The Case for Embracing Technical Debt: When It's a Strategic Advantage

The Case for Embracing Technical Debt: When It's a Strategic Advantage

In the startup world, there’s a famous mantra: “Move fast and break things.” But somewhere between the move-fast era and enterprise maturity, we collectively decided that all technical debt was a villain waiting to destroy us. We built entire careers around debt elimination, created JIRA tickets with apocalyptic descriptions, and treated every shortcut like it was code arson. The irony? Some of the most successful companies in the world wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t taken on strategic technical debt at precisely the right moment....

January 17, 2026 · 14 min · 2854 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Preparing Your Project for Sudden Viral Traffic: A Survival Guide

Preparing Your Project for Sudden Viral Traffic: A Survival Guide

You know that feeling when you refresh your analytics and suddenly your servers are screaming louder than a cat at a vet appointment? That’s the moment you realize your carefully crafted side project is about to either become legendary or spectacularly explode in everyone’s faces. I’ve lived through this scenario twice—once successfully, and once… let’s just say I learned what “503 Service Unavailable” really means at scale. If you’re reading this, you’re probably experiencing either pre-viral anxiety or the thrilling aftermath of unexpected internet fame....

January 16, 2026 · 13 min · 2568 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Are We Training Models on Corporate Secrets and Pretending It's Fine?

Are We Training Models on Corporate Secrets and Pretending It's Fine?

The elephant in the room isn’t new—it’s just gotten bigger, smarter, and disturbingly capable of memorizing everything you feed it. Yet somehow, we’ve collectively decided that pasting proprietary business logic into Claude or ChatGPT is totally fine. Spoiler alert: it’s not. The Uncomfortable Truth Nobody Wants to Admit Let me set the stage with what should be obvious but apparently isn’t: when you feed confidential data into an AI model, that data doesn’t just disappear into some secure vault....

January 16, 2026 · 13 min · 2717 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Building Robust Services with Modern .NET and Minimal APIs: Less Boilerplate, More Results

Building Robust Services with Modern .NET and Minimal APIs: Less Boilerplate, More Results

The Controller-Free Revolution (And Why You Might Actually Like It) Remember when building a REST API in .NET meant creating a controller file, adding attributes to every method, and somehow ending up with more ceremony than a royal wedding? Those days are fading faster than your motivation on a Monday morning. Welcome to the world of Minimal APIs—where you can craft production-ready REST services with less code, fewer files, and genuinely less headache....

January 15, 2026 · 13 min · 2616 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Build vs Buy in 2026: The Strategic Framework for What to Own and What to Outsource

Build vs Buy in 2026: The Strategic Framework for What to Own and What to Outsource

If you’re reading this in early 2026, you’ve probably been in at least one meeting where someone threw out the phrase “should we build it or buy it?” and watched the room split into two camps: the build-it-yourselves who see every problem as an opportunity to flex engineering muscles, and the pragmatists who just want something that works by next quarter. I’ve watched this play out enough times to know there’s rarely a clear winner—only better-informed decisions....

January 15, 2026 · 13 min · 2683 words · Maxim Zhirnov