Oleg Vakarev
@vkrv.bsky.social
Backend dev daring to be basic in a complex world
Pinned
Oleg Vakarev
@vkrv.bsky.social
· Dec 25
"The hard part about software development isn’t figuring out the problem, or coming up with the solution, or writing the code. The organizational coordination, and making sure that everyone feels empowered and motivated and has ownership, is the really hard part”
thenewstack.io/whats-psycho...
thenewstack.io/whats-psycho...
It got worse
November 14, 2025 at 3:31 PM
It got worse
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
I’ve loved my Steam Deck so I’m very much looking forward to picking this up when it launches 👀 www.theverge.com/tech/818111/...
Our first look at the Steam Machine, Valve’s ambitious new game console
Valve’s Fremont was real.
www.theverge.com
November 12, 2025 at 9:39 PM
I’ve loved my Steam Deck so I’m very much looking forward to picking this up when it launches 👀 www.theverge.com/tech/818111/...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Man l, I hate people that hold other people back, and "shame them" and "call them names" for wanting a better life, these people are absolute trash that want to drag you down with them.
Don't just avoid people that hold you back, "run", and never look back.
Don't just avoid people that hold you back, "run", and never look back.
November 8, 2025 at 7:08 PM
Man l, I hate people that hold other people back, and "shame them" and "call them names" for wanting a better life, these people are absolute trash that want to drag you down with them.
Don't just avoid people that hold you back, "run", and never look back.
Don't just avoid people that hold you back, "run", and never look back.
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
I’ll put it more simply: my first (and best) aerobatic flight instructor looked me in the eye before our first lesson and said: “remember, airplanes really like the ground. They really really like the ground.”
Aviation is inherently dangerous: a million pounds of metal and fuel magically flying at 500mph. The engineering and systems we have developed are just amazing and have given everyone the idea that it’s all cheap and safe. It ain’t. It’s expensive and it requires constant vigilance and organization.
'That just gave me chills': CNN anchor spooked by Kentucky governor's report on UPS crash
November 9, 2025 at 6:32 AM
I’ll put it more simply: my first (and best) aerobatic flight instructor looked me in the eye before our first lesson and said: “remember, airplanes really like the ground. They really really like the ground.”
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Much of the the internet runs on Elastic Block Storage.
It's the default (and in most cases, required) storage layer for every EC2 instance running in AWS.
This article by Marc Olson was a delightful read on its history and engineering challenges.
www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/cont...
It's the default (and in most cases, required) storage layer for every EC2 instance running in AWS.
This article by Marc Olson was a delightful read on its history and engineering challenges.
www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/cont...
November 6, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Much of the the internet runs on Elastic Block Storage.
It's the default (and in most cases, required) storage layer for every EC2 instance running in AWS.
This article by Marc Olson was a delightful read on its history and engineering challenges.
www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/cont...
It's the default (and in most cases, required) storage layer for every EC2 instance running in AWS.
This article by Marc Olson was a delightful read on its history and engineering challenges.
www.allthingsdistributed.com/2024/08/cont...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Using slidev (sli.dev) for the first time. Looking forward to delivering my first presentation with it tomorrow at J-Fall Conf in the NL - @rafaelponte.bsky.social told me about it in the beginning of the year, but took me a while to experiment with it.
November 5, 2025 at 1:44 PM
Using slidev (sli.dev) for the first time. Looking forward to delivering my first presentation with it tomorrow at J-Fall Conf in the NL - @rafaelponte.bsky.social told me about it in the beginning of the year, but took me a while to experiment with it.
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
gonna have a hard time with this one at current LLM capabilities because www.nature.com/articles/s42...
November 4, 2025 at 3:24 PM
gonna have a hard time with this one at current LLM capabilities because www.nature.com/articles/s42...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Rare to read a post arguing about the importance of software architecture BUT doing it without software architects than this one.
And you can just sense the hard-earned scars Matt got on the way: at Netflix, Twitter & other places:
Such a good read: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-go...
And you can just sense the hard-earned scars Matt got on the way: at Netflix, Twitter & other places:
Such a good read: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-go...
November 4, 2025 at 7:57 AM
Rare to read a post arguing about the importance of software architecture BUT doing it without software architects than this one.
And you can just sense the hard-earned scars Matt got on the way: at Netflix, Twitter & other places:
Such a good read: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-go...
And you can just sense the hard-earned scars Matt got on the way: at Netflix, Twitter & other places:
Such a good read: newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/what-is-go...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Happy to see someone outside Google rebuild/verify Go toolchains. Thanks @agwa.name! www.agwa.name/blog/post/ve...
"So far, Source Spotter has successfully reproduced every toolchain since Go 1.21.0, for every architecture and operating system. As of publication time, that's 2,672 toolchains!"
"So far, Source Spotter has successfully reproduced every toolchain since Go 1.21.0, for every architecture and operating system. As of publication time, that's 2,672 toolchains!"
I'm Independently Verifying Go's Reproducible Builds
Introducing Source Spotter, a Go Checksum Database auditor and Go toolchain reproducer
www.agwa.name
October 30, 2025 at 5:15 PM
Happy to see someone outside Google rebuild/verify Go toolchains. Thanks @agwa.name! www.agwa.name/blog/post/ve...
"So far, Source Spotter has successfully reproduced every toolchain since Go 1.21.0, for every architecture and operating system. As of publication time, that's 2,672 toolchains!"
"So far, Source Spotter has successfully reproduced every toolchain since Go 1.21.0, for every architecture and operating system. As of publication time, that's 2,672 toolchains!"
Prospects are like fears: most of the scenarios exist only in your mind and never come true. What actually happens is something you never anticipated
October 31, 2025 at 12:09 PM
Prospects are like fears: most of the scenarios exist only in your mind and never come true. What actually happens is something you never anticipated
And in web development (react) there are currently 3000 developers responding to each job posting, I should have gone into construction when I was younger
I have 20+ years of experience as a senior programmer and the number of interviews I have got this year is: zero. At first i thought it was because I was aged out of the industry. Now I realize that's just one factor. The money just isn't there for anything that's not AI slop.
October 29, 2025 at 10:43 PM
And in web development (react) there are currently 3000 developers responding to each job posting, I should have gone into construction when I was younger
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
If you have an interest in understanding garbage collection better, or in how Go's new GC works under-the-hood, I highly recommend reading @michael.express's thorough guide through Go's current and Green Tea GC.
“The Green Tea Garbage Collector” by Michael Knyszek and Austin Clements — https://go.dev/blog/greenteagc
#golang
#golang
October 29, 2025 at 7:20 PM
If you have an interest in understanding garbage collection better, or in how Go's new GC works under-the-hood, I highly recommend reading @michael.express's thorough guide through Go's current and Green Tea GC.
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
This is my favorite article on B-tree internals.
Jeremy Cole has done MySQL at Twitter, Google, and Shopify. One of the most knowledgeable MySQL engineers in the world, and his blog is an information goldmine.
blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/b...
Jeremy Cole has done MySQL at Twitter, Google, and Shopify. One of the most knowledgeable MySQL engineers in the world, and his blog is an information goldmine.
blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/b...
October 27, 2025 at 2:36 PM
This is my favorite article on B-tree internals.
Jeremy Cole has done MySQL at Twitter, Google, and Shopify. One of the most knowledgeable MySQL engineers in the world, and his blog is an information goldmine.
blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/b...
Jeremy Cole has done MySQL at Twitter, Google, and Shopify. One of the most knowledgeable MySQL engineers in the world, and his blog is an information goldmine.
blog.jcole.us/2013/01/10/b...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Can all the Linux distros just get into a UFC Octagon, fight it out, and let's just have one amazing one, instead of all of them all over the damn place in various unreliable ways?
October 23, 2025 at 3:36 AM
Can all the Linux distros just get into a UFC Octagon, fight it out, and let's just have one amazing one, instead of all of them all over the damn place in various unreliable ways?
Building great software requires so much love, iteration, and testing that I genuinely don't believe large corporations can ship anything that isn't half-baked. Everything good traces back to the startup energy and the original people who built it
October 22, 2025 at 1:43 PM
Building great software requires so much love, iteration, and testing that I genuinely don't believe large corporations can ship anything that isn't half-baked. Everything good traces back to the startup energy and the original people who built it
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Years of database operations compressed into a 5 minute read.
Required reading for everyone building applications in the cloud.
Required reading for everyone building applications in the cloud.
PlanetScale's fault tolerance relies on simple principles, processes, and architectures, but the real work is in the execution. These are the principles we follow to keep our systems reliable.
planetscale.com/blog/the-pri...
planetscale.com/blog/the-pri...
The principles of extreme fault tolerance — PlanetScale
The principles and processes we follow for fault tolerance.
planetscale.com
October 21, 2025 at 4:57 PM
Years of database operations compressed into a 5 minute read.
Required reading for everyone building applications in the cloud.
Required reading for everyone building applications in the cloud.
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
The Google Spanner paper is a 10/10 read.
The most interesting bit? TrueTime, an API that gives time results with error bounds, and one that guarantees <= 7 ms of clock skew. Impressive!
The downside? Not OSS. Even if it were, would require reproducing the timing hardware.
The most interesting bit? TrueTime, an API that gives time results with error bounds, and one that guarantees <= 7 ms of clock skew. Impressive!
The downside? Not OSS. Even if it were, would require reproducing the timing hardware.
October 20, 2025 at 2:39 PM
The Google Spanner paper is a 10/10 read.
The most interesting bit? TrueTime, an API that gives time results with error bounds, and one that guarantees <= 7 ms of clock skew. Impressive!
The downside? Not OSS. Even if it were, would require reproducing the timing hardware.
The most interesting bit? TrueTime, an API that gives time results with error bounds, and one that guarantees <= 7 ms of clock skew. Impressive!
The downside? Not OSS. Even if it were, would require reproducing the timing hardware.
wow....
there’s a major AWS outage going on right now that’s taken down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, Perplexity, Roblox, and lots more of the internet. US-EAST-1 is down and impacting a lot of services that rely on AWS www.theverge.com/news/802486/...
Major AWS outage takes down Fortnite, Alexa, Snapchat, and more
A chunk of the internet has been taken offline.
www.theverge.com
October 20, 2025 at 8:18 AM
wow....
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
More than 90% of Tailscale connections are direct. When they are not, it's usually because of tricky NAT traversal. Here's how we've been improving connectivity, both for us and the greater web. tailscale.com/blog/nat-tra...
How Tailscale is improving NAT traversal (Part 1)
Updates on Tailscale's efforts to improve NAT traversal, for its client and for the web at large.
tailscale.com
October 15, 2025 at 8:55 PM
More than 90% of Tailscale connections are direct. When they are not, it's usually because of tricky NAT traversal. Here's how we've been improving connectivity, both for us and the greater web. tailscale.com/blog/nat-tra...
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
A big lesson from my cancer diagnosis.
If you start feeling people are taking advantage of your time, just disregard those folks. Keep moving. It’s not worth your time. Live your life, and stop being on others people’s time.
Hard lesson I have learned. #Cansky
If you start feeling people are taking advantage of your time, just disregard those folks. Keep moving. It’s not worth your time. Live your life, and stop being on others people’s time.
Hard lesson I have learned. #Cansky
October 14, 2025 at 5:30 PM
A big lesson from my cancer diagnosis.
If you start feeling people are taking advantage of your time, just disregard those folks. Keep moving. It’s not worth your time. Live your life, and stop being on others people’s time.
Hard lesson I have learned. #Cansky
If you start feeling people are taking advantage of your time, just disregard those folks. Keep moving. It’s not worth your time. Live your life, and stop being on others people’s time.
Hard lesson I have learned. #Cansky
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
librephone Project
librephone.fsf.org
October 15, 2025 at 12:26 AM
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Assume all US big tech is secretly run by the CIA, and govern yourself accordingly.
I'm not claiming it is.
Just telling you to assume it is.
I'm not claiming it is.
Just telling you to assume it is.
October 9, 2025 at 7:26 PM
Assume all US big tech is secretly run by the CIA, and govern yourself accordingly.
I'm not claiming it is.
Just telling you to assume it is.
I'm not claiming it is.
Just telling you to assume it is.
Reposted by Oleg Vakarev
Yes, forcing users to upload documents for age verification is going to end very badly.
Collecting sensitive documents, like ID is an especially bad idea.
Do not collect shit that you do not need to collect, ever.
If it's not collected it can't be leaked.
That is all.
Collecting sensitive documents, like ID is an especially bad idea.
Do not collect shit that you do not need to collect, ever.
If it's not collected it can't be leaked.
That is all.
October 9, 2025 at 5:52 PM
Yes, forcing users to upload documents for age verification is going to end very badly.
Collecting sensitive documents, like ID is an especially bad idea.
Do not collect shit that you do not need to collect, ever.
If it's not collected it can't be leaked.
That is all.
Collecting sensitive documents, like ID is an especially bad idea.
Do not collect shit that you do not need to collect, ever.
If it's not collected it can't be leaked.
That is all.