Roman's blog

At the end of the previous instalment I called foreigners an integration test for the Korean digital ecosystem.

In the previous post, I promised that the next instalment would be about the “Korean Banking Byzantine Nightmare”.

Introduction: The Road to Seoul When I initially accepted my offer to Coupang (and consequently made the decision to move to South Korea), I had an interesting mix of expectations and anticipations.

In 2026, we made a Really Seriously Big Decision to relocate to Seoul, South Korea (let’s see how it goes, but it will be for a couple of years at least).

I am mostly leaving this note to myself for future reference - but maybe someone else will find it useful too.

Some of us like to read news.

I have a very specific use case for my Onyx Boox Note Air 3: whenever I need to dive into a big topic, I ask ChatGPT or Gemini’s Deep Research to produce a report-style article.

Over and over again, on X/Threads/Reddit I see debates about why software engineers have to sit through “useless meetings” and Zoom calls instead of focusing purely on writing code.

I’ve just received my Beelink Mate Mini 80 Gbps dock for the Mac Mini M4, and after half an hour of playing with it, I’m really quite impressed.

Why Planning Matters (Even When It Fails) I don’t think it will come as a surprise to any of you, but every company, big or small, has to do planning.

This is the third post in my “Meta: 8 Months Later” series.

This is the second post in my “Meta: 8 Months Later” series.

Someone pinged me yesterday, saying they had been reading my posts before joining Meta, and now they’re curious what I would’ve done differently, knowing what I know now.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about anything vaguely network-related - well, that’s because everything’s been working fine.

It’s been a while since I published my original post on how to configure Obsidian LiveSync with self-hosted CouchDB - and many things have changed since then; in particular, I moved away from using this approach in favour of using GitHub - relatively rare…

There were tons of comments on my recent Threads post related to consuming large amount of documentation during onboarding process, and some comments really resonated with me to the point that I decided to put up a summary here.

Those of you who’ve been reading me for a while already know that I’ve joined Meta after 14 years at Google; what’s more, I’ve switched from a senior managerial position (basically, managing managers and sometimes managing managers of managers) back to the

Before I joined Meta, I had a few expectations about the engineering culture here.

Welcome to the penultimate post of the Safety UX series!

Welcome to the series of posts on the foundations of safety UX in Android.

Welcome to the series of posts on the foundations of safety UX in Android.

Welcome to the series of posts on the foundations of safety UX in Android.

Part III - Package Verification in the Android OS This is the third post in Android Safety UX series - you can find the first one right here.

This is the second post in Android Safety UX series - you can find the first one right here.

This post is intended to be the first of the series Android Safety UX series, talking about Google’s journey and findings in the space of keeping Android users safe.

Recently I’ve been playing a bit with Facebook’s Hack language and HHVM.

I’ve been using Obsidian for some time now; if this is the first time you hear about - think of Notion, but the one which is local to you - where you control where the files are stored, and what information - if any - is shared with other companies.

I am one of those people who are constantly torn between their desire to take physical notes right on the page of the book - and the desire to keep their books pristine and unmarked.

I have a confession to make: I really do hate voice messages.

Do you remember 2003?

I did mention before that I’m using dual ISP configuration, with one of them being fast (Virgin, 350/35) and the other is reliable (Andrews & Arnold, 80/20, 24x7, and generally much lower latency all around).

I have been using Audioengine HD3 speakers for a while now, and I am very happy whenever I’m using them on Mac or Windows.

Since I started working from home more or less full time, a stable broadband connection rapidly transformed from “I would really rather have it” to “I can’t function without it”.

Docker has a somewhat complex relationship with arguments.

I have a bunch of personal services which I deploy using Docker.

I love writing code for hardware.

I must have mentioned that I am an avid reader, and with the number of books I’m reading, keeping physical books is simply not an option (besides, all of our many, many bookshelves are already occupied by kids’ books, so there you go).

Blogging is hard.

In the previous blogpost we discussed how to configure PCI passthrough on Proxmox; presuming you’ve done it, it’s now the time to configure graphically accelerated remote access, so on we go!

Overview For my personal life I am using a combination of a Windows PC, which dual-boots into Debian, which normally works really well.