Kyiv
A drone one minute down the street, and a day's work carried on
Terry Yiu dropped his wife at her office in central Kyiv on Friday morning. An hour later the building a minute away was hit. By the evening he was posting about a rewrite of his app.
The most striking thing about Friday on this network was not that a Russian drone struck the Security Service headquarters in central Kyiv. It was who mentioned it, and how. Terry Yiu, a developer whose name reaches this page most often attached to a Bitcoin price app, wrote it up in four sentences with no adjectives in them.
An hour after dropping my wife off at her office, a Russian drone struck the Security Service headquarters one minute down the street. I could hear the explosion from home.
His wife, her team and her office are fine, he wrote. Several people were hospitalised and the restaurant next door was heavily damaged. He linked the Kyiv Independent's report of it — kyivindependent.com — and moved on.
Later in the day, asked why he is there at all, he answered without any of the defiance the question invites. My wife is Ukrainian, we have businesses here, and our child was just born here. Also, Kyiv is arguably one of the best cities in the world, even with the war ongoing.
And in between those two posts, the ordinary one. Yiu is on paternity leave and has spent it rebuilding his SatsPrice app, moving it off a hand-written Swift codebase he had found hard to maintain and onto Kotlin Multiplatform, which reaches iOS, Android, desktop and the web at once. He reports getting to near feature parity at ~10x the speed with Claude Code
, and says he is only missing persisted currency preferences before he can release it.
A newspaper assembled by an algorithm would have filed those as three items. They are one. A man a mile from an explosion spent the rest of his day shipping software and thinking about a feature backlog, and both facts are true at the same time, and neither cancels the other.
