It’s the end of vacation season now, so I’ll write about our recent one - starting a new Travel tag in this blog. It’s September now, but the trip itself happened back in April-May this year. We’d been planning to go to Japan the previous spring, but were too busy to properly plan it, so we only made it this year - though for a full three weeks, and it was really great.

We liked pretty much everything there: the food, the people, the nature, the cities, the transport system. We bought so much geeky stuff that we had to buy a new large suitcase. But let’s take it one step at a time. I’ll split the story into several parts and write them little by little - otherwise it will turn into a huge wall of text that I’ll never finish :)

I wanted to get a post out before I leave for a relatively long trip. This is the first post after relaunching the blog, and it would be funny if I promised myself to write more often and then disappeared again for who knows how long. I’ve done that before - about 13 years ago, and I wouldn’t want to repeat the pattern now.

I spent some time on GenAI-assisted coding last year, and when I wrapped up and published a small project I was working on, I felt like it would be a nice idea to write a blog post about it. While it’s a small project and it’s unlikely to be of interest to anyone but me, I thought it would be a good opportunity start sharing my experience on a broader topic of vibe-coding and modern programming in general.

I’ve completely neglected my blog, even though I initially planned to write here fairly regularly. Oh well - a year-end review post is a good opportunity to briefly describe the events that have happened recently.

Like many others, I followed the live coverage of WWDC. It’s interesting that, unlike previous events, some sites didn’t bother to do live coverage pages, and instead started tweeting about it. Most likely this has to do with their inability to handle the load properly: in previous years many of these sites had outages, and even now the same AppleInsider has switched to live coverage mode where you can’t see anything except the live feed, and at the top of the site there’s a huge red notice saying “During the live broadcast the page updates automatically” :)

October fourth was my last day at Svyaztransneft JSC. I worked there for almost four years, during which I:

• Worked on the development of almost all modules of our enterprise management system in one way or another (“Document Management”, “Budgeting”, “Contract Management”, etc.)
• Developed and improved the system’s base classes and components
• Developed tools for automating debugging, testing and other operations
• Set up and maintained a part of the development infrastructure
• Migrated the project to new components, IDE versions, and version control system
• Presented at a Young Specialists competition, where I showed off our team’s work on budgeting automation and took first prize.

The time has come to move on. Since October fifth, I’ve been working at the Moscow branch of MegaFon, where I’m developing a portal using Django/Oracle, statistics collection systems, and a number of other tasks.