History
A nostalgic exploration of the early 2000s internet era — from dial-up constraints that fueled creativity, to tight-knit forum communities, digital treasure hunts for rare files, and the pay-per-minute access that made every byte count.
Game Development
Neural networks don't understand pixels as discrete units, producing fake pixel art with misaligned grids and oversaturated palettes. This article presents a four-stage algorithm to fix AI-generated pixel art into authentic sprites.
Programming
A practical deep-dive into the eight most common bottlenecks that emerge as APIs scale from hundreds to tens of thousands of requests per second. Covers caching strategies, async queues, observability, security, and more — with real code examples.
![How to Leave IT and Become a Factory Mechanic: My Attempt at Downshifting [Part 2 of 5]](/content/images/size/w600/how-to-leave-it-and-become-a-factory-mechanic-feat.png)
Essays
The second installment of a series about an IT professional's attempt to downshift into blue-collar work, recounting interviews at a retail company and a factory in Belarus — complete with bureaucratic absurdities and a surprising job offer as a factory mechanic.
Management
Fake recruiters on LinkedIn are sending developers malicious "test assignment" repositories containing OtterCookie malware, linked to the North Korean Lazarus Group. This post walks through exactly how the attack works and what to look for in the code.
Management
A sports IT engineer explains the surprisingly complex world behind stadium ticket sales -- from fighting scalpers and phishing sites to managing wave-based releases, turnstile integration, and filling empty seats.
Essays
A teardown and analysis of a cheap car charger from AliExpress that claims 120W PD 3.1 support but actually delivers only 41W — and worse, can instantly destroy connected devices by feeding 12V to a 5V port due to a critical design shortcut.
Essays
An in-depth exploration of one-bit music synthesis on the ZX Spectrum, from basic square wave generation through two-channel polyphony, covering clock cycle calculations, hardware timing quirks, and a complete functional music engine in Z80 assembly.
DIY
The story of saving a 1965 JEOL JEM-6A transmission electron microscope from a scrapyard fate — from discovering it on a classifieds site to transporting the 1.5-ton instrument to the Moscow Polytechnic Museum for preservation.
Essays
A deep dive into Python 3.14's new subinterpreters feature — how they achieve true parallelism with per-interpreter GILs, the massive C-level refactoring required for isolation, and benchmark comparisons against threading, multiprocessing, and free-threading.
Programming
A 20-year veteran C/C++/Python/Go/TypeScript developer shares blunt, practical career advice for new programmers covering money, employer relations, professionalism, side projects, and dealing with critics.
Essays
Yandex's YDB database now supports three types of vector search — exact, approximate without index, and approximate with a scalable vector index — enabling RAG pipelines with billions of vectors across distributed clusters.