Alex Korotkykh

If you didn’t win the genetic lottery, there’s no shortcut to looking good and staying healthy except diet and exercise.
And there’s no shortcut to reliable, secure software — only steady, methodical work.

One life lesson I still can’t seem to learn: there are no shortcuts.

Sometimes there’s luck — but you can’t rely on it.
If you weren’t born into wealth, there’s no shortcut to getting rich except hard work.

Engineers don’t burn out from long hours.
They burn out from solving the same problems over and over.

Incident reviews always end with ‘we should automate this.’
Six months later, we automate sending reminders to automate this.

Tech debt isn’t a bug. It’s a mortgage.
The real question is whether you’re paying it off or just paying interest.

The longer you’re a CTO, the less time you spend making technical decisions — and the more time you spend preventing bad ones.

If your deployment rollback requires a Google Doc and a prayer, that’s not CI/CD — that’s an escape room.

Competitive multiplayer games are better training for incident response than most workshops: keep calm while everyone blames everyone

Running taught me pacing. Startups taught me pacing with other people’s ankles tied to yours.

The closer a metric is to money, the less it lies.

Compliance is what you must do. Security is what you choose to do when no one is watching.

If your standup is 30 minutes and your incident review is 10, you’re optimizing the wrong meeting.

Most performance problems are product problems wearing a profiler.

I love reading, but never have time.
So I either listen to audiobooks while running,
or read on a Kindle before bed — to protect my eyes from blue light.

Since I’m cheap and don’t want to pay twice for the same book,
the best way to guarantee I never read it is to buy the hardcover

Microservices are great until your feature spans six repos and three release trains.

For most of others it’s simply a cargo cult

In my experience these interviews usually have multiple problems, good candidates might be expected to solve 5+ problems in an hour.
And again, the point of the post is, this approach makes sense at scale, when a company needs to do hundreds or thousands of interviews per day (eg FAANG)

Hiring signal: candidates who ask ‘what hurts today?’ beat candidates who ask ‘what stack?’

Culture isn’t what you write in Notion. It’s what survives during incidents.

The pain of microblogging:
I try to write short, sharp posts — provoke a bit, cut the fluff.
Then I get frustrated when people miss the nuance and take it literally.

Maybe I’m just not built for a format that rewards being loud over being precise.

Posting here is my way of fighting imposter syndrome.

I can’t tell if I’m a grown man and a CTO of a successful startup —
or just a kid who still needs the approval of his peers and teachers more than anything else.

I play a fun game with our hiring managers.
I tell them great engineers can pick up Spring fast, even without experience.
They nod in agreement — and then hire only people who’ve already used Spring.

Every quick hotfix is like putting tech debt on a credit card.
It accrues interest at 28% APR.

Reliability tip: make recovery inevitable. Prevention is optional.

GenAI is amazing at getting you to 90%. The remaining 10% is the part your users notice.

If your cloud bill is below $10k/month, you probably shouldn’t be using AWS in the first place.

There are two wolves fighting in me:
One says we made our lives harder by starting with microservices.
The other says we’d never have had time to split the monolith once hypergrowth hit.

If your OKRs don’t change how people spend their week, they’re just seasonal wall art.

Most architecture debates aren’t about technology. They’re about who has to wake up at 3 a.m.

Still can’t believe someone decided that declaring dependencies as >= 3.1.2 was a good idea — and half of the industry went, ‘yeah, that seems fine.’