About

Backend systems are often easier to understand when their behavior is made visible. This site is a place for doing that: taking technical ideas that usually stay hidden behind requests, queues, databases and state changes, and turning them into explanations that can be explored.

Experiments are interactive, visual explanations: small models designed to make an idea easier to see and reason about. Notes are the written side of the site — a place for useful information and explanations, but also for anything I considered important enough to work through or wanted to share.

The site itself is also an experiment. I’m a backend engineer, not a designer, and I’m building it with AI to see whether I can make something visually interesting without having a design background. The problems I work on professionally are different, but as a user I have always cared about whether a product feels clear, considered and good to look at. I wanted to see whether I could move even a little beyond the default look of a developer site and make something with its own character.

I’m Maria Nichiporenko, a backend engineer currently working in fintech. That work provides some of the subject matter here, but it does not define the site. Before moving into software I studied physics. I still enjoy taking systems apart and understanding how their pieces affect one another.