Tech blog about the boring stuff.

Building a Self-Hosted Chess Blunder Trainer

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 12:35:00 +0100

When you cannot learn to play well - make a product to get better.

How I Lost 30 Kgs in a Year

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 09:00:00 +0100

No-BS story of what worked for me to lose a lot of weight and hopefully avoid regaining it.

My Stance on AI in Programming

Sun, 01 Feb 2026 14:00:00 +0100

Disclaimer

All of the thoughts below are personal opinions, they’re not sponsored ones (I’D SURELY LOVE BEING SPONSORED but this blog has somewhat like 2 readers), the AI usage here is close to 0, with the exception of the grammar and style review, as the author can’t type 4 words without making a grammatical mistake.

A lengthy intro

AI is polarizing. People are in love-hate relationship with it and there are obvious reasons for that: fear of jobs being taken away from humans, enormous amount of AI-slop in every media format possible, endless AI-first solutions for non-existing problems, VCs pouring billions into AI solutions, endless AI-written linkedin posts about the bright future of AI, you all know it, it’s fatiguing.

State of Homelab 2026

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:00:54 +0100

Evolution of a self-hosting hobby: from clueless to amateur.

Curriculum Vitae

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A Bit on Personal Finance and Python

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 10:34:34 +0100

A short note on my financial tracking journey

Gunicorn Timeout Is Not What You Think It Is

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 15:15:10 +0200

Gunicorn timeout is not a request timeout, it's the timeout of the whole worker not being responsive.

Langchain Dissapointed Me

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 13:58:58 +0200

A short story of how flexibility of langchain becomes its weak spot.

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 5

Tue, 01 Jul 2025 15:00:00 +0100

Deep dive into Prometheus graceful shutdown: analyzing the run.Group pattern, TSDB persistence, scrape manager coordination, and multi-component synchronization

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 4

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 15:01:00 +0100

Deep dive into Celery graceful shutdown and architecture with RabbitMQ/AMQP: in-depth analysis across four projects (Celery, Kombu, py-amqp, billiard)

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 3

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 18:00:07 +0100

Tracking how application shuts down within the modern kubernetes environment

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 6 - nginx's Master-Worker Coordination

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Deep dive into nginx's graceful shutdown implementation: signal handling, master-worker coordination, connection cleanup, and shutdown timeouts

Book Review: Another Fine Myth Series

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:49:22 +0100

A summary of reading: Another Fine Myth series.

A Rant on New Bluetooth Headphones

Sun, 19 May 2024 11:16:04 +0200

How to spend several hundred bucks on a new generation of headphones and stay unhappy due to bad engineering and UX.

Book Review: Blindsight

Sun, 31 Mar 2024 10:50:23 +0200

A short review of the jaw-breaking hardcore sci-fi novel by Peter Watts.

Making a Sudoku Solver: Having no Idea What I m doing.

Thu, 21 Mar 2024 21:00:31 +0100

Creating a Sudoku solver using neural networks having no prior on how to solve sudokus algorithmically or what to do with neural networks.

Book Review: Essentialism

Sun, 10 Mar 2024 12:26:41 +0100

A review of a very dull and boring book. Essentialism: A disciplined Pursuit of Less

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 2

Sat, 09 Mar 2024 16:39:54 +0100

A short exploration of what Docker, containerd, runc are today. How they comprise a modern container stack, how they implement a management of graceful shutdowns, how linux signals are handled within the containerized docker apps.

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown: Part 1

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 14:07:31 +0100

A deeper look into the world of graceful shutowns in Linux processes: exploration of how signals processing works. Linux signals from the ground up.

Blog Updates: 19.02.2024

Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:52:27 +0100

Blog updates: 19.02.2024.

Book Review: Are Your Lights On

Sun, 11 Feb 2024 11:49:34 +0100

A summary of reading: Are Your Lights on. Problem solving in it's core and finding out what's the real problem to be solved.

Book Review: Broadcast by Liam Brown

Mon, 05 Feb 2024 20:10:49 +0100

A small review of the "Broadcast" book by Liam Brown

My Productivity System Search Failure: Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 21:40:39 +0100

An exploration of how I thought to be effective, tried various systems like GTD, Zettelkasten, Pomodoro, failed in it, and what I came up with.

How I prefer conducting code-reviews

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 21:40:00 +0100

My framework of conducting quality code-reviews.

Python Multiprocessing Quirks on MacOS.

Sun, 14 Jan 2024 10:17:00 +0100

Issue with python multiprocessing mode, Django and its tests OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY magic variable meaning

I Don't Like Paper Books

Sun, 07 Jan 2024 19:51:40 +0100

New purchase

Recently I’ve purchased a paper book. I did it only because I was really eager to read that specific book (here it is). The content was good, and I will definitely make a short review afterward, but the process of reading a physical book was quite painful to me.

Ooops, here goes the nostalgia

I’ve spent quite a lot of time in my childhood and adolescence reading books. There was a library on the ground floor of the house I lived in and it had been an endless source of information and entertainment before the internet came to my life.

How to With John Wilson: a must-watch series.

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 20:57:22 +0100

If you’re looking for a way to spend several evenings I have something to recommend to you.

There’s an awesome TV-series slash documentary on HBO called How To With John Wilson. The premise is quite simple: the narrator asks the question “How to do X”, for example, “How to make small talk?” and goes to the in-breadth exploration of the topic, meeting various people, getting into all sorts of bizarre situations and acquaintances.

Learning music and the guitar as the never-ending failure.

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 11:32:30 +0100

TLDR;

I’ve spent 10 years trying to become good at guitar and music, failed at it almost completely, and now give a last chance before understanding, that the whole stuff is just not my cup of tea.

Preface

I strongly believe that people nowadays do not share enough the ways they fail in life. Everywhere you look you will see the history of success, social media feeds will make you feel bad for sitting the evenings in front of your TV watching that new anime series.

How This Blog Is Built

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 20:54:40 +0100

I did not really put a lot of effort into making this project and composed it out of scraps I literally had at home and with the help of tools I already knew and some new things I wanted to try out more in the past.

Hardware

I have a server rack under my TV with a terabyte of storage, 8-core ARM CPU, a neural processing unit, and the network switch.

About me.

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 12:12:30 +0100

Hey there, I’m Andrew.

I’m a staff software engineer. Born in Belarus, lived in Ukraine, currently residing in Warsaw, Poland. I write stuff in Python for ~10 years. I’ve been working in product companies, outsource and start-ups, and I hope I have something interesting (or boring!) to write about.

Things you may expect reading this blog: reviews of technical books, deep-dives into the world of Linux, containers, cPython/Python, progamming quirks, software engineer career, and whatever the stuff I find intereseting.

Why yet another blog?

Tue, 26 Dec 2023 11:30:16 +0100

Really, why?

Hey there.

It’s been a long time (as of this moment in Dec. 2023 ~10 years) I’ve been a software developer and throughout these 10 years I’ve been wanting to have my own blog and website.

The biggest problem for me was always the thought that there’s nothing for me to write about that can be of interest to the people outside of my life. Everything’s been written and for every minor and major topic there’s already an expert in it, writing lengthy explainatory posts or large tech company blogs having enough resources for their articles to be professionally written, polished and reviewed.

Anatomy of Graceful Shutdown

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A comprehensive series exploring graceful shutdown patterns across different technologies and platforms, from Linux signals to Kubernetes orchestration.

Projects