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My name is Maksim Zhirnov. I’m a Growth Marketing Expert & MarTech Engineer. I help tech companies scale through data-driven marketing strategies, powered by my engineering background. I love building marketing systems that drive growth and sharing insights on the intersection of technology and customer acquisition.
Implementing Circuit Breakers, Retries, and Timeouts Without Extra Drama

Implementing Circuit Breakers, Retries, and Timeouts Without Extra Drama

Let me be honest with you: if you’ve ever had a microservice call hanging indefinitely while your application slowly suffocates under thread exhaustion, you know the special kind of panic that follows. Your users are refreshing their browsers. Your alerts are screaming. Your coffee is getting cold. Nobody has time for that drama. The good news? Three resilience patterns can save you from this nightmare: circuit breakers, retries, and timeouts. And unlike the theatrical presentations you’ll see in some tutorials, implementing them is straightforward when you understand what each one actually does....

January 31, 2026 · 9 min · 1827 words · Maxim Zhirnov
The Obsession with Immutability: Are We Just Afraid of Understanding State?

The Obsession with Immutability: Are We Just Afraid of Understanding State?

There’s a peculiar phenomenon sweeping through modern software development like a caffeinated squirrel through a nut factory. Everyone’s talking about immutability. It’s in every JavaScript framework worth its salt, it’s baked into React’s philosophy, it’s the foundation of Redux, and functional programming evangelists won’t shut up about it at conferences. But here’s the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to admit: we’ve collectively turned immutability into a cargo cult, reverently copying the rituals without fully understanding what problem we’re actually solving....

January 31, 2026 · 12 min · 2538 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Practical Caching Patterns: TTL, Cache-Aside, and Write-Through Explained with Real Code

Practical Caching Patterns: TTL, Cache-Aside, and Write-Through Explained with Real Code

If you’ve ever watched your database buckle under load while your cache sits there pristine and underutilized, you know the pain. I’ve been there—watching connection pools max out, query times climb into the seconds, and users watching spinners that never complete. The problem? A caching strategy that looked great on a whiteboard but fell apart in production. Caching isn’t black magic. It’s more like seasoning in a recipe—use it wrong, and you ruin the dish....

January 30, 2026 · 12 min · 2538 words · Maxim Zhirnov
The Internship Economy: Cheap Labor or Real Training?

The Internship Economy: Cheap Labor or Real Training?

The coffee machine at most tech companies sits right next to a cork bulletin board plastered with internship opportunity flyers. A recent graduate scrolls past them, pausing on one posting: “$0/hour, great for resume building!” — a phrase that’s become oddly normalized in an economy where we expect to exchange time and labor for, well, nothing but “exposure.” But here’s the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath the cheerful LinkedIn testimonials and carefully curated internship program websites: the unpaid internship market has quietly become a class-based sorting mechanism, and nobody seems particularly interested in talking about it....

January 30, 2026 · 8 min · 1617 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Vendor Lock-In Is Inevitable: Why Cloud Agnosticism Is a Fantasy

Vendor Lock-In Is Inevitable: Why Cloud Agnosticism Is a Fantasy

Remember that conference talk where someone passionately presented their “cloud-agnostic architecture” that would let them switch providers in minutes? Yeah, I’ve attended a few of those too. And every single time, I watch the audience nod along with the same glazed expression they’d have watching a motivational video about morning jogs. Deep down, we all know the truth: cloud agnosticism isn’t a strategy—it’s a well-intentioned fairy tale we tell ourselves at 2 AM before deployment day....

January 29, 2026 · 11 min · 2242 words · Maxim Zhirnov