Art, letters, music, software & tennis.

I’m Yask, a software engineer in New York. This is my salon: what I make and what I love, each hung beside an old painting it rhymes with.

Hubert Robert’s painting of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre: a long vaulted hall lit by skylights, hung with paintings, with visitors strolling and artists copying at easels. — Hubert Robert, *Project for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre*, 1796. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

I care about art, literature and music; about learning for its own sake; and about software that makes a life a little more harmonious. I love building things, and I love shipping them even more. Off the screen: tennis, training, and a Fujifilm camera.

I. The Studio

Things I’ve built and shipped, mostly in the evenings.

Kangra miniature: Krishna, blue-skinned, plays his flute in a flowering grove while milkmaids lie entranced on green hills, within a pink painted border. — Kangra, India, *Krishna Fluting to the Milkmaids*, c. 1780. Opaque watercolour on paper. Cantor Arts Center, Stanford.

Talking Krishna

In the old paintings, everyone stops to listen to Krishna’s flute. In the app, he listens back.

Hold the button and ask a question. A young Krishna answers with a verse from the Gita, in Hindi or English.

Made with: Swift, Gemini
For: iPhone
Year: 2024

App Store

Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day: a couple under one umbrella walk toward us across wet cobblestones at a Paris crossroads, other walkers and a green lamppost behind. — Gustave Caillebotte, *Paris Street; Rainy Day*, 1877. The Art Institute of Chicago.

Magic Maps

Caillebotte painted the walk. Magic Maps plans it.

Describe the walk you’re in the mood for, and it plans a route through real places nearby.

Made with: SwiftUI, MapKit, GPT-4.1
For: iPhone
Year: 2026

magicmaps.ai

Astor

One reader, one book, one globe, and the whole afternoon to understand something.

Illustrated readings on any subject, written at your level, with a tutor alongside.

Made of: Prose and diagrams
For: The web
Year: 2026

astor.press

Vermeer’s The Astronomer: a scholar in a blue robe reaches toward a celestial globe on a carpeted table, a book open before him, by a leaded window. — Johannes Vermeer, *The Astronomer*, 1668. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Smaller pieces, hung salon-style.

Watteau’s Mezzetin: a costumed performer in a pink-striped suit sings to his guitar on a garden bench. — Antoine Watteau, *Mezzetin*, c. 1718–20. The Met.

AI DJ

A performer reading the room.

Plays real records and performs real DJ moves, each chosen live. Python and a fast model.

yask.dev/dj

Leonardo’s pen-and-ink studies of water spiralling past obstacles and falling into a pool, with notes in his mirror script. — Leonardo da Vinci, *Studies of water*, c. 1508–09. Royal Collection.

Pulse

Leonardo watched water to learn how it moves.

A quiet system monitor that watches your Apple silicon Mac from the menu bar.

yask.dev/pulse

Vermeer’s The Lacemaker: a young woman in yellow bends close over her bobbins, threads of red and white spilling from a cushion. — Johannes Vermeer, *The Lacemaker*, c. 1669–70. Musée du Louvre.

Dojo

Concentration, at the scale of a thread.

A calm code editor built on Neovim, dressed for the Mac, with familiar shortcuts.

yask.dev/dojo

Hiroshige’s Plum Park in Kameido: a dark plum branch crosses the foreground, white blossoms against a red-to-white sky, the orchard behind. — Utagawa Hiroshige, *Plum Park in Kameido*, 1857. Rijksmuseum.

Nine

Vertical, a century and a half early.

Records your Mac as vertical video for the iPhone.

yask.dev/nine

II. The Library

Reading, writing, learning.

Fragonard’s Young Girl Reading: a girl in a lemon-yellow dress, a lilac ribbon in her hair, reads a small book against a rose cushion, painted in quick, loose strokes. — Jean-Honoré Fragonard, *Young Girl Reading*, c. 1769. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Fragonard’s reader has forgotten we are here. That is the whole point of a good book.

I care about literature as much as software. I read widely, I like the depth of academic work, and I write: poems mostly, and essays that begin as poems. A few will hang here soon.

When I wanted a better way to learn anything, I built Astor.

“A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.”
John Keats, Endymion, 1818

III. The Court

Tennis, and the training behind it.

Leon Battista Alberti wrote the first treatise on painting, designed churches, and was said to leap over a standing man with his feet together. The Renaissance never split the mind from the body.

Neither do I. I love playing tennis, and I train for it.

Lavery’s The Tennis Party: on a sunlit lawn, a woman in a pale dress lunges for a high ball while friends watch from chairs beside the net. — John Lavery, *The Tennis Party*, 1885. Aberdeen Art Gallery.

IV. The Darkroom

Colour, light, and Fujifilm.

Fuji Studio

Fujifilm’s film simulations are colour palettes with a memory of real film. I love them enough to have built an app for them.

Film recipes, settings and every photograph on a Fujifilm X100V, handled from your Mac over one USB-C cable.

Works with: Fujifilm X100V
For: Mac
Year: 2026

fujistudio.app

Sorolla’s Strolling along the Seashore: two women in white summer dresses and veils walk along a bright beach, wind lifting the fabric against a blue sea. — Joaquín Sorolla, *Strolling along the Seashore*, 1909. Museo Sorolla, Madrid. Film looks approximated in the browser.

Sorolla worked in a photographer’s studio as a young man, and married the photographer’s daughter. You can tell.

V. By day

Data platforms, and the work before them.

In 1832 a painter named Samuel Morse left the Louvre with this canvas unfinished, sailed home to New York, and somewhere at sea began sketching the telegraph.

Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre: a red-walled salon hung floor to ceiling with miniature copies of masterpieces, the Mona Lisa among them, with visitors copying at easels and Morse instructing his daughter. — Samuel F. B. Morse, *Gallery of the Louvre*, 1831–33. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago.

I like people who are both. By day I lead the team behind WMG Pulse at Warner Music Group, which shows artists their royalties in real time. Before that I built infrastructure for the audiobooks launch at Spotify, and worked on the platform Shopify’s app developers build on.

Before all that, small open-source tools in Python. One, InstantMusic, reached the top of Hacker News in 2015.

Provenance

2024–Warner Music GroupStaff Engineer, Tech LeadNew York
2022–24SpotifySenior EngineerNew York
2017–22ShopifySoftware Engineer to SeniorToronto
2015Google Summer of CodePython Software FoundationDelhi

Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter: a young woman in a blue jacket stands in soft light reading a letter, a map on the wall behind her. — Johannes Vermeer, *Woman in Blue Reading a Letter*, c. 1663. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Correspondence

Vermeer never lets us read the letter. Send me one anyway.

yask123@gmail.com

It’s — in New York.

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