Becoming a Tech Lead Without Turning Into a Meeting Manager

Becoming a Tech Lead Without Turning Into a Meeting Manager

The Tech Lead’s Paradox: How to Stay Technical While Leading You got the promotion. Congratulations! You’re now a tech lead. Your title reads better on LinkedIn, your salary bumped up, and suddenly everyone’s looking at you for “technical direction.” Then—about three weeks in—you realize you’re drowning in meetings. Stand-ups, syncs, architecture reviews, stakeholder updates, planning sessions, and something called “alignment meetings” that nobody can quite define. Between 9 AM and noon, you’ve attended four video calls and written zero lines of code....

January 25, 2026 · 18 min · 3799 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Why Most Threat Models Are Fan Fiction for Security Teams

Why Most Threat Models Are Fan Fiction for Security Teams

The Problem Nobody Wants to Admit Your threat model sits in a Confluence page, beautifully diagrammed, meticulously documented. It’s a masterpiece of security theater. Your developers glance at it during onboarding, security checks it off a compliance box, and then everyone pretends it actually represents reality. Sound familiar? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most threat models are elaborate fiction—carefully crafted stories about how systems should be attacked, divorced from how they actually evolve in production....

January 25, 2026 · 12 min · 2516 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Disaster Recovery for Solo Developers: What to Do When Everything Breaks

Disaster Recovery for Solo Developers: What to Do When Everything Breaks

When you’re a solo developer, your infrastructure isn’t just your business—it is your business. There’s no ops team to call at 3 AM, no heroic incident response meeting where someone else takes charge. It’s just you, your cold coffee, and the sinking realization that your production database just became nothing more than a digital ghost story. I’ve been there. And I’m guessing you have too, or you’re smart enough to know it’s coming....

January 24, 2026 · 11 min · 2254 words · Maxim Zhirnov
The Case for Bash Scripts Over CI/CD Pipelines in Some Projects

The Case for Bash Scripts Over CI/CD Pipelines in Some Projects

Look, I’m going to say something that might get me banned from the DevOps dinner parties: not every automation task deserves a fancy CI/CD pipeline. I know, I know—it sounds like heresy in 2026. We’ve been conditioned to believe that bigger, more complex, more enterprisey is always better. But what if I told you that sometimes a well-crafted Bash script, sitting quietly in your repository, might be exactly what your team needs?...

January 24, 2026 · 12 min · 2480 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Designing Libraries That Are a Joy to Use: A Practical Guide to Modern UX in Library Spaces

Designing Libraries That Are a Joy to Use: A Practical Guide to Modern UX in Library Spaces

If your library’s website feels like navigating a labyrinth designed by someone who’s never actually tried to find a book, or your physical space makes patrons look like they’re searching for buried treasure without a map, you’re not alone. The good news? Designing libraries that people genuinely enjoy using isn’t some mystical art reserved for tech giants with bottomless budgets. It’s about understanding that libraries aren’t just repositories of books—they’re experiences....

January 23, 2026 · 14 min · 2851 words · Maxim Zhirnov