The Benefits of Writing Code That Only You Understand

The Benefits of Writing Code That Only You Understand

Ever had that nightmare where someone reads your entire codebase, understands your brilliant algorithms better than you do, and then uses them against you? Welcome to the world of developers who don’t obfuscate their code. It’s like leaving your diary on a public bench with a neon sign saying “READ ME.” Code obfuscation isn’t about being secretive or paranoid (okay, maybe a little paranoid—but justified paranoia). It’s a legitimate security practice that transforms your readable, maintainable code into something that still works perfectly but looks like it was written by an alien in a caffeine-induced fever dream....

January 7, 2026 · 8 min · 1684 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Game Development in Unity with C#: From Zero to Your First Interactive Game

Game Development in Unity with C#: From Zero to Your First Interactive Game

Getting Started: Why Unity and C# Are Your New Best Friends If you’ve ever dreamed of creating your own video game but thought it required some sort of arcane programming sorcery, I’ve got news for you—it doesn’t. Welcome to the world of Unity and C#, where your wildest interactive dreams can become reality without selling your soul to complexity demons. Let me be honest: game development used to be intimidating. But today’s tools have democratized the process beautifully....

January 6, 2026 · 10 min · 2045 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Microservices: The Most Overhyped Architecture of the Decade

Microservices: The Most Overhyped Architecture of the Decade

Over the past decade, microservices have been touted as the silver bullet for all software architecture problems. Tech conferences overflow with talks about breaking down monoliths, distributed systems scale infinitely, and teams finally achieving the promised land of independent deployment cycles. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: we’ve collectively confused “technically possible” with “actually necessary.” The microservices revolution has created a generation of engineers convinced that a monolith is inherently evil and that fragmenting their codebase into dozens of distributed services is the path to enlightenment....

January 6, 2026 · 12 min · 2422 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Building a Distributed Locking System in Go with ZooKeeper: From Theory to Production

Building a Distributed Locking System in Go with ZooKeeper: From Theory to Production

The Lock Dilemma: When sync.Mutex Just Isn’t Enough You know that feeling when you realize your precious in-process mutex won’t cut it anymore? Yeah, we’ve all been there. Your single-threaded assumptions worked fine until your system decided to grow up and become distributed. Suddenly, you’ve got multiple services running on different machines, all trying to access the same resource, and your sync.Mutex is sitting there looking confused—because it only locks things within a single process....

January 5, 2026 · 11 min · 2181 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Building Distributed Systems Architecture: From Single Server Dreams to Multi-Node Reality

Building Distributed Systems Architecture: From Single Server Dreams to Multi-Node Reality

If you’ve ever built an application that worked perfectly on your laptop but somehow crumbles the moment real users show up, congratulations—you’ve just discovered why distributed systems exist. They’re not some fancy theoretical concept dreamed up by computer scientists who had too much coffee. They’re the practical answer to a very real problem: how do you make things work when you can’t fit everything on a single machine? Let me take you on a journey through distributed systems architecture—the good parts, the confusing parts, and the “why would anyone design it that way?...

January 4, 2026 · 9 min · 1883 words · Maxim Zhirnov