Welcome!

My name is Sándor Rátkai (pronounced: ʃaːndor raːtkɒi), but I also go by Alex, the English translation, which is easier for English speakers to remember.

I'm a C++ programmer from Hungary with a background in PHP backend development.

My tools of the trade

Desktop application development
  • C++
  • CMake build system
  • Fmt formatting library
  • Boost library
  • GoogleTest framework
  • Compiler Explorer (by Matt Godbolt)
Web development
  • PHP 8
  • Laravel
  • Symfony components
  • PHPUnit testing library
  • PHPStan, PHP Code Sniffer
  • VueJS framework
  • Bootstrap CSS framework
Other technologies
  • Linux (exclusively)
  • Bash scripting enthusiast
  • Docker containers
  • Git version control
  • Relational databases
    • MariaDB
    • PostgreSQL
    • Sqlite

Products I like

Sublime Text is a lightweight editor I reach for constantly, great for quick edits and small projects.

Sublime Merge is the graphical Git client I use on almost every project, especially at work. It gives me a clearer view of the history, and committing just part of a file is a breeze.

Their licensing is refreshingly generous too: an active license gets you three years of updates, and once it lapses you keep the last version indefinitely (as long as you don't update it). It also covers every machine you own, even at the same time.

Their tools ask more of you in cost, disk space, and memory, but they work right out of the box.

The code intelligence keeps autocomplete sharp and accurate at every project size I've thrown at it, whether it's C, C++, PHP, or JavaScript.

Database integrations even bring accurate autocompletion to raw SQL, if the project demands it.

Debugging, running tests, and visualizing coverage are all just as easy.

I'm fascinated by Pine64's community-driven hardware. I own several of their devices and have landed a handful of pull requests upstream, listed on my Open Source Contributions page.

For Phosh, the PinePhone's desktop environment, I fixed app sorting for names with non-English characters.

For the PineTime, I added step-count history, so yesterday's total survives the automatic midnight reset.

For the PineNote, rather than a patch, I built PaperSudoku, a stylus-driven Sudoku app written with the device as its explicit target hardware.

I haven't sent patches for the PineTab or RockPro64 SBC yet, but I enjoy tinkering with them too.