Blog
Personal opinions and thoughts. If you are interested in (articles|opinions|statements|etc.) from teams or companies, check out their resources instead.
The blog is separate from my CV on the main page. The CV is the formal document, while this is where I’m a backend engineer with some unhinged opinions.
The blog went away once because I had nothing interesting to write about. It came back when I got tired of repeating myself: someone I know gets hyped about a topic, and I write the same wall of text in chat again. Now it lives here.
Behold, the blog v2.0! Deliberately provocative takes, in hopes of getting the point across.
Posts RSS
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'Write AGENTS.md' Skill
An agent skill to generate AGENTS.md, and why the output is, at best, a draft.
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If It Is So Dangerous, Then Sandbox It!
Step-by-step guide to sandboxing your agent; a bunker and a local data center are optional.
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Learn How To Prompt Already
You still have to learn how to prompt a model, otherwise who else will show it what good looks like?
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Krea 2 Prompting Skill
An agent skill for writing Krea 2 Turbo prompts, built from hundreds of local image-generation experiments. It covers everything from photorealism to adult content and pure organic monsters.
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Stop Enter-ing, YOLO It
A few sentences of prompting and then hours of <Enter> pressing, what a wonderful day (no)! YOLO it for the god's sake.
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You Don't Need A %Frontier LLM%
In most of the cases you don't need (Astra|Fable|Opus|%paste-a-new-LLM-name-released-this-week%).
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Real-Time Blackhole List (RBL) and DNS Blocklists (DNSBL) for email antispam
How Real-Time Blackhole Lists and DNS blocklists work in email anti-spam, how mail servers query them, and where they help and where they hurt.
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DNS Block TikTok
TikTok resists normal DNS blocklists in parental control apps. Here are the root domains that actually stop it, and why the obvious lists fail.
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The Definitive Send Email Guide
The complete guide to sending an email: parsing the recipient address, finding the receiving SMTP server, talking to it, and confirming delivery.
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DNS, rDNS, FCrDNS
Why reverse DNS alone does not prove a mail server's identity, how forward-confirmed reverse DNS (FCrDNS) works, and what that means for email delivery.
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The BCC Is a Lie
BCC is not an email header. It is a difference between the headers you write and the SMTP command you send, which is why blind copies leak so often.
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Graylisting, Nolisting, Unlisting, and Other Annoyances
Graylisting, nolisting, unlisting and other anti-spam tricks explained, with notes on why they annoy mail operators and what they actually stop.
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Mandatory Email Headers or How to Send Email (into Spam)
The mandatory headers an email needs to be accepted at all, how to compose a message by hand, and how to land in the spam folder anyway.
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How to validate an email address
Email validation is harder than a regular expression. What the RFC actually allows, what parsers accept, and how to validate an address in practice.
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SMTP components or Why sending emails is a rocket science
MUA, MSA, MTA, MDA and the rest of the SMTP chain explained, and why sending an email is more complicated than the protocol name suggests.