Timur Iskhakov

A couple of posts in this blog started with a game mechanic, explored a problem behind it, and offered a solution (hopefully, an interesting one).

Lately, I’ve been working on a task that involves calculating the difference between two slices, returning unique elements that are not shared between them.

Some time ago, while investigating sudden spikes in memory usage, I noticed a particular piece of code that was the culprit.

If you’ve played FTL: Faster Than Light, a game described by its developer Subset Games as a “spaceship simulation roguelike-like”, you probably know it’s all about min-maxing.

Last time we were rolling the dice and calculating probabilities of getting certain sums, we used approaches that relied on brute-forces and binomial coefficients.

A while ago we looked at two string-searching algorithms: a naive search and a version that is optimized for SIMD instructions.

As someone who grew up watching The Matrix, Johnny Mnemonic, RoboCop and reading books by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, it’s no wonder I loved Cyberpunk 2077, a 2020 action-adventure game by CD Project Red.

Every now and then my friend Alexei and I play a fun little game unofficially called “Can you make it faster?”

Most of the backend applications I work on talk to other systems, like a backend (micro)service, another application, or a database.

In this blog, I usually write about approaches and technologies that help us build more efficient software.