Every piece of software here is described as contemplative, which sounds like a mood and is actually a set of constraints. It is worth saying plainly what they are, because they explain the odd decisions — why there are no accounts, why nothing syncs to a server I own, why the apps are named in Russian, and why a worship planner and a noir text adventure belong on the same page.
The work should end
Most software is designed to be returned to. Sessions are lengthened, streaks are counted, notifications recall you. A tool for preparing Sunday worship has the opposite obligation: it should get the minister to a finished bulletin and then leave them alone. Nothing here has engagement metrics, because there is nothing I want to maximise about the time you spend inside it. Мера — measure — is the whole discipline, and it is the name of the one browser extension I have written, which does nothing but hold you to a tab limit you set yourself.
The data is yours, and it is a file
Every app writes plain files to your own disk — TOML, YAML, JSON, Typst source. No account, no cloud, no telemetry, no proprietary container. If I stopped maintaining all of this tomorrow, every document, sermon, budget, and CV entry would still open in a text editor. Where syncing exists, it is to a server you already control: your own git remote, your own WebDAV. This is a theological commitment before it is a technical one. Tools that hold your work hostage are making a claim about who your work belongs to.
Process, not product
I work in the traditions of process and liberation theology, and it shows in the shape of the applications. Iskra plans a sermon from single-line ideas that grow, get grouped into movements, and get reordered — because that is how thinking actually goes, and a tool that demands a finished manuscript at the start is lying about its own subject. Zerkalo keeps versioned history because a document is a sequence of states, not a final artifact. The software assumes revision is the normal condition.
Соборность — unity in freedom
The narrative engine behind the games is called Sobornost, after the Russian idea of a unity that is not achieved by coercion — a community whose togetherness costs no one their particularity. It names what I want from the interactive fiction, where the branching is meant to be genuinely yours rather than a corridor with decorated walls, and it names how the tools relate to each other: Skrizhal feeds Zerkalo, Iskra sits beside Rubric, Kopilka Android answers Kopilka. Separate programs that hold together without being merged into one platform.
Why the Russian names
Зеркало, mirror. Искра, spark. Скрижаль, the tablet of the law. Копилка, the money box. Мера, measure. Each name states the tool's whole intention in one word, and states it in a register that resists being turned into a brand. There is also a plain aesthetic reason: I like them.
The notes themselves
- Зеркало · Zerkalo A Typst workplace built after losing a whole major research paper to a cloud sync corruption.
- Rubric Planning worship from first reading to finished bulletin, for United Church congregations.
- ГОСТ · Gost Turning a manuscript into a compilable academic template so the writing can start immediately.
- Spasibo A contemplative mystery on a winter North Atlantic crossing, and the engine underneath it.
- The Severed Hours Noir interactive fiction inside a firm that promises Continuity, Clarity, and Compliance.