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Dmitriy Kovalenko

Dmitriy Kovalenko

Lead Software Engineer at LightSource; creator of FFF (fast file search picker for Neovim) and open-source maintainer of high-performance projects in Rust and C.

Jul 7, 2026

0:43
Where did it all start for you in terms of programming?
0:50
Sure.
0:51
I mean, that's pretty, so like I am from Ukraine originally.
0:56
I did pretty far away to all the way to San Francisco at this point.
1:01
I'm not sure if this is the end destination, but essentially I started as pretty much every single software engineer in Ukraine, going through the university and then working as outsource employee at like, you know, it was like dev shop was pretty popular at some point.
1:20
And Basically, everyone I think in more in Eastern Europe has been doing this experience.
1:28
So for me, programming started like when I was actually in the last two grades of school.

8 MINS LATER

9:55
It's almost as if you want to express your program as a mathematical collection of functions without this... touching the real world resources and stuff and then you go like oh actually from our camel to see or zig to be as performant as possible like this to me this is like two ends of the of the spectrum
speaker_3UNKNOWN
39:44
Yes.
39:44
Uh, can you see my screen now? Uh, it, it might sound like I'm always LARPing on ripgrep, but essentially the problem that, uh, ripgrep doesn't really do much of, uh, internal, mm, na- like, you know, file system optimizations.
40:01
But there are a ton of things that you can do for Windows.
40:05
You can do this for, uh, like there are internal NTFS APIs that you can call to become better than ripgrep.
40:12
There are Linux, there are certain BSD optimizations, and there is macOS optimization that you can do to improve this whole operation.
40:21
The problem that, uh, ripgrep doesn't really benefit this because every time it's, it cannot store and persist this information at all.
40:31
And here is like an example that I just made for, um, a simple cat improves, uh, presentation exponentially.

49 MINS LATER

89:42
... and then we'll see how it looks.
LinkarzuHOST
14:09
what is fff then dimitri so it's a file picker you can also grab files
14:16
right yeah So the idea is very simple that it's the fastest in terms of like raw speed file picker that is like much faster than whatever you will find in new web community.
14:29
Plus it's really, really fast, like, you know, file picker.
14:34
So like, for example, for example, let's just open an example and I'll just show you why it's fast.
14:40
So I'll just have a Chromium code base, right? I'm sure that it's like kind of exaggerated example, but it's fine.
14:49
They did have like 460 files and currently I do have also recording.
14:55
So my kind of, my disc is a little bit on fire probably.

42 MINS LATER

LinkarzuHOST
57:10
And you use Rust as your main language, right?

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