Crafting Your Own Babel Plugins: A Journey into the Heart of JavaScript Transpilation

Crafting Your Own Babel Plugins: A Journey into the Heart of JavaScript Transpilation

Picture this: You’re at a fancy restaurant where the menu is written in tomorrow’s language. You’re hungry now, but the chef only speaks yesterday’s dialect. Enter Babel – the cosmic translator that turns your futuristic JavaScript into something even IE6 would understand (if it weren’t, you know, dead). But what if you want to invent your own culinary syntax? That’s where plugin witchcraft comes in. Grab your spatula, we’re cooking up some AST transformations!...

July 24, 2025 · 4 min · 844 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Functionality at All Costs: When Usability Takes a Backseat

Functionality at All Costs: When Usability Takes a Backseat

There comes a moment in every developer’s journey when you must choose: build the thing that works or build the thing that’s comfortable. Like choosing between a Swiss Army knife and a scalpel – one does everything poorly, the other does one thing brilliantly. Sometimes, functionality demands the driver’s seat while usability buckles up in the rear. Let’s explore those glory-and-mayhem moments where raw capability trumps user-friendliness. The Functionality-Usability Tug-of-War 🥊 Imagine you’re building a missile guidance system....

July 24, 2025 · 4 min · 642 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Building Voice Interfaces: A Hands-On Guide to Speech Recognition Technology

Building Voice Interfaces: A Hands-On Guide to Speech Recognition Technology

Picture this: You’re yelling at your smart speaker to play your favorite synthwave track, but instead it starts reading Dostoevsky in Polish. We’ve all been there, right? Voice interfaces have turned us into accidental polyglots and impromptu conductors of electronic orchestras. But how do these digital listeners actually work under the hood? Let’s build our own voice-controlled system that won’t mistake “play some beats” for “analyze some beets.” Core Technologies Powering Voice Interfaces Voice interfaces operate through a symphony of technologies:...

July 23, 2025 · 3 min · 605 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Should We Engineer Programming Languages Like Disposable Coffee Cups?

Should We Engineer Programming Languages Like Disposable Coffee Cups?

Picture this: you’re debugging a 40-year-old COBOL payroll system at 3 AM while questioning life choices. As your coffee goes cold, you wonder—should programming languages come with built-in expiration dates? It’s not just a philosophical shrug; it’s a tectonic plate shifting under our keyboards. Let’s dissect this silicon carcass. The Walking Dead: Languages That Refuse to Die Some languages haunt us like digital ghosts. Take COBOL—the undead granddaddy still processing $3 trillion daily in financial systems....

July 23, 2025 · 3 min · 486 words · Maxim Zhirnov
Crafting Grafana Plugins in Go: A Developer's Odyssey

Crafting Grafana Plugins in Go: A Developer's Odyssey

When Grafana and Go collide, magic happens – but not the kind with wands and pixie dust. This is the gritty, type-safe sorcery where backend plugins transform chaos into elegant dashboards. As someone who’s wrestled JSON into submission at 3 AM, I’ll guide you through building production-ready Grafana plugins in Go, complete with error-handling war stories and compiler-enforced discipline. Why Go for Grafana Plugins? Go isn’t just a language; it’s a survival kit for backend developers....

July 22, 2025 · 4 min · 775 words · Maxim Zhirnov