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
Scrum Is Just Waterfall with Extra Meetings: A Harsh Reality Check

Scrum Is Just Waterfall with Extra Meetings: A Harsh Reality Check

Look, I’m going to say what everyone’s thinking in that 9 AM standup but too polite to voice: Scrum implementations often become bureaucratic nightmares that are functionally indistinguishable from Waterfall, just with mandatory audience participation and more Jira notifications. I know. Controversial. But hear me out before you close this tab in frustrated silence. The Uncomfortable Truth Behind the Agile Revolution Here’s the thing about Scrum: it was born from a genuine desire to escape the rigid, sequential hell of Waterfall methodology....

January 15, 2026 · 9 min · 1769 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Why Your Technical Content Falls Flat (And How to Fix It)

Why Your Technical Content Falls Flat (And How to Fix It)

The Silent Killer of Technical Content You know that moment when you stumble upon a documentation page, start reading, and by paragraph three your eyes glaze over? You’re not alone. Somewhere in a Slack channel right now, a developer is typing: “Has anyone read this docs? I’m so lost.” The brutal truth: most technical content fails not because it’s incorrect, but because it forgets that humans—actual, tired, impatient humans—will be reading it....

January 14, 2026 · 11 min · 2297 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Stack Overflow: Your Favorite Code Snippet Library or a Ticking Legal Time Bomb?

Stack Overflow: Your Favorite Code Snippet Library or a Ticking Legal Time Bomb?

We’ve all been there. It’s 2 AM, your deadline is in 6 hours, and you need to parse a JSON response in a way that’s just slightly off from what Google tells you is standard. You open Stack Overflow in a new tab, find exactly what you need, copy-paste it into your codebase, and move on with your life. Fifteen developers in your company do the same thing every week. Then, five years later, during due diligence for a funding round—or worse, a lawsuit threat—someone discovers that the code snippet you borrowed from Stack Overflow is actually derivative work from a GPL-licensed project....

January 14, 2026 · 11 min · 2148 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Background Job Processing: A Developer's Guide to Celery, Sidekiq, Hangfire, and Cloud Queues

Background Job Processing: A Developer's Guide to Celery, Sidekiq, Hangfire, and Cloud Queues

If you’ve ever built a web application that needed to send emails, process images, or generate reports without hanging your users’ browsers, you’ve encountered the background job problem. And if you haven’t yet—congratulations, you’re still in the honeymoon phase of web development. The truth is, background job processing is one of those unsexy infrastructure problems that separates hobby projects from production systems. Get it right, and your users never notice. Get it wrong, and you’re at 3 AM debugging why all your scheduled reports vanished into the void after a deployment....

January 13, 2026 · 12 min · 2424 words · Maxim Zhirnov