Strong Engineers Don’t Know Everything.They See What Matters.
Become the engineer AI can’t replace – the one people trust to make the call.
Latest writing
- 01 Learning from a True Mentor Is the Dirtiest Hack How I stopped bouncing between random courses, learned to think in the right direction, and accelerated my progress in engineering many times over.
- 02 You and Your AI Agents Are the Harness That Matters Most Why instructions and an agent harness cannot replace human attention.
- 03 5 Things I Wish I Had Realized Earlier: From "the IT Guy" to an Engineer Five engineering lessons I paid for with time, rework, and stress.
- 04 Quint Code 5.0 — decisions as living project infrastructure. Why I rewrote the interface from scratch, why engineering decisions matter more than code, and what comes next.
- 05 Don't Fool Yourself: Context Graphs Context graphs can improve institutional memory, but without identities, versioning, access controls, and auditability they quickly become a pretty data dump.
- 06 Quint Code — Systems Thinking for Programmers A thinking tool worth your attention
- 07 And again... A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors! Actually, does it make any sense?
- 08 Exception Generation is Pure Evil This is Not a Joke
- 09 On LLM Spirits and 'Completely New Skills' Reflections on Karpathy's software 3.0, the nature of skills in the AI era, and what it means to be an engineer when LLMs become human spirits
- 10 Why Large Context in LLMs Doesnt Save You From Hallucinations A look at the main technical problems, plus a couple of small tips on how to work with conversation history and what to measure
- 11 Why Augmented Intelligence? Explaining my interpretation of the AI abbreviation, why it is important for me to primarily talk about Augmented, not Artificial Intelligence
- 12 Fundamentals of Modeling in Ontological Work Trying to understand once more what a model is, and what an ontology is
- 13 Productivity through primary metrics: how to finally understand where your time goes A deep dive into how to break free from the dopamine matrix and so-called procrastination
- 14 AI Works While I'm in the Shower A short note about the present and future.
- 15 Attention, We Have a Gap! Continuing the discussion about the importance of recognizing the gap between reality and subjective perceptions
- 16 Distinguishing Models and the Physical World Have you ever wondered what distinguishes a novice from a master?
- 17 Fundamental Mastery Have you ever wondered what distinguishes a novice from a master?
- 18 Engineering Habits: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly Truth It is all in your head.
- 19 The global state is not a Monster Every public voice of IT keeps saying that the global stat is bad thing. It is far from being true.
- 20 Embedding Design Into Code Project abstractions can be implemented in code, but not fully expressed only by it.
- 21 Pain and Pleasure of Debugging Don't play around with the debugger
- 22 All-consuming pitfall Only a Sith deals in absolutes
- 23 Being Precious Such a funny delusion.
- 24 The Wisdom of Avoiding Conditional Statements Get rid of this IF/ELSE trees already!
- 25 Information Redundancy: Not Bad, Quite the Opposite More data representations for better.
- 26 What the heck is homomorphism? Be careful, there’s no way back
- 27 What is Abstraction? Such a delusional topic.
- 28 Concentration No description for this, read the post!
- 29 I have tried to love Python And I failed.
- 30 Changing the Blog's Flight Direction Fight even if tired.
- 31 Type-Oriented Programming Short note on very interesting thing.
- 32 HighLoad Saga. Part Three: Transaction Processing and Analytics What about storing it by... columns?
- 33 HighLoad Saga. Part Two, Chapter 2: Data Storage and Processing Subsystems Key aspects of data storage subsystems
- 34 The Zen of Dependencies I don't mean to harm anyone here.
- 35 HighLoad Saga. Part Two, Chapter 1: Storing the Data No description for this, read the post!
- 36 Hack in Declarative Model - Part 3 Exploring the Rabbit Hole of Recursiveness
- 37 HighLoad Saga. Part One: The Fundamentals The first of the HighLoad Saga series.
- 38 The Essence of Error Theory About the main perspectives and approaches in defensive programming
- 39 Pitfalls in software design reasoning Few conrintuitive things.
- 40 You do not need TDD. Only if... A bit "higher" way of looking at Test-Driven Development.
- 41 Currying Quick dive into function programming trick.
- 42 Serious talks about API Versioning Closer look on the theory of REST API versioning.
- 43 Hack in Declarative Model - Part 2 Diving deeper, meet recursion.
- 44 Designing Effective REST APIs: A Comprehensive overview Some info about REST Apis and their development process.
- 45 The Value of API Gateway: When Does It Shine? When to utilize an API Gateway, understand the features and values it provides, and determine situations where it may not be necessary.
- 46 General Techniques for Documenting Systems A look at the practices we have in software engineering that help express and understand the system arch.
- 47 Your own static site, today and for free! Create your static site, easy and free for one evening!
- 48 So what is Design Patterns? Let's talk about design patterns and the reasons for their existence.
- 49 Hack in Declarative Model - Part 1 The first look at declarative programming paradigm.
- 50 Python's Concurrency Do it FASTER!
- 51 Immutability is The Key Few words about Immutability
- 52 Debugging Python Code The orthodox way to do it.
- 53 Bullshit Of Self-Documenting Code They are smart, but even smart people still people...
- 54 Levels Of Reasoning About Software Tough staff, or – how to think about software systems.
- 55 Hack in Fundamentals Scientific look at programming. Concurrency, atomicity and something else.
- 56 Algorithms Complexity How to properly think about a program, what is time complexity, and what is "Big O" notation? Let's delve into it.
Hello there, I'm Ivan.
I'm a systems engineer and CTO. Co-founder of Fusioncat, author of Haft, and builder of systems for private-equity companies.
My work spans code, specifications, architecture, infrastructure, teams, and business processes.
I write about the decisions, methods, and mistakes behind that work.