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Becoming a lead isn’t just another line in your resume,  it’s a mental shift. It’s the moment you go from being a developer to someone responsible for your code and the entire team. Next, you’re also listening, mentoring, negotiating, motivating, and knowing how to find common ground even in challenging situations.

Today, I’m a Dev Lead at EXANTE. We develop internal services for a select group of internal stakeholders. But my journey started long before that — with informal leadership, a few mentorship flops, and plenty of lessons learned the hard way.

Here’s what that path looked like.

How to compare the efficiency of SQL query plans? “Measure the execution time, of course!” — an experienced reader would say. And they would be absolutely right: from a practical perspective, the more efficient DBMS is the one that delivers higher TPS. However, sometimes we need to design a system that doesn't exist yet or predict behavior under loads that haven't occurred yet. In such cases, we need a characteristic that allows us to perform a qualitative analysis of a plan or compare two plans. This post is dedicated to one such characteristic — the number of data pages read.

Complex systems often appear chaotic or incomprehensible, yet closer examination reveals that such complexity can frequently be reduced to a simple underlying mechanism. By systematically removing layers of emergent behavior, one can uncover a fundamental rule or equation from which the entire system originates.

A few weeks ago, OpenAI announced that Codex is available for Plus users, and I didn’t miss a chance to try it. And today, I’m excited to share a guide to OpenAI’s Codex. As a developer, I’ve found it to be a powerful and practical tool.

We append the following metrics to the T-SQL procedure statements: execution count (x), CPU time in milliseconds (c), duration in microseconds (d), number of reads (r), number of writes (w), and @@rowcount value (n). You can display these as absolute values or percentages.

For years, we’ve studied Oracle to make PostgreSQL a more migration-friendly option. We introduced tools similar to SQL profile and SQL plan baseline as AQO and sr_plan extensions. In some cases, PostgreSQL even outperforms Oracle, especially in automatic re-optimization.

Migrations from Oracle to PostgreSQL are usually smooth performance-wise, and we’ve even developed session variable extensions to make the transition easier. While many enterprise-only features exist, PostgreSQL often integrates popular solutions directly into the core.

Manual resource management in low level C-style C++ code might be annoying. It's not practical to create good enough RAII wrappers for every single C API you use, but approaches with goto cleanup or loads of nested if (success) hurt readability.

A defer macro to the rescue! The deferred lambda will be executed on scope exit, no matter how it happens: you can return from any point, throw an exception (if allowed), or even use a goto to an outer scope. It is truly zero-cost and doesn't rely on C runtime or standard library, so it can be used even in kernel development.

In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through everything I’ve learned about using Google Jules — an asynchronous coding agent. I’ve kept the explanations clear and simple, so whether you're an experienced developer or a beginner, you’ll be able to follow along. By the end, you should feel confident working with Jules: assigning tasks, reviewing its output, and making the most of its capabilities. Ready? Let’s dive in. ;)

CAPTCHA has become a familiar part of the internet: distorted texts, “find all the traffic lights” images, audio riddles, and other challenges that distinguish humans from machines. Every bot-system developer or QA engineer automating web scenarios has at least once run into a script suddenly stumbling over a CAPTCHA. A natural question arises: can a program be taught to solve CAPTCHAs the way a human does—quickly and reliably? In this article I will try to figure out how AI CAPTCHA solvers are built, from classical OCR methods to modern neural networks.

Hi everyone, I’m Alexey. I’m a big fan of observability, and in this post, I want to share something I’ve been working on — the pgpro-otel-collector.

TL;DR: pgpro-otel-collector is an OpenTelemetry collector (aka monitoring agent) tailored for gathering Postgres metrics and logs — brought to you by PostgresPro.

Ashamed to admit, I still use Swarm in 2025. It's easy to explain, quick to set up, and simple to use. It's a starting point in the world of containers when full-blown Kubernetes is overkill. But Docker's evolution hasn't been the most straightforward. Over time, it began to lack a minimal dynamic proxy for Swarm - one that you run once, which configures traffic routing to microservices automatically - and forget about it. That's how Millau was born - an ingress-proxy and load balancer based on labels. It currently powers its own website and a few other projects.

Want Higher Google Rankings?

Try These 6 Backlink Strategies That Actually Work.

In the end, you’ll get tips to help you build a strong backlink strategy.

This article presents a business-driven approach to software architecture, focusing on maximizing profitability through technical decisions. It advocates for:

Distributed, stateless services with immutable models for scalability

Isolated third-party integrations without disrupting core logic

Simple, modular design 

Best for:

✔ Tech leads designing scalable systems
✔ Managers optimizing dev efficiency
✔ Stakeholders evaluating ROI on architecture

If you've ever run multiple instances of PostgreSQL or other software on a single machine (whether virtual or physical), you've probably encountered the "noisy neighbor" effect — when instances disrupted each other. So, how do you make them get along? We’ve got the answer!

Users don’t fear changes. They fear wasting time. Why users reject “best” products — and how to win them over.

Learning Shopify has been on my bucket list for a few years now. Plenty of people in my circle — friends, colleagues, and fellow devs — are all somehow involved with Shopify in one way or the other. Earlier this year, I finally had some breathing room between projects, so I figured it was the perfect time to give Shopify a proper look.

I started exploring the platform by setting up a dev store, poking around the admin, and skimming through the API manual. While this was a quick and easy start, it didn’t give me a deeper understanding of the platform. Plus, clicking my way through the UI felt repetitive and tedious.

That got me thinking: is there a more efficient, developer-centric way to manage a store? Something that I could run in a terminal, plug into a CI/CD pipeline, or script my way out of those mundane tasks.

I recently got my hands on Windsurf AI, and I wanted to share my experience with this AI-first Integrated Development Environment (IDE). If you’re a developer like me, always on the lookout for tools to boost productivity, this might be on your radar. So, is Windsurf AI the real deal? Let’s find out.

In this post, I’ll show you EXACTLY how to run Telegram ads in 2025.

In fact, this is the exact process I use to grow my Telegram channels and get quality subscribers for just 0.01 TON ($0.03 as of May 15, 2025).

My name is Ilya and I’m a Core Developer at Bright Security. In Bright we work on a DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing) solution that helps development teams find and fix vulnerabilities early, straight from CI/CD. My own path began in full-stack engineering, but almost a decade of shipping production code drew me ever deeper into application security. In this article I’m explaining key approaches on what SAML actually is and how we detect it in Bright using DAST.

"Electricity is not just a form of energy, but the invisible current that connects all aspects of our lives, from technology to nature itself."