML in Opera, Safari, Chrome, IE and Firefox, what the heck?

PHP. I wrote an app in PHP that allows me to turn off my PC from my iPhone. I extended it to include volume up/down features a few days later. These are the kind of apps you write when you’re lazy ;)

And finally some goodies from all around the web for web designers and developers:

• A new CSS framework is in town: The Square Grid
• 60 Exclusive Free Icons: “Childish”
• Kontagent Unleashes New Version Of Facebook Analytics Platform
• HTML5 Canvas Element Guide by Louis Lazaris
• Five Useful Design Techniques and Coding Solutions For Web Designers
• Get MySQL Replication up and running in 5 minutes
• The Ultimate Guide to Object Oriented Basics of JavaScript by Joseph McCullough

That’s it for today. Cheers!