Where’s the line between
“I’m lazy and don’t want to go to the gym”
and
“I’m listening to my body and taking care of myself by skipping today”?
02.03.2026 17:19
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Where’s the line between
“I’m lazy and don’t want to go to the gym”
and
“I’m listening to my body and taking care of myself by skipping today”?
Bounded contexts.
Reasonable test coverage.
100% infrastructure as code.
Working CI/CD from day one.
Sometimes constraints are a gift.
Fun fact about Pliant #3:
Most startups can’t afford to “do tech right” at the beginning. Time to first release usually wins over everything else.
In our case, external dependencies — vendors, licensing, legal work — bought engineering something rare: time.
We used it.
Premortems are one of the most underrated reliability rituals.
Instead of analyzing a failure after it happens, you gather the team beforehand and ask: “Imagine this project failed — what went wrong?”
It’s much easier to spot risks before launch than to explain them after.
Most systems don’t collapse. They slowly normalize worse behavior.
Managers who obsess over velocity usually don’t understand what slows teams down.
Most ‘overengineering’ accusations come from people who’ve never been on-call for the thing they underengineered.
I’m at the stage of my career where sleep is a feature, not a luxury.
AI won’t replace taste. And taste is still the hardest skill to hire for.
Management is just applied empathy with consequences.
Fun fact about Pliant #2:
All of our tech teams follow the same naming pattern: two words starting with the same letter — an adjective and a noun.
We started with Fancy Features and Mighty Machines as placeholders until we came up with something better.
Seven teams later, we didn’t
Stability is what happens when you stop being clever.
Getting older is realizing rest is productive.
GenAI is great at answers. Judgment is still a human bottleneck.
There’s no such thing as ‘simple’ in distributed systems. Only familiar.
Every abstraction saves time — just not always for the person who wrote it.
Fun fact about Pliant #1:
In December 2020, when we issued our first card as a B2B payment card provider, the very first transaction was buying a giant plush pink unicorn 🦄
Priorities were clear from day one.
Experience is knowing which problems are not worth solving.
If your AI strategy is replacing humans instead of amplifying them, you’re just automating mediocrity
Authoritarianism doesn’t begin with tanks.
It begins with people saying:
“Trump can’t cancel elections — there are laws.”
“Even if AfD wins, they still can’t revoke passports — there are courts.”
Laws don’t enforce themselves.
We had to put down our cat today.
She was with us for 15 years — since before we were married, through 5 apartments, 3 cities, and 2 countries.
Pets are a part of our lives.
For them, we are their whole life.
Pet yours. Tell them you love them.
It’s only Kubernetes if it’s from the French region of Kuberne.
Otherwise, it’s just sparkling container orchestration.
the outcome will likely be disappointing — regardless of seniority.
Shared context often matters more for success than the number of years of experience.
An engineer can be very capable and experienced, but still fail if the manager doesn’t share enough context.
If no one explained how A/B tests are run, what level of change is acceptable without design involvement, or when marketing sign-off is required,
- With seniors, you talk about why
“We need to increase conversion on this page — see if there are simple changes that might help.”
Recently, I realized this framework also applies to the relationship between an engineer and their manager.
There’s a fairly common framework to explain engineering seniority:
- With juniors, you talk about how
“Go to index.html, find the button tag, change the color to #D0312D.”
- With mids, you talk about what
“Change the CTA button on the landing page to red.”
As a kid in Ukraine, −25°C meant schools were closed and we were free to go sledding.
Outside. Happily.
Twenty years later, −6°C in Berlin and I’m negotiating with myself just to leave the house.
Aging is not the upgrade I was promised.
We’re hiring experienced Engineering Managers at Pliant.
Multiple domains, including customer onboarding and platform infrastructure.
We value clarity over ceremony.
If you enjoy enabling strong engineers and keeping teams fast as they scale — let’s talk.
pliant.bamboohr.com/careers/225
Took my first almost-three-week vacation in 5.5 years at Pliant.
The company survived without me.
Achievement unlocked.
Back to being indispensable.
Merry Christmas to everyone celebrating.
Hope you get at least one day this year without alerts, incidents, or Slack pings.
Enjoy the peace while it lasts.