~/17-years · the medium keeps changing
Nikolay Glushchenko
software architect · seventeen years in
The medium keeps changing. I keep building.
I build real-time platforms: the kind that sit quiet at zero and then eat 100,000 requests per second ten seconds later, without falling over.
I used to write and review code every day. Now Claude does most of that, and I do the part that doesn't fit in a prompt yet: I hire people, onboard them, coach them, and keep the whole thing moving. Over the years that's meant building teams from scratch — ~60–70 engineers hired and grown. Most of the pipeline is AI-native now: a new module goes from idea to running in a couple of days.
~/work
Interactive experiences for live events, driven from people's phones — all it takes is a browser, nothing to install. The hard part is the load: a whole stadium taps at once, so the platform sits idle at zero and has to swallow 100,000 requests a second within about ten seconds, up to ~200,000 people at the same time. I built it from scratch and hired the team around it. It started as a monolith so we could ship, then moved to microservices on Kubernetes once the load — not fashion — called for it. It's modular by design: new activities plug in, and these days a new one goes from idea to running in a couple of days.
A mobile app that turns data from wearables into habits that stick. It had been abandoned for about a year; I was brought in to bring it back. It came with manual deploys from someone's laptop and a cloud bill mostly spent on the wrong databases. I rebuilt the team, put proper CI/CD in place, and moved the data layer to MongoDB — the bill dropped from ~$3,000 to ~$700 a month, and shipping got a lot faster.
I came in as the first and only developer and built the platform. Once it caught on, I got the budget to grow it, hired, and led my first team — that's where the management track began. Real-time audience engagement at live-event scale, years before it was a common thing to do.
Early career, eLearning for schools. I built a visual authoring tool that let non-devs create lessons directly — before it, every lesson needed a programmer. Also a real-time module for live online classes: teachers and students working together in the browser, long before that was normal.
no names here on purpose — the products and the events they ran at aren't mine to name-drop.
~/how-i-work
- Cost is a feature. I've cut infra bills by several times without slowing delivery down.
- Everything through CI/CD, multiple staged environments, code review not optional.
- AI-native now: Claude writes most of the code, I design the systems and run the people.
- And not just for code. I'm wiring AI pipelines into every role — engineers, designers, PMs, QA — wherever a step can be made faster or the output better.
- Much of it runs on a private skills library — internal tools I build for our own products and the way the team actually works.
~/oss · tools I built because I needed them