tekBlueprint

The year is drawing to a close and it’s “a time to gather stones.” Or, to put it less pompously, simply time to take stock. I’m not sure if there will be any new articles; I’ve completed all the remaining drafts.

I decided to write a brief summary of the results for this past partial year (starting March 2025). I wouldn’t call it a good year, but it wasn’t all bad either. It also became clear who in life were just temporary companions – people who only appear when they need you to solve their own problems. As they say, “Nothing personal, it’s just business.”

I built the website and projects completely alone, juggling it with my main job and personal matters. Consequently, this work consumed almost all my free time – working without weekends, holidays, or free evenings. Considering I hadn’t had proper vacations for the couple of years prior, this was a grueling process in many ways. Though it did get a bit easier towards the end of the year. But, surprisingly, I don’t regret it. This work turned out to be the most useful and interesting thing I’ve done recently; it kept me from stagnating.

Website and blog

The first version of the site with a blog appeared, where I planned to share useful information. Initially, it was a quickly made and adjusted Hugo site based on a basic template, but later I rewrote it from scratch, considering the requirements for the published content. Fixing issues and implementing SEO recommendations took some time. I made the corrections gradually, and the search engines began to index the changes properly. I didn’t engage in any promotion or advertising at all, as I didn’t have the bandwidth. Currently, the site’s structure and content are quite satisfactory, and adding new articles is easy and straightforward. What’s still missing is a search function, and I want to decouple the comments functionality from GitHub – I’ll get to that later.

For change notifications on articles, I initially implemented RSS feeds (the link is at the bottom of the page). I suspect not everyone knows what this is or why it’s needed. Therefore, I additionally created a channel in Telegram to duplicate the links.

Towards the end of the year, I finished all the unfinished article drafts. It came out to nearly three dozen articles on various topics, including some new to me. I couldn’t elaborate on all of them in detail or with the highest quality due to time constraints, but hopefully, they proved useful to someone. Judging by the categories, the main focus turned out to be architecture and development.

Special thanks to Alexander Vasiliev for the article MySql vs Postgres. LIKE operator, advice, and feedback on the site.

Articles for 2025:

1. Active Object
2. Infrastructure Simulation
3. Code Obfuscation with ProGuard and JAXB
4. Architecture As Code
5. Architectural Decision Record
6. Not all AIs are equally useful?
7. MySql vs Postgres. LIKE operator
8. Specifications and Documentation Management
9. How to make systems communicate
10. Native applications with GraalVM
11. Project Charter
12. Calculation of sizing using a simple system as an example
13. Let The Music Play
14. Formula interpreter (DSL)
15. Technology Radar
16. Project Estimation and Planning Tool
17. Knowledge Base Hub
18. Technical Solution Selection
19. Spring Boot with built-in ReactJS application
20. Website development using Static Site Generator (SSG)
21. CI/CD with Gitea in HomeLab
22. Filtering data via SQL-like query
23. Authentication via OpenID Connect
24. Managing containers with Portainer for HomeLab
25. Organization and isolation of functional modules within the service
26. The IT market and employment in 2025
27. Using local AI models on a HomeLab
28. Development of projects from scratch or using ready-made platforms
29. API types and architecture styles

Projects

Alongside my blog, I was developing several projects from scratch that intersected with my responsibilities as an architect, and it was interesting to automate some of the routine processes. This forced me to revisit development ( frontend, backend, devops, etc.), despite my reluctance, as I hadn’t been doing it full-time for several years. These projects have consumed, and continue to consume, a significant amount of time compared to the blog.

Now, due to the nature of my current work, I can’t always use these projects. There aren’t many tasks for an architect, and they’re mostly useful for large projects. Several new interesting ideas have emerged along the way, but for now, I need to finish everything I’ve planned for the projects I’ve already started.

HomeLab

It’s not really related to the website, more like the supporting infrastructure, but it’s worth mentioning nonetheless. Ever since my days as a system administrator, I’ve disliked dealing with servers, switches, and all that setup, but it had to be done. Although, to be fair, I’d like to point out that everything has become noticeably simpler now than it was in 2006-2008. Perhaps I’ve gained more experience, I don’t know.

I was able to deploy an environment for developing projects and the website itself, as well as for tasks with neural networks. Given my limited free time, this significantly helped speed up the development and testing process, eliminating the need for manual work with builds, releases, tests, and everything else.

I’d also like to build a NAS to accommodate the growing data volumes for AI models and for backups. But I haven’t had the time for that yet, and there are alternatives.

Conclusion

I’m continuing to develop existing projects. Besides the CLI (documentation as code), I still need to create web service versions. I’ll be adding articles as new ideas arise and as I have free time.

Thank you for your attention, and good luck in the new year! :)