Who is Nazar Bartosik?
Nuclear Physicist | Rollerblader | Photographer
Hello 👋🏼 I’m Nazar Bartosik – an academic nuclear physicist (PhD), which means I’m also a programmer, a scientific writer, a public speaker, a data scientist and a person with analytical mind. On top of that I have a few non-professional self-taught titles:
photographer: Instagram
rollerblader: NazarOnWheels
videographer: YouTube
father and a curious person in general.
So far my life had unfolded in 4 countries: 🇺🇦 Ukraine (22 years) → 🇩🇪 Germany (3 years) → 🇨🇭Switzerland (2 years) → 🇮🇹 Italy (8+ years). I’ve been to many more, thanks to my academic work, mostly tied to one of the Large Hadron Collider experiments.
I speak 4 languages: Ukrainian, Russian, English, Italian, not counting the ones I can program in.
All this lets me have a broad view on many topics, usually seeing them from more and deeper perspectives than most people would.
🧐 Overthinker with attention to detail
I’ve been attentive to details for a long time but only recently realized that I’m also an overthinker. Surprisingly enough I’ve discovered it thanks to the Instagram recommendation algorithms. Yet contrary to the negative fame of overthinking as a destructive never-ending loop of thoughts, I see it as my superpower. 💪🏼
Combined with systematic analytical thinking from my physics career and attention to details trained by photography, I usually manage to steer those loops into logical chains of thoughts, terminated by definitive conclusions. Furthermore, playing chess during my teenage years trained me to always think several steps ahead no matter what I’m dealing with, which means that I build those chains of thoughts pretty much all the time (as long as I’m awake 💁🏻).
The chains of thoughts that I find worth your attention I share in this blog.
🎯 Laser focus on User Experience
Growing up in post-soviet Ukraine I envied products from the “western" capitalistic world, which always seemed more colourful, more stylish, of higher quality.
I will never forget the feeling of scrolling the click-wheel of my first iPod nano, which I’d bought damaged on eBay to repair on my own. After disassembling it to replace the battery I could see all the complexity inside that powers that beautiful and seamless user experience, completely hidden behind a well-thought design. That started my dedicated interest and appreciation for good design: of user interfaces at first, then industrial design of products and ultimately the user experience as a whole.
When I went abroad for the first time, I couldn’t stop noticing all the details of how things were done differently from what I’ve been used to, from plastic-bottle recycling stations in supermarkets of Hamburg to metro stations showing the time left until the next train. That routine keeps running in my head to this day.
In case you wonder what’s up with the metro-station timers… In Kyiv metro you’re shown the time passed since departure of the previous train, not the time left until the next one arrives. Keeps your memory and math skills in shape, while building emotional resilience to uncertainty 👌🏼
Since I get to live only a single life, I care a lot about getting the best possible user experience in any given situation, as long as it aligns with my values and possibilities. So multiple times a day, every day, I get annoyed by my user experience being worse than expected. Often it is simply caused by the behavior of individual people, which has less to do with physics and more with sociology or philosophy. Yet even more often it happens because someone at some point made a bad design decision, which most certainly can be improved with a bit of effort and thinking.
This is what Nazar Thinks about most often, and I’ll be writing about that too.