Somewhere on this site there’s a line that says it’s set in mono and ink, and tea. The first two are about the typography. The third is about me. I drink an absurd amount of tea and almost no coffee, and at some point that stopped being a small detail and became the honest answer to “how do you actually work?”
So this is the one post here that isn’t about software.
Where I’m from, tea isn’t really a drink
In Azerbaijan, çay — tea — isn’t something you reach for when you’re tired. It’s the first thing that happens when you walk into a home. Before the real conversation, before business, before anyone asks why you’ve come, there’s tea. Turning it down feels almost rude; offering it isn’t really a decision, it’s reflex. You can tell how welcome you are by how fast the glass appears in front of you.
And it’s a particular glass — the armudu, pear-shaped, pinched at the waist. The shape isn’t decoration: the narrow middle keeps the tea hot down in the bulb while the rim stays cool enough to hold. You drink it black, usually with a slice of lemon. You don’t stir sugar into it — you hold a cube of qənd between your teeth and let the tea pass through it, or you keep a spoon of mürəbbə, fruit preserves, on the side and alternate. There’s often a samovar, and the glass is never really empty for long; someone refills it before you’ve decided whether you wanted more. Tea isn’t a serving. It’s a duration.
Tea is patient. Coffee isn’t.
I think that’s the part that actually shaped me.
Coffee is a spike. It’s a jolt, a hit, do-it-now energy, and the whole culture around it matches — quick, standing up, on the way to somewhere else. I like coffee fine. But it’s the drink of attacking a problem.
Tea is a line, not a spike. Warm, steady, endlessly refillable, made for sitting with something rather than charging at it. And almost all the work I’m proud of has tea’s rhythm and not coffee’s: the careful read instead of the fast guess, the boring correct fix over the clever risky one, the willingness to sit with a bug long enough to actually understand it. A glass of tea is quiet permission to not rush. Most of my better decisions were made slowly, over something warm.
The glass next to the keyboard
So there’s always one there. A glass, or honestly the whole pot, parked next to the keyboard. Getting up to refill it is the punctuation of my day — the natural full stop between one task and the next. Tea going cold is the tell that I’ve fallen deep into something and forgotten the world; reheating a forgotten glass is its own small ritual.
And here’s the thing every developer secretly knows: the hard problems don’t get solved in front of the screen. They get solved on the walk to the kettle. Somewhere between pouring one glass and the next, the answer I’d been hammering at for an hour just arrives, unbidden, because I finally stopped hammering. The tea didn’t solve it. But the pause the tea gave me did.
Why it’s all over this site
When I built this corner of the web, I had to decide what “personal” even meant. It would have been easy to make it nothing but the work — the plugins, the servers, the writing about code. But a personal site that’s only your résumé isn’t personal; it’s a brochure. So I let the small true things in. That’s why tea is in the footer, in the little terminal, in the line where I say it’s on me if you’re ever nearby.
That last part isn’t a figure of speech. If you ever turn up in Azerbaijan, there will be tea — poured before you’ve sat down, refilled before you’ve asked, in a pear-shaped glass, probably with something sweet on the side. It would be rude not to.
The offer stands. çay məndən. 🍵