The Privacy Paradox: How do you fix what you can’t see?
User: ‘Why did I get disconnected?’ Me, staring at empty logs: ‘Great question. I literally cannot tell you.’ This is the no-logs promise in action.
Our VPN has a strict no-logs policy. We don’t track user activity. We don’t store connection logs. We don’t identify individual users.
This is exactly what our users want—and need.
The Geography of VPN Performance
Why your VPN works perfectly in London but barely connects in Jakarta isn’t a bug—it’s geography.
After managing VPN services across 100+ countries, I’ve learned that “global coverage” on a map tells you nothing about actual user experience. The world isn’t flat when it comes to internet infrastructure. And that reality shapes everything we do in IT service management.
Life is a gamble, and we’re all players
We’re all gamblers, whether we acknowledge it or not. Life itself is a game of chance, and every decision we make is, at its core, a bet. From the mundane – choosing what to eat for lunch, to the monumental – deciding where to live or which career to pursue, life is a series of wagers with uncertain outcomes.
Good Strategy
As 2023 draws to a close, I find myself in a reflective state, contemplating about the year and planning the year 2024. A central theme that recurs throughout this reflection is the course we’re steering, which is shaped by strategy or, sometimes, the conspicuous absence of it. I recently read a book named Good Strategy Bad Strategy (Goodreads) by Richard P. Rumelt, which I consider essential for anyone looking to grasp how strategic thinking can channel collective efforts for the greater good. Here, I’d like to highlight a few essential insights from the book.
Capacity Management
Capacity Planning is sort of an art, but mostly maths. After being in the game for a while, you can start to sense the business demand trends and system loads, but that should be backed up by numbers.
There is an in-depth article written by Diego Ballona about Capacity Planning in the ByteByteGo blog showing how deep this subject can go.
Starting with observability in a company
When starting to implement observability practices in a company, work with the resources that you have. Until they are fully exhausted, or they start to limit your processes, only then think of buying a new tool that will lift these constraints.
I often get reached out by representatives of some observability/monitoring software stack offering their solutions. It’s not that simple. Tooling isn’t the answer if you are just starting. Problems won’t get solved with new shiny tools. If a company is technologically and culturally not prepared to embrace benefits provided by observability, there’s very little benefit of purchasing new tooling.
how to understand IT systems (my experience)
If you are not from IT world, it can get difficult to understand what are the IT systems and how they work. For the past couple of years I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the complexity of the IT systems and one of the things that helped me was to fitting it into simpler concepts.
Essentially, all IT systems must solve some sort of problem and deliver some value to users. They provide some input and expect something in return. What is happening in-between is the job of IT systems.
deployed changes can cause incidents even after 6 months
did you just deploy a change to prod? critical systems didn’t go down? seems there is no negative impact in general? awesome :)) but..
don’t congratulate just yet as although these changes didn’t impact your systems at the moment, they could start the process of butterfly effect.
hello_world!:)
Recently I’ve started to work in a mysterious area of IT world – Observability. It appears that it’s quite relevant in modern IT companies:)
In an ideal scenario, whenever IT systems fail, users shouldn’t feel a thing due to modern approach to system design. The resiliency of distributed systems should help the IT systems to either self-heal or fail-over to backup infrastructure.