The Real Changes

Helldivers 2 and Self-Improvement

2026-03-31T13:23:00Z

Intro

Helldivers 2 is a phenomenon for me as a game. It depicts a futuristic world of "Super Earth-based managed democracy," bringing liberty and democracy to distant worlds using weapons and pumping oil as part of the process. The developers predicted the future by building the most absurd reality possible, joking all the way. The gameplay is surprisingly great, even while being goofy and buggy; fighting bugs with a machine gun is immensely satisfying. I do not play other games, and it is my way of getting in touch with real people and feeling a sense of camaraderie during missions. However, one thought kept disturbing me: this game is surprisingly metaphorical in the sense of self-development. The fun factor itself is connected to specific challenges, and that is exactly what I am going to discuss here.

Diving

The concept of "diving" justifies having multiple lives in the game, which in this imaginary future is made possible with clones. On each mission, a team of four Helldivers or fewer is sent to a planet full of enemies (literally thousands), and when a character dies, a substitute is sent in. I associated this with the idea of reincarnation and accepting the world with all its drawbacks. If reincarnation exists and we are sent to the same world repeatedly, maybe we should start understanding something – or at least learn how to deal with the world and its problems. There is no way out; if you don't handle it, you simply don't play the game.

When you start, you suck, but you eventually get familiar with the weapons and the (awkward) controls. The key to success is also playing as a team: complementing your mates, helping each other, and sharing limited resources. In this regard, this game isn't different from the real world, but in the real world, we often "suck" without maturing – just concentrating on the suffering. We do not value teamwork and the evident necessity to share limited resources, at least for practical reasons. When that realization struck me, I stepped away from the computer like, "What the heck..."

Challenging yourself

The game has difficulty levels from 1 to 10, and the difference between levels is significant, with many more enemies – including heavily armored and armed ones – especially between levels 5 and 6. The point is that once you play at a certain level, it becomes boring. Again, in the game, it is very clear that you need to move to higher difficulty levels. Still, the idea of constantly challenging yourself is not so evident or widely accepted in real life, but that is what happens: life becomes boring.

Self-reflecting

Can I play at this level? Well, you won't get the answer until you try. Sometimes I go back to easier levels in the game, but mostly I am surprised that even when I thought I "sucked," we still finished the mission and all the objectives. It's like, "Do you mean I didn't suck?" It doesn't matter; what matters is if the mission was finished successfully and the spirit of camaraderie was there, along with all the positive vibes. I realized I had false criteria, because this "do I suck" metric is subjective, too focused on myself, and too distorting.

Let’s look at this differently: three guys are playing the game, I joined and killed some enemies, so I contributed and did what I could. You would never hear from the team "you shouldn't be here" or "you didn't contribute enough." Why do we say this in real life? Probably because we are not enjoying the "game." Twice, I joined a game and accidentally killed other characters with my hell-pod. No critique: "It's fine." Once, I drove a vehicle with the others directly into a deep hole and we all got killed. The reaction? "LOL." And it works, because you play worse when you think too much about your previous mistakes. Yet, we continue to criticize each other and feel ashamed in real life. Isn't it strange?

Conclusion

There was one video titled "HD2 is so realistic we had PTSD." Of course, it’s an exaggeration and the guys were just having fun. The thing is that a lot of people have a kind of trauma from the constant flow of negative news and predictions that the world is coming to an end tomorrow. Is it good to escape this world? It kind of works for me, and it works surprisingly well when this fantasy world is worse and more absurd than the one we have now. No, I am not sponsored by Sony or Arrowhead, and I would not recommend HD2 to everyone. My current theory is that it attracts specific types of people who find something in chaos and challenges. Maybe men just need epic moments sometimes.

It's Not a Race

2026-03-24T11:27:00Z

Intro

Tech progress, as I feel it, was somewhat shadowed by dramatic political events and AI-buzz. If you dig deeper, it feels so inspiring how many good technologies evolved and matured lately – my favorite being Go, of course. :) Coming from a B2B world, which is very conservative about the tech stacks being used, I often notice a misconception: that you should always use "the latest and the greatest." That's not necessarily true, especially if you take into account the term "production-ready," which implies reality-testing and stability, as well as documentation and a community (with a known number of bugs and workarounds). My point is that on a country level, it's good enough to adopt decent technology rather than consider it a race with a winner and losers.

The COBOL case

If you look at job ads, you can notice that from time to time banks are looking for COBOL programmers because they still need to support COBOL apps, which can be core systems, by the way. Of course, Revolut will take over these banks with its modern tech stack, product-based approach, and the principle of "attracting the best talent" (probably being the most important). But the old COBOL code surprisingly works and does the job. It's not like with the introduction of a new tech stack the old apps stop working, but it almost seems like it.

The PHP case

There's also the "When will the investments pay back" principle – rewriting a core banking system can take a long time to pay back and comes with instability risks (which mean losing customers). Management in Germany frequently uses PHP-based apps because of investments made into learning this stack (I mean by suppliers, who can in turn offer lower prices). The thing is, it's too outdated and... it doesn't work. For example, some parts of websites have broken scrolling in Chrome because of a WordPress plugin; I'd also not trust business data to a PHP app, as they can be insecure. This PHP era has to end; it's five steps back, at least:

First, there was PHP (and Perl)
Then, we had Ruby and Ruby on Rails, Python and Django, probably C# and ASP.NET, and Java
Then we had server-side JavaScript and Node.js
After that, we had server-side TypeScript and server-side React (OMG) :)
Now we have Go, and many companies are rewriting their Java, JavaScript, and Python with Go

Go is mature; it has all the features, the community, and the libraries. It has much better packaging compared to npm (hell), and its design is holistic. And it delivers great performance. It's a matter of computer literacy to learn what PHP is, when it was relevant, and why it's relevant no more. Most people know that you should probably operate your mouse with your hand, not with your foot – for me, that's not even an exaggerated analogy. The more dramatic analogy is shooting yourself in the foot because it's cheaper, and that's what happens when someone orders a PHP app in 2026.

The Opensource case

When new tech evolves, it's just there, and as lots of engineers like open source, it often arises as an open-source project. It might not be pretty and is probably not well-documented, but if enough companies adopt this technology and contribute to it by fixing bugs and documenting, it can become great. The issue is that people in general – be they managers or bureaucrats – do not want to wait and/or to contribute. And that's the issue! We are all kids wanting something shiny right now, and as kids, we don't want to take responsibility for contributing or being real about the fact that shiny doesn't mean good. And that's when the tech gets commercialized and you see pitiful ads and promises:

You are promised: stability, enterprise-level support, a good-looking box (which is already suspicious for a codebase), a high-quality development process, and a compatible environment.
You get: dependency on a proprietary tech stack which you're not able to change, the same bugs as everywhere, and bad code quality because it's not open and you can't see the code itself – or it was outsourced to an LLM or a subqualified company.

It's not a bad thing to believe that people will cut corners where they are allowed to, so managers maximizing profits in the short term will do it.

The way out

I've written that the EU was not radical enough regarding regulations, but what would these regulations to implement open source look like? And, more importantly, what process is required? Just "in my humble opinion":

We need to identify areas where open-source solutions exist and implement requirements that, in these areas, solutions should be Opensource-based (maybe I'm not radical enough here).
I believe that the only way to find out if a solution is good enough is to start using it – the wider, the better. Finding bugs or new requirements is the process here.
We need to pay for adding features and fixing bugs, but these contributions should be sent as pull requests to the main branch, just because it's cheaper to maintain one main branch and one company shouldn't have to pay for that alone.

If, say, you're in Germany and you invest in some software and write pull requests – will some company in the US benefit from that? Yes, sure, as well as North Korea and other bad actors. "But that's not a bug, it's a feature":

Civilization is essentially one noosphere;
You maintain your digital sovereignty in any case, because no one can take the Opensource product from you;
It's not that everyone can just "install and use it"; you need competence and a community, which bad actors don't have, so we're safe.

Conclusion

It's funny that when discussing tech or politics, we end up discussing being an adult and taking responsibility. I have a friend who migrated from Moscow to London, and he said that this attitude of being an adult is what makes the difference between countries. Being too conservative, on the other hand, is not compatible with tech; the challenge is to embrace the new Generation-Z-JS-frameworks and still feel comfortable and aware of what's going on. Do we have a term like "Über-adult" who can do that?

Progress Was Always Practical

2026-03-19T13:12:00Z

I've just watched an interview with Boris Cherny at the Pragmatic Engineer channel and one idea struck me: programming for Boris was always practical; he uses tools and programming languages just to achieve his goals, and the same approach goes for AI tools. That's why he's using Claude, which has gotten significantly better, although it's still an LLM that has nothing to do with AGI.

What I've observed before myself and read was convincing enough that AI "is not there yet": 80-90% of the AI-generated code was not needed at all, and developers using AI spend 20% more time doing their jobs compared to their colleagues without AI tools. But the "practical" approach flips this over; maybe new Claude models contribute to this change too. I haven't tested the latest Claude models, but the point is that industrial programming – i.e., being paid to write code – is different from learning programming or writing code as a hobby (which is what I was doing). In industrial programming, "tests passed" can be a criterion, and it doesn't matter if it's a prototype or production code.

And I was thinking about this from a completely different angle. I came across LISP lectures and watched some videos just because some ideas seemed non-trivial and I had some free time. But what are the practical implications of LISP nowadays? Emacs customization, probably, and that's it: if you write a web app, you'll use TypeScript or JavaScript on the front-end and probably Go on the back-end (OK, or Python, Java, TypeScript, JavaScript, and many others, but not LISP). If you want to process data, you'd probably use Python (or Kotlin). If you want to write a mobile app, you'd probably use... You get the idea; LISP is interesting to study, but it didn't survive the evolution of software. And Go won (in its niches), being the most practical language possible.

So, even if the statistics for AI agents were as bad as mentioned above (and they are getting better), AI as a practical tool is winning, and it's completely clear to me now. There's a bunch of new challenges for software developers: competition on the job market just because fewer developers are required, and a new set of skills to set tasks for AI and review the results – to know which tasks to delegate and where to trust or to check, among others. I'm still glad I can code for pleasure, though.

Seveneves Is a Great Book by Neal Stephenson, But It's Wrong IMO

2026-02-10T14:50:00Z

Intro

First, I should say that I'm no one to act as a critic for Neal Stephenson's work. Second, Cryptonomicon is one of my favourite books. Third, I'd recommend reading Seveneves yourself and making your own conclusions. It was issued in 2015 and I see some parallels in modern history, and the point that I'm making is that the logic of how extinction events influence humanity is completely different from what's in the book. And regretfully, I have some experience with totalitarian and paternalistic regimes, so bear with me.

World becoming totalitarian

The story starts with the Moon's destruction and it suddenly causes democratic states to become totalitarian. Well, I like one more sci-fi book about extinction events, notably the war with the aliens; the book is called Ender's Game. The society is pretty totalitarian there as well, but people make choices. You can have pretty bad choices, but as long as you have them, it's not all over. Ender's parents had the choice to have a child or not, as they were allowed to have him only if they gave him away. But the darkness in which Seveneves immersed me started with the absence of choice: whether you have loved ones or not, you have to leave Earth without them, you don't have a choice. And it's not even the distant future, so the society should be the same, not used to totalitarian decisions. I want to have a choice to die the way I've chosen with the people I want, that's all I'm saying.

It's also a very slippery slope to put some interests of a society above the individual. Who gets these interests right? Who manages the risks of manipulating these interests? It opens a Pandora's box, just as unlimited and uncontrolled power does.

Somebody knows the solution

Like, who trusts the politicians? It sounds pretty paternalistic to me to sit in front of the TV and listen to the truths someone decided to be the truths and put into the mouths of politicians. The lack of critical thinking and the lack of options is the bad thing, and it's a lot worse than extinction. Extinction is still probable; it's not guaranteed.

I work in project management, and I know what uncertainty and risks mean. I haven't worked with extinction events – it may change a lot, putting more pressure on you – but you still have to make plans and assign tasks. What's the best team? It's a diverse team, and by "diverse" I mean different opinions. I get the diversity movement as opposed to the discrimination of minorities, but to me, the discrimination question never arose, as having a different opinion and being brave enough to escalate it prevailed. That's how you deal with uncertainty, and this allows you to have more options to choose from. This way you can notice some crucial conditions on the ground, which put all the big and beautiful plans developed in the Ivory Tower into the trash bin. Censorship doesn't work, because it doesn't change reality; it can only influence the perception of reality for a short period of time.

You need to encourage rebels, you need to encourage disobedience, because only then you have several options to choose from. I remember the faces of the people when plan A went to the trash and we turned to plan B, which they considered trash in their ignorance. They said nothing, and they said it all.

Personally, I can imagine much more pessimistic scenarios for the events described: civil wars, or international conflicts over resources to secure the best possible party at the end. I think of the politics in the bunkers with the cyanide. Or Don't Look Up – that’s practically a documentary.

The level of tech is a retro sci-fi

I have a personal beef with this: it was retro sci-fi in 2015 already. Seriously, nothing better than the Orlan suit and the ISS? It's so annoying to me because it indicates such a great distrust in humanity. We are now in a completely different place with Roskosmos in ruins with its rockets and spacesuits; there's a whole new space industry, meaning not just SpaceX, but other rocket companies and lots of other companies inventing stuff around space exploration. I can comprehend "doing what we can with what we've got," but we've got a lot more in terms of human talent and inventions.

Depressive

It's just depressive. The world has changed toward the pessimistic side a lot since 2015, to the extent depicted in the sad joke: the cleverest people died around 2020 to catch all the progress and not see all the shame we live in. And in a depressive world we need hope; again, I don't even think about influencing someone's writing, I just can't stand depressive fiction in the current context. I get that you need something to overcome, but Andy Weir's characters had to overcome a lot as well; in Project Hail Mary it's an extinction event. The main character is far from being a hero or even brave, but he still has humor, and that is what makes us human beings and gives us hope. Again, the book Seveneves is great, I just refuse to fall into depression. And I would discourage anyone from making a choice for depression and being too serious. It just doesn't make any sense, sorry.

A couple of quotes

"I have realized what your trouble is: you are too serious. A smart face is not yet a sign of intelligence, gentlemen. All the most stupid things on earth are done with that very expression. Smile, gentlemen... smile!"

The Very Same Munchhausen, by Grigory Gorin.

"Stay away from negative people. They have a problem for every solution."

Often attributed to Albert Einstein.

How To Get Interviews and Pass HR (At Least)

2026-02-10T13:10:00Z

Intro

Following up on my article on structuring the job search, I have actually achieved some results through my own testing – these are likely tips you have heard before. The main difference here is that I saw an increase in my positive reply rate. The results might be slightly biased toward the German market, and I’ve structured them into the following stages:

Preparing the application
Applying + follow-up
Preparing for the interview
Speaking at the interview

I still haven't landed a job yet, but I have secured several interviews and received positive feedback afterward, so I’m happy to share these tips!

1. Preparing for the application

It’s easy to get discouraged when applying for a long time, but I suggest revisiting your CV and cover letter periodically. You might find new ideas or notice mistakes that are crucial for these documents. I found errors and lapses in logic that made me think, "Who could have even written this?" Well, I did, and no one I asked to check it noticed.

Another thing I learned the hard way: keep both your CV and cover letter concise and simple. By "simple," I mean even the technical aspects. I used to make my CV in Canva; it looked great, but it likely failed during parsing. I switched to Google Docs, keeping the formatting as simple as possible, and it worked. For the cover letter, I use the following structure, which is specific to my situation:

A formal notice that I am applying for the position (including a job code if applicable).
Two paragraphs on why my experience and skills are a good fit, ideally mentioning specific relevant experience and results.
My story: how and why I moved to Germany.
What I did in my most recent role.
References with links to their LinkedIn profiles.
Logistics: how I plan to handle the commute or a move to another city (one sentence).
My work permit status (one sentence).
A polite closing note expressing hope that I provided enough info to minimize their risks or misunderstandings (one sentence).
Best regards.

With Arial 11pt and 6pt spacing between paragraphs, the cover letter occupies roughly 3/4 of an A4 page. The parts that change are the first, second, and sixth. Keep in mind that the more you change, the higher the risk of introducing errors.

2. Applying + follow-up

Some obvious points, in case you weren't aware:

Always apply through the company's website if a form is available, or via email if requested.
Calling in advance helps.
Always include the cover letter and a Reference or Letter of Recommendation (Qualifiziertes Arbeitszeugnis in Germany), whether they ask for it or not. Include your diploma recognition (Anerkennung) as well, if you have it – if not, apply for it ASAP.
Sometimes they'll only have one field to upload a file, so merge your PDFs in this order: cover letter first, CV second, references third, and diploma recognition last.
Keep exploring different job boards: some become irrelevant while others rise; my latest find for Germany is HeyJobs.
LinkedIn works best when you post regularly and recruiters find you.
If you post on LinkedIn, 1/3 to 1/2 of your posts can be external content – don’t overstress yourself.

In Germany, the common rule of thumb is to expect a reply within two weeks; in reality, they often start inviting candidates to interviews within one week. I’ve concluded that it makes sense to follow up after one week. By the way, vacancies older than a week are probably not worth it. To follow up, you can try calling, but meetings often get in the way – email works just fine.

3. Preparing for the interview

Standard stuff again – just do your homework:

Read their website. Know how many employees they have and what they do; write it down and memorize it.
Think about the questions they might ask. I don't mean "strengths and weaknesses" – if they respect you, they won't ask that. The "big three" for me are: tell us about your experience/story, your best achievement so far, and your biggest challenge.
Prepare your answers: write them down, check for mistakes, and say them out loud several times to get used to them. Simplify them if they are difficult to remember.

4. Speaking at the interview

Based heavily on my own mistakes, I present the following tips – especially if you are not speaking in your native language:

Speak slower and articulate more clearly than you think is necessary. You are a new person to them, and they need time to adapt to your speech pattern.
Show empathy: use active listening and comment on points they mention. Show involvement and understanding, even if they don't explicitly ask a question.
With HR, you need to prove you’ve actually read the job description. Talk about it and explain how you interpret the role.

And one of the most valuable tips that works (from the Primagen): at the end of the interview ask for a brief feedback. In the era of corporate correctness you'll get some bits of information it's almost impossible to get otherwise.

Conclusion

That’s all for today. I hope you learned something new! :)

Raising Arizona Is Metaphorical

2026-01-29T18:16:10Z

Intro

My daughter has just turned 14, and I feel that I owe her this post. I remember vividly a few nervous days before the birth and a few days after I came to a maternity hospital to get a large bundle inside which there was a small human being. Who didn't react much, but was incredibly sweet, so we called her Sweety (if I were to translate it to English) for the first week. And I remember the first time she slept on my stomach and then on the bed, it was a pleasure just to be nearby and watch her. Being around children brings joy and happiness, but parenting challenges you like nothing else.

I watched Raising Arizona (a 1987 movie) recently, directed by Joel Coen, and I had a few associations with parenting pain points. It's all my interpretation. I thought it would be fun if my daughter finds these thoughts later, when she becomes a parent. We're going to visit some dark places.

"But we also love her"

There's a moment when bank robbers lose the child, H.I. (the husband) and Ed (the wife) are passing by, and the robbers beg "Take us with you! We also love her!" or something like that. The point is that in parenting love is care and when you screw up your love doesn't count. You have to learn to screw up less, and learn it quickly. It puts you under stress, especially if you are not used to managing your emotions, organizing stuff, dealing with uncertainty and making decisions, being kind to other human beings when you feel that something bad is happening to your child. Emotions do count, but at a young age children don't care, they just need to be safe and all the stuff around them organized. Frankly speaking, I'm not in favor of excuses being an adult, but I totally get it. You see, here we deal with a prehistoric situation, the excuses were not invented yet, just get the stuff done.

A dream job

H.I. thinks he's a robber, but I see robbery as a metaphor for a dream job. And I had it: visiting distant places, dealing with great people, accomplishing ambitious and risky projects. It was legal and they paid me for that. But until you are miserable at the job, you have to apply your skills and experience to something (legal, by the way) to provide for the family, that's what the family (and archetypical roles in it) is about. Family is more important than the job, that's the point. In the family you have a more fulfilling life and all the other roles in life can't compete with this role. I'll also advise running away from companies where management calls a team a family. It's manipulative.

Pulling the ring from the grenade

So H.I. fights with the demon, pulls the ring from the grenade and kills the demon, which hardly can be lawful or "self-defense". No, police doesn't come to the scene at all. My point is that it's naive to think that the laws cover all the cases in life. Laws are meant to be applied by decent people in the interests of humanity, but that's also not how it sometimes works. In totalitarian countries laws are used for anything else but the interests of humanity and people, applied selectively, although on paper they can look reasonable. There's also morale and ethics in society, which can change over time (which is funny by itself) and is heavily used for manipulation in worst cases. "Is it better for my family?" is a question that matters and it will keep you sane over time. "Better" meaning long-term, like can I tell this story to my daughter without being ashamed. After having a kid I learned the hard way not to blame people for anything. I kid you not: I bought a motorcycle, being afraid to be considered a coward by my daughter in the future. Kids can smell cowards and liars, by the way. And kids know their parents very well for sure.

Are you ready

When you have a child, he/she doesn't care if you're ready or not. In the movie H.I. and Ed return the child as they figure out they are not ready to be parents, but that doesn't happen in real life (exceptions applied). You need to get over everything you did wrong and be there for your child, always. You have no place to hide, although you could probably hire a psychologist to listen to your regrets (not a bad idea at all to get some paid moral support). The point is that it can be easier and my biggest regret so far is not visiting parenting courses. My friend did that, he has four kids now, and it helped him for sure. Common knowledge doesn't work, the institutions to pass the knowledge from older members of your family probably don't work. Getting ready is a task and it should be addressed, it's that simple. On the opposite side, life will never be challenging and fulfilling (and these two go together) enough without a child, and I personally think it's a right reason to have a child. It also means you have resources, and you'll definitely need them.

Old friends may fade away

There's a moment when H.I. and Ed meet another family, H.I.'s boss, who is a swinger with his wife (played by Frances McDormand). Parenting changes the point of view, you see people more profoundly and you assess if you want to communicate with people based on their family life and their attitude towards their own children. I don't care about the success stories of "achievers", if their family life is poor or their kids didn't get enough love.

By the way, there was a research that "enough" doesn't exist for parental love: the more love children get, the more potent they become. Back to friends, this new viewpoint also means some friends will fade away, because they didn't settle or they have issues with family life. It's difficult to find people with similar family values and priorities. And planning anything with a few families is a project, but the time spent together is incredibly satisfying. These fading friends will be the symbols of hobbies or lifestyle you had, and you'll have to say goodbye, because family is the priority.

Meet yourself

That's the toughest one, I'll not be able to crack it, I'll just barely touch it. There's a character, Leonard Smalls, to whom I referred as "demon" above, but he's obviously born by H.I. and I assume he is H.I.'s dark side. H.I. is nice and loving and gentle, Smalls is the opposite. And dealing with your dark side (for men) is not as easy as having a fight and pulling a ring from a grenade. Imagine Smalls living with you, that's what family life can reveal. Being tired, exhausted, overloaded, every person can turn into Smalls. That's what I meant earlier by not judging people. Managing your emotions, aggression, even smaller movements and dealing with your inseparable dark side is The Challenge. And control is not an option, I can confirm. If I had easy answers, I'd write them here, but I see none of them.

Conclusion

There's no conclusion here other than I suck as a parent, but I'm still trying my best. And I'd highly recommend you to watch the movie in case you didn't. There was another "dream job", we gathered with colleagues and discussed movies every week. Yes, they paid for that as well, because that's what team building looks like. But that's another story.

The TCO Thing

2026-01-29T12:05:00Z

Intro

At first I had an idea to write a balancing article to my thoughts on opensource and custom solutions, to be a devil's advocate and to criticize myself. People choosing Windows, WordPress and ready-to-install systems can't be all wrong and they are not dumb for sure. And I thought I could prove their viewpoint with the TCO analysis, but then I had an intuitive feeling that I'm missing something. If this TCO analysis is correct, why is it often disproved lately? And then it struck me: we are already in some "catastrophic" scenarios, but I'm cheerful, so I'll call them post-apocalyptic scenarios (PAS). We are not living in post-apocalypse yet, although some people are building bunkers and there's a whole culture and community of "preppers". But some changes are so drastic that they turn over the financial models, one of them being TCO.

TCO model

A typical TCO model has two components, and that's a lot already: the cost of buying and the maintenance cost. I don't feel that's enough, so I'd add two more:

Making a decision cost
Buying/development/implementation cost
Maintenance/enhancement cost
PAS maintenance/enhancement cost

Let's go really quick through it. First, you make a decision what to buy to fix your problem, and that involves costs: you need to become a minimal subject matter expert or to find one, you need to view some demos, find people you trust and ask them questions about how they feel using the product, find the reviews, create a "+/-" table, make your conclusions, get stuck in decision paralysis, find a way out, get stuck again and so on. Marketing and word of mouth do a great job supplying you with information, so it seems like you know the right choice. They both fail with opensource solutions, for instance: opensource products often do not have paid marketing at all (be grateful for a neat GitHub page), most people you know may not know about it or even have a non-professional negative attitude (that's what marketing specialists of the other products are paid for) toward these products, yet the opensource product can beat a closed-source one in product-market fit, being (mostly) free for acquisition cost.

The buying phase is exploited by marketing as well: you visit a nice office, drink free coffee, have a talk with nice people, then you conveniently pay a large amount of money (assuming you can't be screwed if you pay this large amount), you get your license key or even a box. So, you have a box on the shelf, nothing works. Well, you have to pay for some consulting, but they will not do the work for you; in the case of an ERP system they will not figure out what to do with your 50 incompatible item directories. But they got the money, they are happy, and you are not.

I've been implementing the best ERP systems available on the market since 2003, and I strongly believe in custom solutions, because they have three traits "pre-packaged" or even "customizable" solutions don't have:

You start to understand your requirements during development
You can create something unique, supporting your unique competitive advantage
The tech stack of most "pre-packaged" solutions is pretty old, and you are free to leverage the advancements in technology

B2B moves at a slower pace and there are reasons to have a "pre-packaged" solution as well:

A stable tech stack
Standardized supporting processes to deal with your contractors easier
Figure out your requirements from the software description

But the killing argument for a "pre-packaged" solution is the maintenance cost, because talented developers are not willing to support their software, they are willing to write new software. So eventually you'll lose even the ability to fix bugs in your custom solution. But that's not the case if IT is the core part of your business, and you put consistent effort and budget into its enhancement. Many retailers do it, some logistics companies do it, and they can be quite successful. Just don't slow down, because freezing is death for your product.

"Effort" is a key word here. So, if you have a lot to do and you are not willing to put a lot of effort into software development, is the "pre-packaged" option still good? Well, it is, if we do not consider PAS. PAS changes a lot, not only TCO. But how to predict PAS?

How to predict PAS

In January 2022 I had a task from an IT company as a part of the hiring process: make a presentation for a potential new product. And I wrote that a war in Ukraine is possible and we should probably have a backup plan for the product in this scenario. How did I do that? Well, it's simple:

PEST analysis (politics, economics, society, tech) – just read the news, bro
SWOT analysis: how can external factors from PEST impact the product or the company? SWOT analysis normally includes internal factors as well, but for PAS they are mostly irrelevant.

The Russian army was near the border of Unkraine, so there was information in the news that the probability of war is above zero. Why? Well, the troops have guns, and they shoot the guns, that's what they do if they have an order. Why place the troops and don't order them to shoot? It's called politics, but sometimes the politics ends and the war begins. I personally didn't believe that it would turn out this way, no one I knew believed and lots of strategically-thinking people didn't consider it an option, but it was there all the time and the probability turned into a matter of fact. And it was that easy to notice and predict; it was in the news.

So there's usually some information about the probability of a PAS; the information is widely available, as it's a major event. What kind of event? Let's look at PEST again:

War for politics
Crisis for economics
Civil war as a consequence of radicalization for society
Systems hack/breakdown for tech
We could add flood, earthquake, fire or meteorite for natural disasters

In case you are not still panicking or ordered the bunker already, what are these events about?

What PAS brings

There's a book Trust by Francis Fukuyama. It's a shame I didn't read it, but I strongly recommend it. Here's my take on trust:

Trust is a fundamental basis of the modern world (meaning all the letters from PEST)
The fundamental flaw and the reason for poverty in the Global South is a lack of trust, and I observed it personally in Russia for 39 years
In case of PAS the most damage it does is it breaks trust: in the government, economics, society or tech

Just remember the latest bug causing software breakdown in the airports. We have to pay with our time and money buying alternatives, moving slower or reserving funds for possible losses caused by such an event. Anyway, let's return to TCO.

How PAS changes TCO

A mild economic crisis can cause many companies to cease to exist. Yes, they promised to support your software (or, worse, you used their online platform), but in the case of closed source you have nothing to do. A mild political crisis can turn tech giants against you, and that's why Europe is so "excited" about replacing software and SaaS services from the US with alternatives. It turns out, it doesn't take WWIII to be screwed.

The older logic was reasonable: in the case of WWIII we won't need this software anyway. Well, gents who said that, what do you say now? The US sanctions against ICC judges don't have a symmetric response, because EU and US were partners and trusted each other. Debanking, ban from apps and services. What's interesting is that it's a test, the same way lots of military technologies are sadly tested in Ukraine. Does it work? How do they react? That's valuable information. If you have this information, you are ahead of your opponents as you can leverage it. Opponents earlier considered partners, sad to say.

The issue with opensource is that technically it can be created by developers from the US, but you can still be independent. That's the trick, until anyone proves the opposite. You can put any sanctions you want on a country, but you can't prohibit it from using opensource solutions, and this case with the most heavily-sanctioned countries proves the point. The flawed logic is when one says "well, we'll always be on the other side, issuing sanctions". I have news: "always" doesn't exist in PAS.

Software is a bunch of code, you need this code – it's an important point, we need to stop here for a moment – but you also need the competence to modify this code, then you have all the degrees of freedom with your software solutions. I've seen some software, notably JavaScript frameworks, which are opensource, the documentation exists, but to make money on it, the docs are brief and you are encouraged to obtain info via paid courses. That's not good enough! You need a leading technology for every area with a healthy independent community creating all the documents needed to reproduce all the results you want with the software. Yes, Linus Torvalds kicked all the Russia-based devs from the kernel team. Yes, independent.

The next question: what do you need to create competence? There's a book by Quincy Larson How to Learn to Code and Get a Developer Job and he skyrocketed his career as a developer visiting hackathons and meetups. In the most introvert-filled industry, communication, communities and offline meetings are key. And I search through Eventbrite, Meetup.com in Germany and I cry, because there's nothing and it sucks. There are some meetups in Berlin, Cologne and Munich probably, and I'm in a rural area, and it can be the same in rural areas in the US. In any case, it's easier for me to find an English-speaking Discord group for Go development than to find anything online or offline in Germany. Is that the reason the US is so ahead of Europe regarding tech?

Conclusion

There's another level of trust: people as sentient species build trust when they meet each other personally. My job is 99% communication and trust is essential for me. And the thing I hate the most is 30-minute online interviews – it's impossible to build any trust with this lack of presence and this lack of time. In Europe people often consider environmental impact more important than personal contact. The contact can be a reason for pollution, but abandoning it doesn't solve the problem. And it's sad to live in this "videoconference" world, the lack of trust and the lack of means to build it being the reason for this sadness. That's all I have to say.

When You Let It Slip

2026-01-21T14:10:00Z

Intro

I have something to say regarding the recent discussion on "digital European sovereignty" and the dependence of the EU on software from the US. More than that, I have several examples where, in a few major (and one minor) cases, people escaped this dependence. I have to make a few disclaimers though:

I'm not into conspiracy theories, and I assume that the main motive for what's happening is money.
I don't believe in external abstract evil, but I know for sure that evil exists inside me, and laziness is one of its implications (right now I'm too lazy to exit the terminal and Neovim, for instance).

The story itself is very old and has been described multiple times, but in Europe it still works: our client sends us a docx document, we need the money, so we have to have MS Office and MS Windows installed, whatever they are called now. But that's the decision point. I have a small outlook on this situation in European companies, and I feel like the management of these companies doesn't see a pivoting point here at all, they just comply. And so it happens. There are a few efforts to migrate to Linux (mainly in the government), but just imagine the amount of license fees European companies, NGOs, and governmental structures pay for Microsoft and/or Apple. It's huge, and I don't see the point of not using Linux.

The Linux/MS Windows and MS Office case

Again, not being religious and evading conspiracies, I prefer Linux for being a better product as a desktop operating system. And DHH does too, having been an Apple evangelist earlier. And even gamers migrate to Bazzite being pissed off by Microsoft policy. For me, it's evident that the open source model just works better for an operating system, and for the desktop, you mostly need web apps nowadays, so it's more convenient and safer to run Linux for that. I still won't buy a Chromebook though, because not all the apps are online for my purposes, but for the B2B world, it's easier than ever to migrate.

The document format for exchange is still tricky, but especially for editing contracts, you could use apps to edit contracts collaboratively, and I've seen quite a few people who know how to use the "compare versions" MS Word feature for that. PDF has also proved to be a good solution for document exchange, providing "the same look everywhere" experience.

The argument "everyone knows MS products" seems flawed to me. I'm 43 years old, and I've seen a few people who know how to use Word (at least structural markup and contents auto-generation), Excel (formulas), and PowerPoint (a few guys and gals from consulting, one of them being a designer from McKinsey). "Everybody writes it in their CV" is closer to reality to me.

I used Linux when the Internet was delivered via dial-up modems and chatbots didn't exist. Now you can not only ask, you can generate a config file for anything effortlessly, so as 'modern AI' (at least what we have now) lowered the bar to enter development, it has surprisingly unnoticed lowered the bar for a desktop Linux user. Linux software got more mature, hardware support got better (even in Debian, he he he). And as development became more accessible, it turned out that Linux on the desktop just works better for that. Meanwhile, MS Windows is turning into AI slop both from the inside (the code) and from the outside (UI/UX). I also play Minecraft on Linux and use cloud gaming, by the way.

The TeX case

Was there a case where Microsoft didn't get in with its standards? Well, the scientific society is a great example of that. They somehow managed to organize themselves on an international level, and only sources in TeX format are accepted. Someone has to write a fiction (probably a thriller) about that and name the real heroes who did that. As a scientist, you are free to write in MS Word and pay someone to typeset your text in TeX format, but you can't submit it in MS Word. Did Microsoft try to penetrate this market? I don't know, but I could assume it for the "follow the money" reason, and this market is huge as well, but someone didn't let it slip.

The USB-C case

The EU presents USB-C charging unification as a major win. It's a win, from a consumer perspective and from an environmental perspective (which rarely match). The same could be done for document formats, and the document unification/open document format initiative exists, but it slips, not being enforced enough, in my humble opinion. Again, returning to USB-C: tough enforcing wasn't a problem there, rather one of the key success components, so fear it not. Microsoft wasn't able to repeat this "standards trick" with Internet Explorer, JavaScript, and HTML extensions, and IE as a product hopefully died, but Microsoft Office formats are still alive and well. I don't say they should die, I just say there's no way closed formats controlled by one company could be beneficial for all.

My humble case

This Linux/MS Office/TeX rebellion story is nice, as it takes almost nothing to write an article about it in a blog nobody reads anyway. But that's not the case, I wrote all my diplomas in TeX and I had severe resistance in one particular institution. "Could you just pay someone to type it in Word?" asked the director of this institution. "You are not allowed to impose a closed format from a particular company" – that's exactly what I said (I'll not elaborate on my feelings in this moment, but as you can see I wasn't friendly at all). Did they have the power to make me? We don't know that, events happened in Russia where it's hard to say if anyone was concerned about using TeX for a diploma thesis. Did I pay for that? Yes, sure, but I was always a pain in the butt for them, so they made me collect all the signatures twice, rewrite half of my thesis in a week or so, and defend my thesis twice. My point is that you don't let it slip by creating non-zero costs to make you use MS Word. They were in full control, but by doing this I somehow made it work my way. Could I have behaved myself "wisely" and complied? Sure, and I'd have nothing to write about. :)

Acknowledgements

As I don't believe in external evil, I have to acknowledge US corporations for contributing to society and open source with the products I use:

Adobe for CSS and PDF
Microsoft for VS Code and TypeScript, Playwright and contributions to the Linux kernel
Apple for WebKit, LLVM, and CUPS

Conclusion

It's a whole other story how this "let it slip" thing happens – I mean the decision-making process it takes. I strongly believe we let ourselves slide first, and then external compliance (I don't use "shit" here for some reason) happens. Being not sincere to yourself is a way to go if you want circumstances to slide. But when these circumstances hit you back, don't complain – you deserve it.

I'd like to add a dramatic quote by myself to this nonsense:

We are living in a time of ignorance and false assumptions. And it is our tolerance that allows them to rule.

And I'd like to thank George Orwell and Yevgeny Zamyatin for their books.

How I'm Screening Out Vacancies

2026-01-19T17:00:00Z

I just wanted to share my experience with applying for vacancies, because time and resources are obviously limited, and some descriptions cry out, "Do not apply here." So here are the red flags I use for project management, but you'll get the idea and will be able to apply them to other areas.

Nothing in particular means it's project management in IT, but there's no evidence of any other details. Managing IT services? Building infrastructure? Implementing solutions for business logic? Developing new digital products? After 22 years, I'm sure all these areas require specific expertise, so the job description should be specific as well. You just can't write "IT Project Manager" and post it.

Mix of skills is a great filter for greedy people. They want a project manager combined with a system admin and support. That's not "all-rounder" – you're just being greedy and unprofessional, so you'll get what you deserve: incompetence.

Not naming the system you implement. These are not names of ERP systems: SAP, SAP ERP, M365. Why? Well, SAP is the name of the company, for instance. Again, the problem is that you need relevant experience to implement any ERP system, and the experience required is very different for each.

Outdated tech stack. This could be the most arguable one, but in my personal opinion, if you're sticking in 2026 with PHP, C#, RPA, or no-code, you just create more problems than you're trying to solve, so these projects are cursed from the start.

Strange name for the role, like project coordinator or project controller instead of project manager, indicates a major misunderstanding, a probable lack of authority accompanied by full responsibility, as well as a possible intent to pay significantly less.

Developing an in-house ERP system is like reinventing the bicycle, and from an economic viewpoint, it's not viable unless a company is a vast retail network. For a midsize construction company – definitely a no-go, and a waste of resources for a false objective.

AI buzz – because that's not how it works. You don't replace people with AI, and you don't jump over maturity levels. You also can't compensate for incompetence with AI, by the way.

The End of the Midlife Crisis

2026-01-04T14:50:00Z

It's very easy to define midlife: before it everything goes up, and after it – down. It has two dimensions, though: one being a decline of cognitive and physical abilities, but another is the expectations – you will probably not meet better people, watch better movies, read better books. There's only one Gravity Falls and The Three-Body Problem, guys. :) Chasing brighter impressions is dangerous, as it leads to drugs or high-adrenaline adventures, both being, in fact, running from yourself. So, passing the midlife crisis is about stopping running and accepting reality. Mistakes are hard to accept, but the good news is that now you (hopefully) have made enough of them to benefit from this experience and try to do everything right.

So what is this reality about, what's frightening us? This stuff is not necessarily negative, by the way. There's the deepest pool in the world, Deep Dive Dubai, and it has some inscriptions on the bottom for those who dive there. Metaphorically speaking, there are some bullet points at the bottom of the midlife crisis, and the end of the crisis doesn't happen without reading and accepting them. Thank God I had time to reflect on them, and thanks to my psychologist I had support and a baseline. So, here we go, without further comments and conclusions:

Family and parental roles are the most important
Adulthood is about owning your mistakes
Most mistakes and their consequences can't be "fixed"
Sometimes there will be no external punishment for your mistakes, and you'll regret it the most
Nobody needs anyone; choosing a person as a friend or as a partner can only be a conscious choice
Being with a person who didn't choose you is a mistake
Giving up your boundaries or breaking another person's boundaries is a mistake
Having your own opinion and respecting yourself is important
Nothing will change in your favour accidentally; if you want something to change, do it yourself
Making a difference requires pushing through
Having a job is important, as being paid is a simple sign that you do something valuable
You know everything life is offering you, and the most valuable things are pretty basic and don't cost much money
It's easy to choose hobbies: those which are part of your lifestyle
Lifestyle is more important than goals
There are no external challenges
Without challenging yourself, life is boring and you'll probably degrade
There's no external meaning of life
Being a good man is important, and you can only try
Sometimes you just live on
Sometimes all options are bad, with not choosing at all being the worst
Downfalls shape you
We know almost nothing about life, so learning is important