Essays
The Belarusian Elf: History of a Game Console with a Spectrum's Heart
The story of the Elf, the only Soviet-era 8-bit game console, built on ZX Spectrum architecture in early 1990s Belarus — and why it couldn't survive the Dendy onslaught.
Essays
Essays
Treasured Encyclopedias: The Warm World of Knowledge from a Soviet Childhood
A nostalgic memoir about growing up surrounded by Soviet encyclopedias, from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia to children's dictionaries — and how perforated index cards and magazine collections formed an analog knowledge base long before the digital age.
Essays
Why Senior Developers Stay Silent About Bad Projects
A senior engineer explains why experienced developers often choose silence over intervention when they spot doomed projects, introducing the concept of influence as a bank account that must be spent strategically.
Essays
Developers' Pain in Today's Reality: How I Found a Solution
An electronics engineer creates the 'Error Board' — a diagnostic PCB with intentional circuit errors — to identify passionate young engineering talent during job interviews, replacing ineffective traditional assessment methods.
Essays
Diving into Pixels: Discovering the ZX Spectrum
A personal memoir of growing up in the late Soviet era and discovering the magic of computers through a ZX Spectrum clone — six games that changed everything.
Essays
Why Windows XP from 2001 Runs Faster Than Windows 11 on the Same Hardware
A comprehensive benchmark comparing six Windows versions on identical Lenovo ThinkPad X220 laptops reveals that 25-year-old Windows XP outperforms Windows 11 on most metrics, exposing the cumulative performance cost of modern OS features, security layers, and telemetry.
Essays
Archival Storage: Where to Best Store Cold Data? A Complete Guide to All Physical Media Types from FDD to LTO and M-Disc
A comprehensive review of every physical storage medium for long-term data archiving, from floppy disks to enterprise LTO tapes and thousand-year M-Discs, with honest assessments of longevity, costs, and practical recommendations.
Essays
The Second Father of MP3
The untold story of James D. Johnston, the Bell Labs engineer who co-invented perceptual audio coding alongside Karlheinz Brandenburg, built a portable music player three years before the iPod, and was largely erased from MP3's history.
Essays
The Soviet "PlayStation": A History of Domestic Game Consoles
The history of Soviet game consoles from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, covering pioneering devices like the Palestra-02, Turnir, Elektronika Eksi Video, and the Videosport series that introduced millions of Soviet children to electronic entertainment.
Essays
"Exceeds Expectations": How to Hack Performance Review and Consistently Get High Ratings
A candid guide on how the performance review process really works in IT companies, and how to strategically position yourself to consistently receive top ratings.
Essays
End of the Silicon Era? China Launches Production of Molybdenum Disulfide Chips
China has launched an engineering demonstration line in Shanghai for processors based on molybdenum disulfide, a two-dimensional material just three atoms thick that could overcome silicon's fundamental scaling limits.
!["Hello! I Am [0.44, -0.91, 0.66...]" — How to Teach a Machine to Understand the Meaning of Words](/content/images/size/w600/5e9193121fa7afe5478fda42f28e5503.jpg)
Essays
"Hello! I Am [0.44, -0.91, 0.66...]" — How to Teach a Machine to Understand the Meaning of Words
An accessible deep dive into word embeddings for NLP, tracing the evolution from simple numbering and one-hot encoding through bag-of-words and n-grams to Word2Vec and Transformer-based embeddings with positional encoding.