Writing Cryptic Comments as a Form of Documentation Strategy

Picture this: you’re diving into a legacy codebase at 2 AM, desperately hunting for a bug, when you stumble upon a comment that reads // Here be dragons followed by 200 lines of the most convoluted logic you’ve ever seen. Your first instinct might be to curse the developer who wrote it, but what if I told you that cryptic comments might actually be a legitimate documentation strategy? Now, before you grab your pitchforks and start citing every clean code principle ever written, hear me out....

July 30, 2025 · 10 min · 1955 words · Maxim Zhirnov

AI Ethics Boards: Magic Safety Nets or Corporate Spectacles?

The tech sector’s new spectator sport isn’t robot fighting – it’s ethics board voyeurism. Every AI-powered company now stages its version of a Greek tragedy where philosopher-kings deliberate whether their latest creation should be fed to the data gods. But beneath the grand performative rituals, does anyone actually steer the ship? Or are we watching the digital equivalent of a stage magician pulling ethical rabbits out of a compliance hat?...

July 30, 2025 · 4 min · 814 words · Maxim Zhirnov

Building Natural Language Wizards: A Deep Dive into spaCy Magic

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is like trying to read backwards through a prism – complex, but when you crack the code, suddenly text becomes malleable magic. With spaCy, we don’t just analyze words; we become text whisperers. Let’s build an NLP system that understands, dissects, and maybe even laughs at your terrible puns. Installation & Initial Setup Before we channel our inner Sherlock Holmes of text analysis, we need the right tools....

July 29, 2025 · 4 min · 713 words · Maxim Zhirnov

Ageism in Tech: The Great Senior Developer Purge Debate

Let’s get one thing straight: ageism in tech isn’t just informational – it’s algorithmic. We’re watching a silent revolution where “Teams just streamlining processes” often masks “Shuffling greener devs to the front of the queue”. But before we burn our keyboard CEOs in effigy, let’s parse the code. The Code 42 Dilemma: Replacing Humans with “Smart” Systems “If you think you’re irreplaceable because of who you are, you’re doomed. If you think you’re irreplaceable because of what you do, you’re also doomed....

July 29, 2025 · 16 min · 3310 words · Maxim Zhirnov

Government-Approved Skeleton Keys: The Dark Side of Universal Backdoors in Software

The Secret Passage You Didn’t Code (But They Did) Let’s talk about digital skeleton keys - the shortcuts to your software’s treasure chest that nobody wanted to make. Imagine stumbling upon a protruding rock in your garden only to find it hides a door labeled “Government Access Only.” When your code grows up to become production-grade, who else gets keys to your castle walls? What’s a Backdoor? (Definitely Not Your Friend) A universal backdoor creates hidden entry points by design....

July 28, 2025 · 4 min · 644 words · Maxim Zhirnov