QA Engineer in a Product Company: How I Left Outsourcing and Stopped Panicking Before Releases

From outsourcing to product: a QA engineer’s honest journey to better releases, healthier work culture & real impact on the product.

From outsourcing to product: a QA engineer’s honest journey to better releases, healthier work culture & real impact on the product.

n8n is a powerful, extendable workflow automation tool that allows you to connect different applications and services. Running it on your local machine gives you complete control over your data and workflows, which can be done on Windows, Mac, or Linux systems. This tutorial covers the two primary methods for local installation: using Docker and using Node.js (npm). If you are interested, then read this article until the end. :)

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.

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!

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.

This is the pilot episode of our new interview series Meet the Developer, where we talk to the people behind anti-censorship tools. Our goal is to shine a light on the developers whose open-source solutions help millions of people stay connected.
In this first episode, we sit down with Toby, the lead developer of Hysteria, to discuss the project’s origins, technical challenges and his perspective on internet censorship.
Let’s start with an introduction. Tell us who you are and what you do.
Just call me Toby. I’m a software engineer. Previously, I have worked for a large company. But right now, I’m a co-founder of a startup with some friends.
Nice to meet you Toby! Would you like to share what type of startup it is, or is it a top secret project?
We are still in stealth mode.
Why did you decide to develop Hysteria?
It was originally a project I developed for myself when I was in college.
China’s global Internet connectivity has been notoriously bad for as long as I can remember (still not any better right now). Not just in the sense of censorship, but also in terms of connection quality.
For example, if you have a server in the US and want to connect to it from China, expect over 10-20% or more packet loss.
So if you set up a proxy server in another country to circumvent censorship, it would be painfully slow (the most popular tools back then were GoAgent and later Shadowsocks).
So Hysteria began as an attempt to improve my speed for watching YouTube videos.
It’s always great to see developers building something to solve their own challenges. I can relate to the packet loss issue. Either you suffer the packet loss, or you have to purchase an expensive server with CN2 routing, which will cost a lot.

In this article, I would like to share my experience participating in the Agentic Legal RAG Challenge 2026 hackathon. Our team is called "Sparks of intelligence".
Original article in Russian: https://habr.com/ru/articles/1014520/

Accessing Claude from Russia might seem like a daunting task due to the service's regional restrictions. In this article, I will explain in detail how to register for the web version and API of Claude, what tools are needed to bypass the restrictions, and how to use the service safely in the future. This guide is based on personal experience and includes registration methods that are current as of late 2024 and have been tested in practice.
After searching Russian-language resources, I realized that there is very little practically useful information, or it might not account for changes in the service's operation. Ordinary users have to gather information piece by piece - from various YouTube videos, forums, or superficial articles.
Therefore, I decided to create an up-to-date guide based on my personal experience and knowledge, taking into account all the pitfalls that an inexperienced Claude user might encounter.
Recently, I needed to run a VLESS subscription on Windows, make it work with my work VPN, and deal with all the associated 'joys.' I tried v2rayN, Nekoray, and Hiddify—and quickly realized I wanted to write my own client.
And so, singbox-launcher was born:
👉 https://github.com/Leadaxe/singbox-launcher
Below are a few details about why and what came of it.

A good way to improve product communication is to use special characters for their intended purpose.
In Russian typography, there is a rule for using quotation marks depending on the context.


This year, like many Habr visitors, I read with great interest the articles by the respected MiraclePtr, learned to apply his ideas and recommendations, and got practical experience with protocols, clients, and graphical panels. For many protocols, there are detailed installation and configuration instructions available to even the most inexperienced users who are just starting to explore the world of Linux.
I finally got around to the protocol briefly described in the article "Modern Anti-Censorship Technologies: V2Ray, XRay, XTLS, Hysteria, Cloak, and Everything Else" — the Hysteria protocol, which has already reached its second version. And I couldn't find a comprehensive Russian-language guide for it, which prompted me to gather all the information in one place once I figured out the main issues of installing and configuring the server and clients for using this protocol to bypass blocking.


In my previous Russian-language article on Machine Learning as Alchemy, I discussed the possibility of discovering novel solutions without relying on GPUs or expensive computing clusters. In this article, I will share my experiments with continual learning and the compositionality of thought using micro-neural networks, and explain what the philosopher Lev Vygotsky has to do with it all.

The Mandelbrot set. And it's a program! I made it in g++, a freely distributable C++ compiler. Read it! Very interesting. Using OpenMP, you do parallel programming at the multithreading level. And I decided - this would be a completely different level of quality! I implemented honest supersampling (antialiasing) - with 8x8 antialiasing (64 passes per pixel!!!) That is, not 1920 by 1920 pixels, but 8x8 more! 15360 by 15360 pixels! And then these 64 passes reduce by one pixel, but smoothly - and no longer 8-bit, but 24-bit TrueColor!

I finally decided to replace my old Linksys router and buy a new gigabit router with a built-in VPN – that's what most retailers call the feature, without specifying whether they mean a VPN client or a VPN server.
After some searching, I managed to find only one major seller – the orange one with three letters – whose website has advanced filtering for routers by VPN parameters, such as protocol and operating mode (client/server).
And so, with a list of several dozen candidates for purchase, the main question arose – what speed over VPN can each of them deliver?
As we wrap up another year, it's time to look back at what our department has accomplished. 2025 brought us 42 published papers spanning fundamental ML theory, applied AI systems, and cutting-edge optimization methods—from transformer Hessians and generative models to hallucination detection and matrix-oriented optimizers.
Beyond publications, our students won competitions and defended their theses: 14 Bachelor's, 9 Master's, 3 PhD, and 1 DSc dissertations. They also launched ambitious group research projects. Three of our faculty and alumni received the prestigious Yandex ML Prize, and our head Konstantin Vorontsov was inducted into the Hall of Fame. If you read our summer overview of thesis defences or last winter's year-in-review for 2024, this post continues that story with the next chapter.
In this year-in-review, we dive into the research highlights, share stories from our educational programs, and celebrate the community that makes it all possible.

In this article, I will show you how to build your first AI agent from scratch using Google’s ADK (Agent Development Kit). This is an open-source framework that makes it easier to create agents, test them, add tools, and even build multi-agent systems.

People have always valued privacy. Developments of the past decades — the internet, social networks, targeted advertising — turned data into an asset. The AI wave multiplies what can be inferred from crumbs. Phones and apps are integral to people’s lives. Some users keep everything on their phones; others are more restrictive. It shouldn’t rely only on user awareness: developers should provide the first line of defence and the tools that protect a user’s right to privacy. Even if you already deal with most of these pieces daily, I want to share my mental model — how I frame decisions with checklists and a few concrete examples from practice.