Ivan Roganov — Blog

I learned to program because I was bored in front of a 486DX4 with 8 megs of RAM and a 160 MB drive.

What a token really measures: how irresponsible a person is.

Google is launching the Googlebook.

For forty years we pretended software was the product.

We had this amazing thing called a computer — precise, predictable, trustworthy.

An entire field of human knowledge goes stale because of one misunderstood word.

Insanity is taking anything to the extreme.

AI-powered support and overseas outsourcing are a great way to lose your customers.

Reading AI-generated slop at a birthday or a ceremony is the fastest way to ruin the room.

Tax every billionaire in the US and each person gets $8,700 — one time.

A 212-tape childhood VHS collection, Requiem for a Dream at 13, and then Star Wars VII.

Humans have way more than five senses.

A programmer's take on the AI hype: a system that needs constant babysitting isn't a working system.

Out of 3,863 women, none matched the 'average.'

Nobody's actually writing their code anymore — the LLM is.

LinkedIn is clutching pearls over the idea of rewriting the U.S.

A waitress served me infinite coffee.

Disney can't animate anymore.

People keep sending me doom videos about AI taking every job.

Yelling at inanimate objects changes nothing — and neither does yelling at your AI.

Life never gets easier — the better it gets, the more work comes with it.

Think of a cat.

Shove everything into Big Data and AI and you end up with gray average nothing.

Ideas are worthless — execution and selling are what make money.

UI and UX have turned into fast fashion — glossy effects that burn through GPUs, batteries and millions of dollars in power every day, only to be replaced next year.

An open letter to LinkedIn's 'security' team: every report comes back 'Everything is fine' while obvious scam bots and real harassment are quietly left untouched.

Modern UI is an unpredictable mess — swipes do different things in every app, buttons jump around the screen, and SEO bros churn out '101 tips' to make it worse.

A solution to a problem is something that makes the problem go away.

IT hiring has become a circus where common sense takes a holiday and absurdity is the norm.

A blunt rant on programmers who blame everyone but themselves: responsibility, professionalism, and why excuses are a one-way ticket to burnout.

How to clone Debian Linux by hand, without third-party tools: dd, partprobe, sgdisk, e2fsck, resize2fs, and a bit of Go — for when you wake up stranded on a desert island.

A hands-on tutorial on driving QEMU virtual machines straight from Go via libvirt — no virsh, no clunky wrappers, just clean JSON in and JSON out.

How RDP has quietly evolved over the last ten years: versions from NT 4.0 to 10, useful mstsc flags, shadow connections, security holes, and the future of Windows administration.

Round two of beating up NVMe-over-TCP.

Buying a brand-new HTC Touch Pro 2 on eBay for $40 in 2022 and diving back into the lost world of Windows Mobile, PDAs, Palm, Nokia, and offline dicts.

Tips and personal stories on not being a clueless bore on an international team: accents, dictionaries, idioms, jokes, emails, names, and the little things that bite.

NVMe is more than just a fast disk — it's a protocol.

How to stand up your own mail server using Mailu — a curated set of docker containers with postfix, dovecot, roundcube and everything you need.

A practical guide to writing articles: five elements of good writing — from storytelling and reading tons of literature to developing your own style and dealing with critics.

Grant Sanderson, creator of 3Blue1Brown, on applying math in business and programming, computing integrals in your head, and building a massive channel.

How to teach programming without killing the spark: three idiotic claims, understanding vs. rote memorization, and why 'couldn't learn' is a cop-out.

How a sysadmin turned pandemic video calls into a full-blown TV studio: Jitsi, Restreamer, BlackMagic, SDI cameras, and broadcasting to 2,000 employees for under $7,000.

Why computers can't think, what's actually dangerous about AI, and how we quietly handed machines the right to choose for us — from TikTok recommendations to hiring systems.

Why people don't read manuals, how to make docs even worse, and why you should write decent ones — a satirical reverse-advice take on documentation.

A blunt take on IT hiring: why AI resume filters are killing the process, why you should hire without idiotic interviews, and how to motivate programmers like actual human beings.

Part two on Blazor: WASM binary pitfalls, Razor gotchas, component communication struggles, lifecycle traps, and the state of the ecosystem.

Useful console services for sysadmins and developers: terminal streaming via seashells.io, file transfers through transfer.sh, and what to do in the console while you're waiting for a deploy.

Part one of how, instead of yet another ToDo list, we built a useful IoT relay control system in Blazor: Entity Framework, MVC controller, server-side rendering, and C# instead of JavaScript.

Part two of the series on Go's task scheduler: breaking down G, P, and M, thread parking, system calls, netpoll, and sysmon — all based on runtime source code.

Transcript of a live talk about building an IT career: from fixing a PHPBB forum at 14 to landing contracts without interviews — why helping people works better than any resume.