Built a personal “AI Slop” Generator in 3 Hours

February 8, 2026 AI, Opinion No comments

Presenting you with AI Slop by Andriy Buday and Gemini: https://aislop.andriybuday.com 

I was recently challenged on why my weekly blog posts are not written by AI. I do have my strong opinions on this and arguments against it but before I delve into them I wanted to accept the challenge. So in about 3 hours of vibe coding I built an automated GitHub and Google Gemini powered workflow that picks either an idea from ideas.md file or one of my older blog posts on this website and (re-)writes a new blog post based on that and then uploads it to my dedicated aislop subdomain.

Solution based on GitHub Actions, FTP, Google Gemini

The entire project took about 3 hours from initial concept to deployment. This was pure vibe coding of ~40 git commits, a bit of setup in my bluehost, and some setup on github.

I learned about GitHub Actions fairly recently, but basically you can build a workflow based on yaml definition that would be triggered on a periodic basis. Additionally you can put your secrets into GitHub repo configuration. I placed my Gemini API key into secrets as well as I then placed my FTP access details (yes, I know it’s insecure and old school, but this is a 3-hour hack project). For FTP I created a dedicated account and only allowed a specific folder on my bluehost, where I also created a subdomain.

How it works: The workflow and Tech Specs

I asked Claude to summarize the technical details because this is what AI shines at:

Workflow:

  • GitHub Actions → triggers workflow daily → Python script picks unprocessed blog post or idea from ideas_tracking.json or blog_posts.json → load content and prompt Gemini via API with custom prompt → postprocess text to HTML → create HTML file and update blog_posts.json (database) → connect to FTP and upload files → git push changes for tracking and backup

Core Development Phases

  • Scaffolding & Engine (75m): Establishing the repository and building the Python script to handle web scraping via BeautifulSoup4 and AI integration.
  • Automation & Queueing (35m): Configuring GitHub Actions for CI/CD and implementing a JSON-based status tracker to manage 370+ URLs.
  • Refinement & UI (80m): Enhancing Gemini’s prompting for authoritative content, fixing Markdown-to-HTML rendering bugs, and building a responsive progress dashboard.

Technical Stack Highlights

  • AI & Logic: Python 3.9+, Google Generative AI (Gemini 2.0 Flash), and markdown2
  • Infrastructure: GitHub Actions for scheduling, Bluehost via FTP, and GitHub Secrets for API key management
  • Frontend & Data: Vanilla HTML/CSS/JS for the dashboard, with JSON and CSV files handling all state-tracking without a database

Thoughts (Why I am against AI generated content)

Is this the future of blogging? Maybe. Is it a future I’m excited about? Not entirely. I am definitely not going to share my AI Slop sub-blog unless that is purely to prove the point. I can barely stand all of these huge walls of text that are clearly written by AI but presented as if humans had written it. Why would you read it? You can just prompt your favorite LLM to give you answers you really need. I almost want to vomit from all this clearly AI generated text with no personal substance or real opinions. Sorry for being this vivid, but again: AI would not write that it wants to vomit because of the text it has written. 

And just to be clear, I do use LLM as a tool to help with my writing, but just not to write instead of me: Don’t Outsource Your Thinking: Why I Write Instead of Prompt

So where does the value of blog posts come from?

In my opinion the value comes from giving your own perspective, from sharing your opinions, driving your own arguments, and, yes, while bloggers can and do use LLM to find blind spots and to arrive at a stronger argument, the arguments should still come from the author, otherwise it is all just crappy AI Slop (unless that was the intention originally).

My ‘AI Slop’ bot can publish 100 posts a day, but it can’t build its own perspective. It can only synthesise perspective based on data it has received before.

My concluding argument is that efficiency in generating text does not equal value in reading text.


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Excellence as Flight

February 1, 2026 Opinion, Success No comments

Note: This is a non-technical post exploring drive for excellence.

I was thinking about what drives people who are top of their field? What makes Alex Honnold climb Taipei 101 without ropes, what makes David Goggins run ultramarathons with broken ankle, what makes Elon Musk sleep on the floor at the factory, what makes Jensen Huang and other top CEOs keep grinding, what makes Bryan Johnson (the “don’t die” guy) blueprint his life, or Tiger Woods, or MrBeast, or whoever you can think is out there pushing the boundary of whatever they are doing.

What makes you do what you do and push for more?

AI generated image based on the text of this blog (damn, so dark)

When I was in high school I was best in class, kind of. Anything STEM absolutely. Physics, math, chemistry were my best subjects and I went on to win many regional competitions and almost made it to nationals. But at the same time I was one of the worst students in physical education and music. I could not run and could not sing. I still remember those classes as some of the traumatic experiences of my life. Not being popular, fearing rejections I poured my energy into what I knew worked, which was the deterministic world of coding, math, and hard sciences. Many of us do the same throughout our lives. 

When I think about people I read about or people I know and admire there is always something in their story that made them push for that excellence. On the outside sometimes it looks just like a bit of luck or good upbringing, which do help for sure, but there is always something else. I will try to build my point by running down some names and you will see how the story adds up.

David Goggins didn’t run ultramarathons because he loves running. He ran to kill the weak person he was. His “cannot hurt me“ and “never finished” books are a great testament to that. I read both of those and it is obvious that the man was drowning his psychological pain in physical pain, much like some alcoholics.

Alex Honnold free soloed so much because he didn’t like the idea of having people around him (from one of the interviews) and because this is the way to cancel all the noise. When you are free-soloing El Capitan, you cannot worry about your taxes, your relationship, or your awkward childhood. You must be 100% present, or you die. I rock climb myself, here is my “rock climbing as a way to cope” post.

Jensen Huang famously said that “greatness comes from character, and character isn’t formed out of smart people, it is formed out of people who suffered”. He pushes for excellence because he views ease as a threat to survival and if you watch some of his interviews he constantly mentions the fear of running out of business.

I asked my daughter what she thinks drives MrBeast. Her first response was “money”. I poked more and she said “power”. I think on the surface this is true, but by looking at extreme obsessiveness over metrics and quality I think he is terrified of mediocrity and plateauing. He said explicitly “I am terrified of the day the line goes flat.” 

Bryan Johnson is probably an example of almost pathological fear and unacceptance of death. I am glad the guy is there experimenting on himself for all of us.

I’m not into golf, but by reading about Tiger Woods it becomes clear that for him the only way to feel safe and worthy was to win, all installed by childhood trauma.

I asked my wife to give me an example of someone famous, she gave me Coco Chanel, looking up her early life, her mom died at 12, dad abandoned her, she was raised in an orphanage sewing there and her designs are a desperate need to never go back to being the abandoned girl in the orphanage.

“You are either the best or you are nothing” – not quoting anyone famous, just one of my colleagues describing the harsh truth of some of the upbringings.

I tried to come up with counterarguments to my theory that people that drive for excellence are those that sacrifice something and struggle. I thought of Richard Feynman, Usain Bolt and a few others, and also  looked up some more names like Bill Gates, Larry Page, Charles Darwin, those who showed up as those with highly favorable upbringings. It is clear that not everyone perfectly fits the narrative I’m building. Indeed many of these people lucked out, were born at the right time and had the right start or were driven by some pathological curiosity or something unusual about them. But at the same time, when you think about it, Bill Gates was famously paranoid, remembering the number plates of employees. He definitely wasn’t running from poverty, but he was running from the terror of losing. Even the “lucky” ones are often running from something, like fear of failure, fear of irrelevance, or something we don’t know, which is more likely.

We often romanticize excellence as a pursuit of happiness. But looking at all of the examples above, it becomes clear that excellence is rarely a pursuit of happiness. It is very often a flight. It is running away from mediocrity, away from trauma, away from the noise.

By definition, to be the best, others have to be behind you. But the real race isn’t against them. It’s against the version of yourself you are terrified of becoming. Struggle does not guarantee success or excellence, actually it is survivorship bias to think so, millions of people struggle and get nowhere, many people struggle in destructive manner, so I see it only as necessary fuel on the path of excellence. Combine that fuel with agency and focused obsession, and you have the way to reach the peak.


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The Internal Protest: Parenting Your Own Procrastination

January 25, 2026 Personal, Productivity No comments

My 9 year old son has been giving me a bit of a challenge lately, like protesting all the time, not wanting to go out, not listening to anything, saying “no” to everything, well you get it, all kids do this at some point and then again at some other point. So tiresome, but, well, this post is not about parenting.

While he has an adult to protest against, I realized that his external protesting is identical to the internal protesting I feel fairly often, and each one of us feels at times. We just don’t feel like doing something. It is likely a very similar mechanism to what kids experience except we are adults to ourselves. One part of our brain knows we “have to” do something, while the other part resists, looking for a shortcut or a break, like telling yourself that you will do it tomorrow. You know, tomorrow that mysterious place where 99% of human productivity is preserved.

Gemini LLM generated hacking of the Temporal Motivation Formula based on contents of this blog post.

In adults, this resistance usually looks like procrastination. Sometimes it is just watching Netflix or doing literally nothing. This form of procrastination is bad if it is supplemented with feelings of guilt. But often procrastination masks itself as productivity. One of my past coworkers once told me he “procrastinates by doing work.” He would avoid the one terrifying, high-impact task by doing ten smaller, easier tasks.

I do this too. If I have to work on a complex design document that requires untangling a messy legacy system, I might find myself refactoring some code instead or tidying the issue tracker. It feels like work, but it’s actually a form of avoidance. There is a term for this. It’s called structured procrastination.

I’ve often wondered if people who push through the pain actually get further (“no pain – no gain”) or if this is a recipe for burnout and failure. Do the structured procrastinators find their own path to success?

In the past I found some personalized ways of dealing with my own procrastination, such as: self-imposed deadlines, external visibility and accountability. Structuring things and setting very clear goals works best for me. While these mechanisms work fairly well, they have a ceiling pushing beyond which leads to frustration and burnout. So I was thinking what is that key solution that would truly keep you going in a sustained manner and bring internal satisfaction.

By looking at some of the psychological research on this, it appears a few things are key to this:

  • Self-determination theory suggests that human motivation relies heavily on a sense of autonomy. My son does not like it when I tell him to go out for a run or a walk because he has no choice, but he sometimes joins me in the garage to kick the punching bag or “lift weights”. You might not enjoy that your project is basically given to you by your boss without your own input.
    • Lowering activation energy. When dealing with large tasks oftentimes the hardest is just overcoming the initial 2 minutes of starting the work and that’s it. The protest is usually about the start, not going. Once my son starts doing something he usually gets through it. When I start some unthankful task at work I usually bring it to the end.
  • Not feeling guilty. Procrastination is a stress-relief mechanism in a way. If you feel guilty about procrastinating you feel stressed, which makes you want to procrastinate even more. Beating yourself is counterproductive, instead just resetting next time without guilt is so much better. In one of my posts I wrote “starting something and then failing is OK as long as you start the cycle again and again, pushing the time of a failure further and further away in any given cycle” as such connecting periods of higher motivation together creating an upward trend.
  • Temporal motivation theory explains why “tomorrow” is a graveyard for human productivity. Here is the formula:
  • Where:
    • Expectancy: How likely am I to succeed?
    • Value: How big is the reward?
    • Impulsiveness: How easily distracted am I?
    • Delay: How far away is the deadline?

If we don’t see value in something or if we think our chances of succeeding are not high our motivation drops. Likely, my son doesn’t see much value in going out for a run with me and his expectancy of enjoying or succeeding is very low. Similarly, if the deadline is approaching sooner our motivation increases. Having the formula above in mind is helpful, so instead of pushing with “willpower” you can do few tricks:

  • Decrease the denominator by shortening the delay via micro-deadlines (like completing sub-task by end of day).
  • Increase the numerator either by clearly connecting the value of your work to a big goal (like this weightlifting today will make me more attractive) or increasing chances of success (I cannot run 10k, let me run 5k so I can do it).

Conclusion

When my son protests he isn’t trying to be difficult. He is just experiencing a low in his motivation equation, maybe the task feels imposed, too difficult, or low value. As an adult, I have to parent myself with the same empathy. Instead of beating myself up for “being lazy”, which only increases stress and procrastination, I need to move the levers that I know work and have worked for me in the past:

  • Restore autonomy. Remind myself I choose to do this.
  • Lower activation energy. Just start for 2 minutes.
  • Not feeling guilty. Instead, restart with new energy and do better next time.
  • Hack the formula. Create micro-deadlines and easier wins.

Either way, we need to find proper ways to self-parent ourselves. Good luck.

.


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Frameworks for Generating Ideas

January 18, 2026 Uncategorized No comments

Is there a framework for generating ideas? Do ideas just happen? Today I struggled to come up with ideas for my next blog post. None of my initial ideas truly resonated with me. Next I just started thinking about what my process for coming up with ideas looks like. Usually it is just writing down a bunch of random thoughts until one of those sparks interest in me. But then a realization came to me:

Sometimes ideas come as visualization at a later time – the other day I could not finish a bouldering (climbing) problem, always falling at the last move. I was walking and visualizing myself climbing and different moves and could not solve it. I was walking later in the day and a ‘toe hook’ idea came to me. The next day I went to the gym and simply flawlessly executed.

Similarly today I was looking at my keyboard and struggling to come up with ideas and then it came to me: ideas are not some kind of “magic” that appear from nowhere, but rather they are processes and you can make them happen and come to you. I don’t pretend to have a patent on generating ideas, otherwise I would sit on a pile of billions of dollars, but, anyway,  some thoughts:

Step 1: Input Loading. Any idea out there is some variation of previously existing idea, some synthesis of multiple existing ideas, or some application to the new context. We can say that Idea: Idea = Input A + Input B (in a new context). For example my blog post about Global Maximum was a combination of computer science “hill climbing” and my career story.

Step 2: The Constraint. Staring at a blank page is very intimidating because there are way too many degrees of freedom, but having constraints is helpful. One constraint I’m operating under right now is time (it is 6:00AM, I’m at a coffee place, and I have 1h20m to write my blog post). Another type of constraint is topic based (like how I connect athletic performance to software careers, blog post). There are more constraints to come up with “artificially”.

Step 3: Diffuse mode thinking. Everyone knows the cliche about the best ideas coming in the shower. This is actually a known phenomenon called Diffuse Mode thinking. It is a key step in James Webb Young’s technique for producing ideas:

  • Gather new material.
  • Work over the materials in your mind.
  • Put the problem completely out of your mind.
  • Your idea will come back to you with a flash of insight.
  • Shape and develop your idea into practical usefulness.

Conclusion
This “framework” might not be complete but I think next time around I will open this blog post to remind me that this is simply a process and I can be in control of it and use techniques.


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Building Personal AI Agent

January 11, 2026 AI, AI Agent No comments

Rich people always had access to assistants (+chief of staff) that would help them with all kinds of chores, would advise them on things, or just do things behind the scenes. We live in an interesting time of AI, where anyone has access to these fabulous LLMs that can do some of those things for us. Like, I’m sure most of us are doing our travel plans with some help from LLMs, or we make buying decision, etc. It is just mind boggling how good these things are becoming!

In parallel, as software engineers, we keep hearing about AI agents all the time. We use AI agents at work. The most useful and prominent example of LLM agents are coding agents. You are likely using Claude Code at work. I already heavily rely on LLMs to track many of my personal goals, to critique me, to give suggestions, etc.

But what if I build a personal AI Agent to avoid repeating things and to make it watch me more proactively?

Vibe Coding AI Agent

There we go! Let’s build something simple first. My use cases for LLMs are fairly simple, nothing too crazy and very closely tied to my Life Goals and areas of life. For example, I have chats with Gemini labeled like “Nutrition”, “Finance”, “Career”, etc. When I eat my breakfast I snap a picture of it and estimate my nutrition intake. When I’m considering stock buying I do research with Gemini. When I plan a trip I build an itinerary with LLM, etc. I track my weekly progress in google docs. I track my finances in spreadsheets. The more I think about this the more I realize there is a room for a personal AI agent that is highly tuned to my personal needs and would orchestrate all of this. Additionally there won’t be any ready solution online, because this is so personal, so I’ve got to build one agent for myself!

Email Digest Agent after ~3 hours of Vibe Coding

So what I’ve built in 3 hours is a “personal AI agent that automatically generates daily digest emails by fetching data from multiple sources in parallel: it retrieves stock market insights for ~X tickers, extracts the current week’s goals (with checkbox tracking) from a tabbed Google Doc, pulls my monthly focus items, pulls net worth data from a Google Sheets dashboard, then uses Gemini to generate a professionally formatted HTML email summary and sends it via SendGrid. The system is built with LangGraph for workflow orchestration, uses OAuth2 for secure Google API access, and preserves formatting details like checkboxes (✅/⬜) by converting them to email-compatible emoji before direct insertion into the final email.”

Tech Stack

  • LangGraph 0.2+ – Workflow orchestration with parallel execution
  • LangChain 0.3+ & Gemini API (gemini-2.0-flash-exp) – LLM integration
  • Google Docs/Sheets API – Data sources with OAuth2
  • Alpha Vantage API
  • SendGrid – Email delivery
  • Python 3.9+ – Runtime

Conclusion

This project is just scratching the surface of what is possible to be built very quickly for personal needs. The most exciting realization for me wasn’t the technical implementation but how accessible it is to connect things together. Setting up all of the API keys and then vibe coding all together is so straight forward that it is just unbelievable.

I will continue this project next week to make it actually properly work for my needs and then will host it on some server to send me those digests. Next steps would be to supplement it with prompts to LLMs to give me quick ideas for what I should focus on, better tracking, etc so I can achieve my goals quicker. So exciting!

Go ahead and build something for yourself!


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2025 Recap. 2026 Plan.

January 3, 2026 YearPlanReport No comments

I skipped similar posts for the last three years because I didn’t feel like exposing too much of my personal seemingly worryless life all the while so many of my relatives and people in my home country of origin are in distress. But, maybe, I’m wrong to close myself for reasons I cannot control. I did set goals for 2023, 2024, 2025 and did track them the same as for the past 16 years (!). Sometimes I think that I should have had more success in life by now if I was setting the right goals and if they were ambitious enough. At the same time, everyone has their own path in life, contributing variables, including luck and misfortune, and demons to fight in their heads. I am of the opinion that life is a struggle. A struggle to fight off suffering and grow, otherwise there is no purpose. Time will show how mistaken I have been, but after all, at the scale of this universe, I’m nothing. My life is for me to live.

2025 Recap

Moved to the US. Joined Meta. Made almost 2x more money than previous year. Wrote 24 blog posts. Read 4 books (a lot less than I wanted). Built a habit of single coffee a day and waking up at 6:30AM. Learned some Muay Thai (2x/week). Took swimming lessons and took kids through swimming classes. Went to 7 metal concerts and went into the death wall mosh pit a few times. Cut my social media consumption almost to 0. Failed at building more muscle. Failed to run 10k <48m. Averaged 348 active min / week. Made new climbing friends. Climbed outside. Explored WA, OR, HI with family. Solo-hiked a volcano. Drove on sand dunes. Drove fun sports cars. Built unforgettable experiences. Paddle boarded and biked. Vibe-coded bunch. 3D printed bunch. Realized that time has no mercy. Didn’t give up.

2026 Goals

I have very rigorous and detailed plans for 2026 with weekly tracking, milestone check-ins, and mechanisms to make it work. Over the years, I tried, simple lists, % based approaches, OKR-based mechanisms, latest I have is some hybrid approach with multi-layers, weekly routines and check-ins, and AI assisted course-correction:

Vision (Level 0) → Areas (Level 1) → Annual Goals (Level 2) → Weekly Routines (Level 3)

Vision: Live a healthy, worry-free, experience-rich, financially independent, and fulfilling life. Close the gap between reality and the dream lifestyle, while building a legacy and having no regrets.

  • Health & Sport: Stay healthy for long, have a healthy strong attractive body and sharp mind. Have a comprehensive health protocol that covers strength, cardio, mobility, and nutrition. This can include weights, kickboxing, climbing, running, and rest days to have proper recovery periods. Balanced food. Good sleep. Enough water.
  • 2026
    • Gain extra 8lbs (4kg) muscle weight (150lbs->158lbs).
    • Run 10k race (good time ~52min or less despite extra weight).
    • Maintain climbing performance despite extra muscle weight (V4-V7 range).
    • Can swim 4 full laps freestyle non-stop. Take 2+ swimming lessons.
    • Video of perfect shadow boxing I can be proud to share online.
    • 3 macrocycle rest weeks with minimum activities (50-70% less)
    • Weekly routines:
      • 400 active minutes / week (vigorous 2x, regular 1x).
      • 3+ cardio / week (e.g. 2 kickboxing + 1 run).
      • 2+ strength / week (e.g. 2 climbing + strength session in the end).
      • 1 dedicated strength training w/ barbell / week
      • In bed at 10:00PM, alarm 6:25AM
      • Daily intake: creatine [counter], D3 and/or multi [counter], protein [counter]
      • Healthy food: 3 times a day, diverse, calorie surplus daily (3,000kcal) tracked with Gemini.
      • Min 2.5L (85oz) water. Tracked with Gemini.
  • Financial / Career / Professional: Goal: Increase net worth and streams of income to enjoy freedom of time and life experiences. Target: $XM net worth by age 47. Explore alternative streams of income and potential new terrains. Semi-retirement post 47.
    • 2026 FAANG high-comp (optimize RSUs, bonuses, 401k etc). Climb the corporate ladder as long as I enjoy it and as long as it contributes to the other areas of life. Spendings <30% of post tax income to supercharge savings/investments.
    • Goals..
      • Max out 401k & Backdoor Roth IRA
      • …
      • Weekly:
        • Spend 1h time-boxed on investing (learn & act).
        • … 
  • Family: Set up kids for success in life…
  • Worry-free: …
  • Experience-rich: …
  • Legacy / Growth / Learning / Fulfillment: …
  • No Regrets: …

Each and every section is as rigorous as my “Health” section. The mechanisms that make these things work for me:

  • Routines & Habits
    • For example, I had a desire for a single coffee a day routine. I built it in 2025, for 2026 I don’t even have to write it down as it is going to be a default.
  • Weekly
    • On a weekly basis I do 2 things:
      • reviewing annual goals and deadlines to see if there is anything I can do next week or if I’ve done the past week
      • being accountable by copy-pasting my weekly report template and filling-it in with completion
  • Course-correction and AI support
    • We live in the age of AI. I found that this year AI will be indispensable for planning, tracking, and adjusting my trajectory to achieve these goals.
    • Specifically for each Area I have a running thread with LLM asking it to identify blind spots, critique me, explore, brainstorm, etc.
    • Tracking with AI. For instance, I found it working perfectly to track my nutrition intake: “Add 22oz water”, “add glass of water with creatine”, “add 2 turkey bacon white sandwiches from Starbucks”, etc. It tracks my day perfectly.

In life “you can have virtually anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want”. It might look like I’m trying to do too much with my plan. The reality is that there is the cost in not doing many things. Like, not watching TV, killing my social media consumption, not socializing enough, not having many friends. The cost is in pushing through bad moods and grinding at work when I’d rather be doing something else. It is the constant fear that I might not be spending enough time with my kids or enjoying the money I have right now.

To decide is literally to cut off, so I’m trading off things. I am cutting off comfort to make space for these goals. There will be collateral damage, but I would rather pay the price of trying than the price of drifting. Time will tell if the trade was worth it, “but in the end, it doesn’t even matter”.


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Escaping the Local Maximum: Hill Climbing and Paying Debts

December 27, 2025 Career, Personal, Success 2 comments

I would like to talk about something that might be hard to accept and might trigger the feeling of regret but that’s an important topic we must entertain in our brains. Ask yourself a question: If you are climbing a hill right now, is that the highest hill you are capable of climbing?

In computer science, a Hill Climbing algorithm can get stuck at a Local Maximum, a peak that is higher than everything immediately around it, but significantly lower than the highest possible peak, called the Global Maximum. To reach the Global Maximum, you first had to walk down the hill leaving comfort, taking risks, and crossing the valley of uncertainty to reach the right hill and then climb again.

I have climbed too many local maximum hills in my life. The most prominent was my time at the United Nations (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria. UN is a highly prestigious place to work, offering a tax-free salary, numerous perks, that might include education subsidy, extra long paid vacations, great pension payments, etc. If you get high enough you even get a diplomatic passport and be treated as a VIP anywhere in the world. Life in Austria is very stable, you get an incomparable quality of healthcare, and a great free education for kids. It is just the pinnacle of stability and quality of life you can get in central/western Europe.

One of the interesting aspects of working there as a software engineer was that I had to read some very old code. There were not many people I could consult about that code, as the people who wrote it have either retired, or…  died. I recall my interactions with much older colleagues at work and this made me realize that that place, while very prestigious and comfortable is exactly that – way too comfortable. A place to work towards your retirement, not the place to thrive and grow.

The problem is that you cannot realistically climb any higher. Even if I were to spend a good 10 years to reach a director level (unlikely) I would still be limited by “Noblemaire Principle” and my income and net worth, despite being very high in comparison to other salaries in Austria, will grow very linearly. Just to pull some numbers, a director at UN would probably make just <200K$ net, when a senior engineer with just a handful of years of experience at FAANG in the US would be taking home (after tax) a lot more than that. In a summary: D1 at UN is the peak of that specific hill. Hard to get, hard to maintain, capped upside. When merely L5/L6 at FAANG is still close to the base of a gigantic tech hill that is almost uncapped upside.

Moving to Canada, going through years of uncertainty (another immigration process), was my climbing down of the Local Maximum hill only to climb a bigger hill. In a way that was paying “Immigration Debt” in the valley. I worked for Amazon for a good 2.5 years and after switched to Google, which was a great boost to my income and career trajectory. Unfortunately I was still climbing the wrong hill out there. Yes, a lot bigger than the previous hill, but still not the biggest hill on the horizon. At the same time, gaining more certainly by becoming Canadian was my walk along the valley and staying at the “base camp” for a period of time just to get to the next big hill more comfortably.

The debt is not always just temporary paycheck cuts or discomfort of moving, sometimes the debt comes in the form of relationships. I had my university friends back in Ukraine, and my connection with them slowly and gradually decreased as I moved to Austria. These days we don’t even wish each other happy birthdays. The same happened when I moved to Canada. I still have a base of good friends in Austria, but the timezone difference made it challenging to keep the connection. When I visited Austria two years ago it was great to meet all of them, but unfortunately that’s the high price I am paying for moving around. The same has happened again by moving to the US, some friends are just north across the border. I have friends everywhere but the depth of connection is dissolving.

I am now at Meta in the Seattle Area, looking up at this very big mountain. It is a challenging, rewarding ascent, and I am focused on the path ahead. The “risk” of down-climbing from Vienna paid off with a trajectory I couldn’t have imagined back in Europe. Because I have down-climbed before, I no longer fear the descents. Life is a struggle, I accept it, if in some years spot a higher peak, maybe one with a different terrain or climate, whether it’s an updated career growth or something else, I won’t hesitate to pack my gear, walk down into the valley, and start climbing again, ready to pay the price again.


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Planning and Direction

December 21, 2025 YearPlanReport No comments

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable” is probably one of my favorite quotes about planning. This is to mean that things are rarely going exactly as planned, but the value of going through the exercise of planning is so great because it prepares you for many possible scenarios, it makes you think about the problem more holistically with the end in mind and spread over time.

The new year is coming soon and I am working on my next new year resolution. I’ve been doing those since 2011 (yup, that’s about 14 years). I’m often obsessed with creating annual plans and meticulously following them. Oftentimes this brings me the results. I think the reason why I ended up at Meta in the US was because it was on my “Career Strategy” document and I did plan for it, I did put some work behind that. Other years I’ve built some habits like doing exercises often or finally made myself wake up early in the morning after many years of struggle. So, yes, I do see very and very tangible results of my annual plannings.

Now, where can this go wrong? You can have a perfect plan and execution but if your direction is wrong you end up in the wrong place. The way to think about this is in mathematical vectors, vectors have both a direction and a velocity. Too much velocity off course and you are further away than steady slow pace but in the right direction. This is both applicable to projects at work, like writing perfect code for a feature that no user cares about, or personal life, like pushing to buy a big house to only realize later in life you missed out on experiences in life.

As I write my next annual plan I am trying to be more deliberate about the direction. Yes, I will still have my spreadsheet and my habit trackers, I can’t help it. But I think this time around I will  be placing more emphasis on long term goals and if my plans bring me there and also challenging the plans some some proper checks, like:

  • The Why Check: If I achieve this goal perfectly, will I actually be happier/better off, or am I just doing it because it seems like the “next logical step” or “just the right thing to do”?
  • The Vector Check: Am I optimizing for speed in a direction I might want to abandon next year?

Being honest with answering these questions might be challenging, but that’s the right thing to do. I encourage people to do planning for all of the aspects of their life. The mental exercise of understanding your constraints and resources is indispensable. Just going through that exercise might reveal something you didn’t realize earlier and even if things won’t go as you planned, you would know to do a better job next time and succeed next time around. Give it a try.


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Passion vs. Fear: What Tony Fadell’s BUILD Taught Me About Overthinking

December 14, 2025 Book Reviews, Opinion, Personal No comments

I needed a reminder today that things sometimes get tough. It is important to understand that everybody ‘fights their own demons’ and you are not alone. Everyone around is struggling, sometimes you see this, but most of the time you don’t. 

To be brutally honest, I’m a big overthinker. I go through all possible and impossible scenarios in my head. This often leads to me spending too much time on some problem, almost getting to the state of paralysis, but sometimes this does pay off. I remember years ago, I worked on a migration of a service, I simply could not get to sleep before checking each and every edge case. The thing worked perfectly, but how much mental capacity it had consumed was probably overboard.

Even the most successful founders and people around have similar struggles. I just finished reading “Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making” by Tony Fadell, creator of iPod and Nest. I’m bringing it in this context because there are chapters on personal growth, struggles of building something, making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and rising again after making those mistakes. Fadell doesn’t pretend the anxiety and stress aren’t there. Instead, he offers a framework for navigating the chaos. Here are some takeaways:

Killing Yourself for Work

One of the chapters in the book talks about the difference between ‘working hard’ and ‘killing yourself’, one coming from passion and being driven to build great things, and another coming from fear (being terrified of what happens if you don’t work hard). I found for myself that I do like to work hard, but also need to be honest about the source of that drive. If passion that’s sustainable, if fear then it is not.

Failure is the Data; Fear of being wrong

Fadell talks about his time at General Magic as a spectacular failure that taught him everything. It reminded me that my ‘overthinking’ is really just fear of being wrong. I am often fixated on avoiding mistakes, but the only people who do nothing make no mistakes. Failure is just data for the next iteration.

Data vs. Opinion; Avoiding “analysis-paralysis”

My paralysis usually comes when I’m looking for data that doesn’t exist. The book simply says that sometimes data isn’t there (yet) and it is ok to bet on your intuition and just move (“just do it” as Nike’s slogan says). Overthinking without data or with made up data is just spinning wheels and wasting energy.

The Crisis Point

The author argues that any meaningful project will have a ‘Crisis’ point. I realized that in my career I had so many projects where it really felt that things were about to fall apart only to find a way to still ship things in the end. Stress during those times is normal, it is just part of the process. If you had zero stress, then it is likely you were not pushing yourself or your team outside of the comfort zone.\

Conclusion

There are so many other great chapters in the book, like “Why Storytelling”, “Assholes”, “Heartbeats and Handcuffs”, “How to spot a great idea”, and so many more, but one lesson I’m taking from the book today is that the path of success and growth is always hard, often filled with failures, stress, and hard work. If you are driven by passion and wanting to make a difference, then push for this, but if your hard work is coming purely from fear, it might be a good time to take a break and see what you can learn.


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A/B Test: Optimizing Career Through Mentorship

December 7, 2025 Career No comments

In sports, no matter how elite the athlete is, they always have a coach. Even absolute world champions have someone who will critique their form, strategize with them about the next event, encourage and push them when they are tired. Yet, in software engineering, I often see people don’t get any help and just try to power through their own career. Imagine, that you can ‘test run’ your career decision, run A/B test on it, and then make the best decision to be deployed to production. This is essentially what mentorship is about.

Q: Why would you want to have a mentor?

There are always people who have been there before. There is someone who went through the same promotion, joined the company you are considering joining, works in the domain you are interested in, built a startup, or is simply in a similar situation. You want to talk to them and learn from them. You will benefit from leveraging their experience. Instead of doing your own O(n) you can learn about optimized O(1) approaches right away.

Q: Shouldn’t you make your own mistakes?

Yes, absolutely. Make them and quickly recover, at the same time there is only so much of this life. You can live a lifetime and not make enough mistakes, and some of them are painful, especially if they are ‘one way door decisions’. So I say: make mistakes naturally while learning how to avoid them and knowing about the mistakes and lessons of others. Other people’s experience is so much cheaper to learn from than making costly mistakes on your own. I think the room for making mistakes is infinite, so, maybe, make them when it is more of ‘two way door decisions’ but get as much advice as possible for irreversible decisions.

Q: How do you get access to mentors that seem inaccessible?

Let’s say you are interested in some particular tool or technology and you know of a person who is voice in that field, say for AI that would be Andrew Ng or Andrej Karpathy. You probably won’t get 1:1 with Andrew Ng, but what you can do is find people who report to them or work with them, who appear on the same white papers as them and get in touch with those people. You can also be very specific when you reach out asking about a very specific part of their work and offering something in return. And I am not talking nonsense – I personally had small exchanges with major bloggers (back then) and with authors of some tech tools, books. What I’m saying is that people are more accessible and open than you might think. This requires high effort, but the ROI on a single response can be career-defining.

Q: Why would anyone be interested in helping you?

Although it might seem you are asking for someone’s time like if it was their charity to you, but that is not the case. There are multiple reasons why they will be interested in helping.

  1. Teaching you forces them to sharpen their own thinking. This is the top of the learning pyramid. 
  2. Networking. More senior engineers are looking for high-potential engineers and mentorship is often a way to build the bench and network across. It’s a win-win.
  3. Sometimes it just gives people satisfaction to know that someone acted on your advice and was able to make progress.
  4. A way of staying in touch with what is happening on the ground, technology stacks, career challenges, etc.

Q: How to ‘match’ your mentor?

One of the mentors I had once said that finding a good mentor is a bit like dating. Not everybody ‘clicks’ even if they seem to be the right fit on paper. In my opinion you need to have a session or two with them to understand. If you are in a big company there are official channels to establish mentorship and I encourage you to try it out. If you are looking for a mentor outside, it might be a bit weird to ask someone ‘Will you be my mentor?’ (sounds almost like a marriage proposal on a first date), but instead you probably want to ask for specific advice on some topic, share your own thoughts on the topic of their interest and build the relationship naturally. Oftentimes for mentorship to be effective you don’t have an official ‘mentorship’ label, and it can just be occasional lunch.

Q: How do you spot a good mentor?

In my opinion, a good mentor will be asking you questions that make you think a lot. They would challenge your thought process. Give new perspectives. Good mentors give you better questions than the ones you come up with.

Q: How do you prepare for the first session?

Treat the first session like a system design interview. Have requirements and constraints in mind. Explain the goals of ‘design’, give some timeframes. For example: “I want to learn how to deal with ambiguity, and this is the situation I’m in …, my goal is to close this ‘gap’ for my next promo by x”.

Q: How do you get the most out of mentorship?

Follow up! Yes – that’s the best advice I have. After each meeting with your mentor, make sure to follow up on the action items. It does multiple things: you are not wasting their or your own time; you are showing respect to your mentor; you are building discipline in yourself. Going to your mentor with the generic “How do I grow?” The question is a bit discouraging. Your mentor will have to put a smart face on and give you a generic answer. Who needs that? Go with very specific questions, create action items, report back on them, put work in. Close the loop!

Q: What’s my model for working with mentors?

I like being accountable and keeping people accountable. As such for my mentorships I keep a list of Action Items and generally strictly follow up on them. This isn’t the only valid approach. Some people find value in more casual and relaxed ‘coffee chat’ conversations.

Q: Do you need a ‘board of directors’ or just one single mentor?

I think getting more perspectives is always healthy. You need one person who is technically better than you, one who is politically savvier, and one who understands your personal values. There is, obviously, a limit to how many mentorships you can handle. Personally I have 1 or 2 mentors at any given time and besides them I have some network connections that work a bit like mentorships where I learn from them, even though there is no label ‘mentor’.

Q: When and how to end the mentorship?

Sometimes you outgrow a mentorship relationship. Let’s say you reached the goal you wanted to achieve. If you have mentorship within the bounds of a company, this is super easy to do, just tie it to the performance review cycle, thank them, leave them good feedback they can use in their perf review and move on. It is fair, a good mentor wants you to outgrow them, it’s awin-win.

If the mentorship is outside of a company, then it is more likely to have natural evolution. Never ‘ghost’ your mentor. Instead give it a logical conclusion, thank them, mention switching to more of ‘ad-hoc’ sessions instead.

Conclusion

You cannot really A/B test your entire life and career. If there are ways to move faster and learn from others then I would say mentorship is definitely one of such ways and you should leverage it. Whether you are looking for a mentor or are ready to be one, remember: we grow faster when we grow together.

P.S. This post is a ‘Thank You!’ to my current and past mentors as well as my self-reminder to leverage this even more in my life for other areas, such as my sports, personal growth, building ideas, etc.


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