CHANGES.md

Reactor 04: New Shift

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0200

I could put the electronics back in the cellar, or finally build something. They became a reactor game. Here is my introduction—and the machine’s increasingly puzzled account.

3D-printed portal gun replica

Sun, 28 Apr 2024 17:52:14 +0200

Just finished my first large 3D-printing project. For sure I couldn’t pass by when I saw this amazing portal gun replica from @KirbyDowney_65 on Printables. Here I’d simply like to share some highlights and happy moments I had while doing it.

I started by printing claws and assembling them, as they seemed the most fragile and tricky to assemble, but not so time-consuming when printing.

A few more printing sessions and the remaining black parts were also done:

Databend on AWS/EKS

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 20:51:50 +0100

Over the Christmas silent period, I got my hands on Databend, a data warehousing solution intended to provide an easily scalable, cloud-first, SQL-based data engine. The keywords bingo speaks for itself: it’s written in Rust, friendly with containers/Kubernetes (k8s), elastically scalable, and uses Raft as a consensus algorithm instead of Paxos. In short, it fits all the last five years’ fashion trends in data warehousing. What specifically appealed to me was the ability to use cloud object storage as a storage backend and the isolation between compute and storage. Benchmarks comparing its performance with alternative open-source solutions ClickBench and with cloud alternatives show some interesting results.

Flipper Zero for testing old dusty electronic components

Tue, 18 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Dimmable LED

On high frequencies (> 50 Hz), blinking of a LED becomes undistinguishable from a bright light. By using pulse width, the “brightness”, or it’s perception can be controlled.

Servo

When I first encountered this device servo, I got really confused, as the way it actually moves towards a certain angle is rather cumbersome. For this specific servo (the one I got with my ARDX) the following settings allowed me to control 180 degrees of angle with a step of 9 degrees:

ClojureD 2020

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 21:10:17 +0100

Last saturday I visited my second ClojureD conference in Berlin. It’s an amazing experience meeting people who indirectly influenced my choice of programming language for the past several years (kudos to Alexander and Nikita).

It’s also very pleasant to see how many new things popped up recently in Clojure community.

Here are few highlights I wanted to share:

Babashka by @borkdude (github) Really appreciate how much effort Michael puts into the modern tooling for Clojure!

Querying the databases from REPL

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 13:56:14 +0100

For already quite some time I prefer using Clojure REPL instead of any other tools for querying the databases. At work we have variety of the storage solutions available (Postgres, Aurora, Presto, Hive), and having a single consistent SQL read-only API to them is crucial for productivity. Additional benefit compared to the graphical tools available in the market is the ability of programmatic post-processing of the data using higher-level language. Being very data-oriented, Clojure comes really handy.

Mastering the Tooling around Clojure Data Analysis

Sun, 08 Dec 2019 23:13:46 +0100

My December present to myself was a series of books. One of them was called “Mastering Clojure Data Analysis” by Eric Rochester. It contains a comprehensive set of examples on analysing and visualising data using Clojure. I found it quite interesting mainly because a couple of use-cases covered in the book correllated very well with daily work, so I thought “why not?”. Once I got the book, I realised what’d be the biggest challenge. It’s first written in 2014, and Clojure tooling made an enormous leap in this 5 years. Obstacle? No, challenge! I really wanted to get my hands dirty with some of the examples in there, but I also resisted to use outdated libraries and tools. Also long time ago wanted to start using deps.edn and it was also a good opportunity to to do that. So, long story short, the process began. I read through and roughly got 60% of the idea of the first Chapter (facebook graph analysis). But for sure, real problem solving goes second, but setting up the tooling goes first!

Complicated data-driven applications

Wed, 01 May 2019 12:09:08 +0200

Any design is not perfect.
There needs to be a way to evolve away from any decision.
Components have different lifecycles.
Components have different levels of criticality.
Those components should have a very clean interface between each other and an outstanding level of isolation.
Replaceable > Extendable, because the latter is more opinionated.
The lifetime of the components should be challenged at all times.
Proven technologies should be maintained in a conservative way.
Solutions that open more opportunities should prevail the ones that put more restrictions on the follow-up design.
The criticality of the components should be challenged at all times.
If you’re not the light, it’s hard to reach it’s speed.
Critical thinking > Lists from the internet, because the latter is more opinionated.

Simple data-driven applications in Clojure

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 23:44:14 +0200

Sometimes the information from the data lake/warehouse/pond/whatever simply needs to be exposed via the REST-api. Just getting the tooling right sometimes may be troublesome. Here’s an example on how things can work out in clojure.

Let’s say we have an SQL-based engine like Presto (or Presto) as the main interface to the datalake. Let’s check how we can leverage the power of Clojure to build a simple application for fetching the data from Presto.

About

Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Notes about my life

 1996 2008 2009 2011 2015 2018 2021
-- Saint-Petersburg ------------------------------- Hamburg -------------------------
------- Programming --- Embedded ---- High load ---- Data -----------Tech leadership-
------- C/C++ ---- Python ------------ Erlang ----- Clojure -------------------------
------------- Guitar ------------------------------------------ Parenting -----------
--------------- Climbing --------- Biking ---- Snowboarding -------------------------

3 libraries to work with swagger in Clojure

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

OpenAPI specification drills it’s ways into becoming a standard in many software companies. Let’s say your organization wants to follow the API-first approach. It means that before implementing any cross-team (or 3d party integration) functionality, the parties first agree on the contract, and review it.

I had this approach in mind since I’ve started working in a small payment provider company. Contracts there meant everything, and negotiating the API/authentication process was basically 80% of the job. When I joined Zalando in 2017 I was very happy to see this approach being adopted company-wise.

Working with me

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m an IT consultant. I help systems and teams work together to solve real-world problems. I’ve done this as an engineer, team lead, and CTO, across payment processing, distributed systems, and data platforms.

You can hire me to scope a problem, develop a first solution, or take responsibility for a larger piece of work. I work across product requirements, architecture, implementation, and the way teams organize around a system.

How I approach architecture

Scope the problem. Understand what needs to work, who depends on it, and the constraints: product requirements, existing systems, people, time, and cost.
Draft a first solution or MVP. Build enough to test the assumptions and learn what the problem actually requires.
Decide what needs to last. Identify the long-lived components and the short-lived parts based on the problem and product lifecycle. A component that supports a durable business need and an experiment that may disappear next month should be designed with different lifetimes in mind.

I use clear interfaces and isolation so those parts can evolve or be replaced independently. These boundaries need revisiting as the product changes. They also need owners: the architecture has to work for the people building and running it.