Industry on @zhisme :: signal over noise

Not Best Time For An Open Source Contributions

Thu, 18 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If intro sounds like an existential crisis to you, then yes – it should!

In the times before AI, there was a reason. You could add this to your CV and it would be valuable, someone could admire your work, find your PR, and even debate the decisions you made during an interview.
Some other resources, like the old Stack Overflow Jobs, allowed you to add your open-source contributions as widgets visible to anyone, and they had a very prominent place on that HTML page.

LLM Strikes Back But Not The Way We Wanted

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

AI strikes back, but not the way we wanted.

Recently I had an interview with a recruiter — a very interesting and unexpected interview for me. It’s a funny story that can teach you something and make you vigilant.
The interview started in a very cliché way: asking me about my experience, why I left my previous company, what I’m looking for, and what my goals are for a new workplace.

OpenClaw Chameleon Hype

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Chameleon With Claws

clawdbot/moltbot/OpenClaw — this chameleon flew through our tight-knit tech world and generated a spectacular amount of hype. 184k GitHub stars in the last month alone. For context, Rails has 56k stars after nearly 20 years.

So what awaits this clawed chameleon — a rapid rise followed by an equally rapid fall?

What It Actually Is

If you boil down what this tool does: it’s a daemon running on your machine that has access to everything on your computer, configured through plain text .md files for whatever tasks you need.

Theory vs Practice: Why Technical Interviews Go Wrong

Mon, 15 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Match interview complexity to job complexity.

Interview for what the job actually requires
System design interviews test interview prep, not engineering ability
Copying FAANG processes for non-FAANG problems is cargo cult
Knowledge you don’t use, you lose

An Exaggerated Hiring Story

HR contacts an engineer and asks them:

Hi, %username%
We are fast-growing, extra efficient, super sufficient
LIST of Fortune 500 FORBES %company_name%

Want to enlarge our staff and hire one another scintillating developer (YOU) to join our super friendly team
Let’s schedule a call to share the details and proceed with next steps

A word on internet privacy

Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Sweetest Cookies

I recently found that people fall into the illusion that all these dancing popups that block your sight from reading articles, news, and other sites, with some bullshit title stating “We value your privacy, please set your choice,” and that pressing reject will stop them from tracking you. But there’s always a tiny asterisk saying (we will store only necessary anonymous data to keep our product improving). But the thing is, your cookies persist between site visits, and Google and other companies already put some data that can help identify you (but yes, it’s so-called “anonymous” data – nowhere does it state that you are, for example, Evgeny Zhdanov and you’re interested in programming and drinking beer).