Alex Korotkykh
alexkor.bsky.social
Alex Korotkykh
@alexkor.bsky.social
CTO @ getpliant.com
The closer a metric is to money, the less it lies.
November 14, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Compliance is what you must do. Security is what you choose to do when no one is watching.
November 14, 2025 at 7:53 PM
If your standup is 30 minutes and your incident review is 10, you’re optimizing the wrong meeting.
November 13, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Most performance problems are product problems wearing a profiler.
November 13, 2025 at 6:56 PM
I love reading, but never have time.
So I either listen to audiobooks while running,
or read on a Kindle before bed — to protect my eyes from blue light.

Since I’m cheap and don’t want to pay twice for the same book,
the best way to guarantee I never read it is to buy the hardcover
November 12, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Microservices are great until your feature spans six repos and three release trains.
November 12, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Hiring signal: candidates who ask ‘what hurts today?’ beat candidates who ask ‘what stack?’
November 11, 2025 at 6:07 PM
Culture isn’t what you write in Notion. It’s what survives during incidents.
November 11, 2025 at 5:39 PM
The pain of microblogging:
I try to write short, sharp posts — provoke a bit, cut the fluff.
Then I get frustrated when people miss the nuance and take it literally.

Maybe I’m just not built for a format that rewards being loud over being precise.
November 10, 2025 at 6:05 PM
Posting here is my way of fighting imposter syndrome.

I can’t tell if I’m a grown man and a CTO of a successful startup —
or just a kid who still needs the approval of his peers and teachers more than anything else.
November 10, 2025 at 5:19 PM
I play a fun game with our hiring managers.
I tell them great engineers can pick up Spring fast, even without experience.
They nod in agreement — and then hire only people who’ve already used Spring.
November 9, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Every quick hotfix is like putting tech debt on a credit card.
It accrues interest at 28% APR.
November 9, 2025 at 8:40 AM
Reliability tip: make recovery inevitable. Prevention is optional.
November 8, 2025 at 8:08 AM
GenAI is amazing at getting you to 90%. The remaining 10% is the part your users notice.
November 8, 2025 at 7:58 AM
If your cloud bill is below $10k/month, you probably shouldn’t be using AWS in the first place.
November 7, 2025 at 8:26 PM
There are two wolves fighting in me:
One says we made our lives harder by starting with microservices.
The other says we’d never have had time to split the monolith once hypergrowth hit.
November 7, 2025 at 7:53 PM
If your OKRs don’t change how people spend their week, they’re just seasonal wall art.
November 6, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Most architecture debates aren’t about technology. They’re about who has to wake up at 3 a.m.
November 6, 2025 at 6:56 PM
Still can’t believe someone decided that declaring dependencies as >= 3.1.2 was a good idea — and half of the industry went, ‘yeah, that seems fine.’
November 3, 2025 at 6:05 PM
I love Hamburg — lived there for 5 years and always happy to visit.
But I’ll never understand how Hamburgers manage to be happier than most Germans while surviving a negative number of sunny days for six months straight.

www.skl-gluecksatlas.de/artikel/glue...
Auf dem Zufriedenheitsplateau
Die Lebenszufriedenheit in Deutschland legt 2025 eine Verschnaufpause ein: Sie stagniert nahezu und liegt mit 7,09 Punkten auf dem soliden Niveau vor der Pandemie. Während die Menschen mit Arbeit,…
www.skl-gluecksatlas.de
November 3, 2025 at 5:19 PM
Correlation or causation?
The engineers most eager to hire QAs always seem to work on the codebase with the lowest test coverage.
October 31, 2025 at 8:26 PM
Every 6 months, someone suggests replacing on of our Postgres DBs with Elasticsearch because ‘the DB is heavy with search queries.’
I ask: ‘What can Elasticsearch do here that Postgres can’t?’
Five years later — still no Elasticsearch.
October 31, 2025 at 7:53 PM
Somehow society quietly agreed that GenAI-generated code is acceptable, but GenAI-generated images and videos are not.

Maybe it’s because code feels utilitarian — a means to an end — while art feels personal, expressive.
October 30, 2025 at 6:56 PM
It’s crazy how quickly we adapt to new technology.
Not long ago, Claude Code felt like magic — pure amazement.
Now I catch myself getting annoyed when it’s wrong, saying things like,
‘Why are you so stupid, you piece of metal?’
October 29, 2025 at 7:52 PM
Discovered The Finals last weekend, Arc Raiders the weekend before.
I thought I was too old, slow, and half-blind for competitive PvP shooters.
Turns out I am — but they’re still a blast.
October 28, 2025 at 5:39 PM