Ignoring Industry Trends to Focus on What Works: A Pragmatist's Guide to Sustainable Development

Ignoring Industry Trends to Focus on What Works: A Pragmatist's Guide to Sustainable Development

Every week, without fail, a new framework lands on Hacker News. Every month, a “revolutionary” architecture pattern emerges from a tech conference. Every quarter, some startup with $50M in funding tells us that the way we’ve been building software for the last decade is now categorically wrong. And you know what? They’re probably not wrong. They’re just… incomplete. Here’s the thing nobody wants to hear at tech conferences: the best tool for your problem might be the one you already know how to use....

December 30, 2025 · 16 min · 3228 words · Maxim Zhirnov
JavaScript Bundlers Showdown: Webpack vs Rollup vs Parcel in 2025

JavaScript Bundlers Showdown: Webpack vs Rollup vs Parcel in 2025

If you’ve ever spent an afternoon debugging a mysterious build error only to discover it was a typo in your webpack config, you know the struggle of choosing the right JavaScript bundler is real. The bundler landscape has evolved dramatically, and what was state-of-the-art five years ago might be causing you unnecessary pain today. Let me be frank: there’s no one-size-fits-all answer to “which bundler should I use?” But there absolutely is a right answer for your project, and that’s what we’re here to figure out together....

December 29, 2025 · 10 min · 2081 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Writing Unmaintainable Code as a Strategy for Longevity: A Satirical Guide to Ensuring Permanent Employment

Writing Unmaintainable Code as a Strategy for Longevity: A Satirical Guide to Ensuring Permanent Employment

The Ultimate Job Security Hack Nobody’s Talking About Let’s be honest: in the world of software development, there’s an unspoken strategy that’s been floating around for decades. It’s whispered about in dark corners of tech forums and hinted at in Reddit threads at 3 AM. I’m talking about the art of writing code so deliberately obtuse, so magnificently cryptic, that you become the only person on Earth capable of maintaining it....

December 29, 2025 · 8 min · 1623 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Introduction to Julia for Scientific Computing: Breaking Free from the Two-Language Problem

Introduction to Julia for Scientific Computing: Breaking Free from the Two-Language Problem

If you’ve ever found yourself writing prototypes in Python, only to rewrite everything in C when things got serious, you’ve experienced what the Julia community calls the “two-language problem.” It’s like having to translate your entire thesis from English to Klingon just to make it faster—exhausting and completely unnecessary. Julia was created to solve exactly this problem, and after a decade of development, it’s become a serious force in scientific computing....

December 28, 2025 · 10 min · 1918 words · Maxim Zhirnov
The Hidden Price of Digital Gold: Crypto Mining vs. Traditional Banking—A Numbers Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing

The Hidden Price of Digital Gold: Crypto Mining vs. Traditional Banking—A Numbers Game You Didn't Know You Were Playing

When Satoshi Nakamoto unleashed Bitcoin on the world in 2009, promising us financial freedom from centralized systems, nobody really talked about the fact that this freedom would come at the cost of boiling off an Olympic swimming pool’s worth of water. Correction: 660,000 Olympic swimming pools. But who’s counting, right? Well, researchers are. And the numbers they’ve uncovered are frankly not great. The Uncomfortable Truth About What Decentralization Actually Costs Let’s start with some uncomfortable honesty....

December 28, 2025 · 11 min · 2267 words · Maxim Zhirnov