Management
Hard-won lessons from seasoned IT professionals distilled into twelve practical commandments — on time, boundaries, burnout, specialization, and finding places where your talent is valued rather than fought.
Essays
A veteran game developer with 15 years of industry experience explains why studios resist adopting C++20 and beyond, covering compilation overhead, Visual Studio lock-in, custom STL replacements, and the economic realities of game development.
Smart Home
A frustrated owner discovers that essential features of his new Bosch dishwasher require mandatory cloud connectivity through the Home Connect app, sparking a broader discussion about IoT design, planned obsolescence, and the local-first principle.
Essays
A deep technical dive into the sound architecture of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive, covering its dual-chip audio system, FM synthesis, the Z80 co-processor, sound drivers like GEMS and SMPS, and how developers pushed the hardware to its limits.
Smart Home
A blind-from-birth engineer shares his decades-long journey building a full smart home system using Wiren Board controllers and Modbus, proving that visual impairment is no barrier to complex home automation.
Essays
An experienced developer argues that AI-assisted coding produces lower-quality professionals and technical debt, warning that the current wave of AI-generated prototypes will create a golden era for classical programmers who understand fundamentals.
History
A detailed history of Soviet and Russian automatic caller identification (AON) devices — from 17-chip KR580VM80A designs in the late 1980s to Intel 8031-based units with phonebooks, voice announcement, and even a custom microcontroller with a built-in sound chip.
Programming
An astrophysicist builds a symbolic algebra system in Lisp to simplify 100,000-term equations generated by numerical simulation code — and documents every wrong turn along the way.
AI
A detailed technical walkthrough of the winning RAG Challenge solution, covering PDF parsing with Docling, FAISS vector indexing, LLM-based reranking, and carefully crafted prompt engineering that outperformed even larger models.
Hardware
A hands-on investigation of three counterfeit USB flash drives from Russian marketplaces reveals devices claiming 512 GB that actually hold less than 1 GB. Teardowns, capacity tests, and tips for spotting fakes.
Essays
A comprehensive history of Easter eggs in software — from the first hidden message in a 1979 Atari game to Google's playful search tricks, Microsoft's secret mini-games, and the most elaborate puzzle ever hidden in a video game.
DIY
A detailed guide to building a home microclonal plant propagation laboratory from scratch — from laminar flow hoods and autoclaves to successfully cloning strawberries and culturing blue cheese mold.