Technical Director s blog about development, technology and management
We were taught from childhood: don't talk back to your elders. But what do you do when age becomes not a sign of wisdom, but a license for unchecked rudeness? On public transport and in lines, they flawlessly scan the crowd and pick the safest target—a bewildered teenager or a tired mother with a child. They never approach sturdy men with that tone. Let's break down the anatomy of a everyday…
140,000 Kazakhstanis are registered at clinics they have never visited. The budget is losing billions, but that's not the worst part. To justify the payments, fraudsters are writing visits, tests, and even serious diagnoses into our electronic medical records. Right now, your medical history could be living a life of its own while someone is hitting their KPIs. We break down how the scheme works,…
Every month, you give 10% of your salary to the UAPF without even glancing at your payslip. And that's a mistake. Starting in 2027, the state will no longer guarantee protection of this money against inflation—the promise was quietly removed from the Social Code. For the generation that began working after 1998, this means one thing: we are left with a base payment and pennies from our own…
In the Great Steppe, power could not simply be seized—it could only be inherited. Legitimacy was the scarcest resource, one for which entire peoples were wiped off the face of the earth. How did the steppe nomads solve the problem of the monopoly on power? Why did the ancient Turkic law prove stronger than any dynasty, and why was the consent of the people more important than lineage? An in-depth…
Monthly contributions for health insurance are deducted from your salary. Miss a payment, and access to doctors is blocked in a second. Yet the same control system failed to notice how 13 billion tenge went to oncology care for Russians who were not entitled to this assistance. How did a hole in the issuance of individual identification numbers (IIN) turn into a critical vulnerability, and why is…
40,000 dental procedures for three doctors, ghost patient appointments, and operations that patients paid for twice. After six months of investigating embezzlement in the compulsory social health insurance (CSHI) system, one key thing became clear: exactly how our contributions are being stolen. The mechanics turned out to be frighteningly simple. In a system worth 2.4 trillion tenge, a patient is…
In April, Kazakhstan reported a record export of IT services totaling a whole billion dollars. It sounds like a breakthrough, but behind the impressive numbers lies simple accounting. Ozon and other major players are relocating their developers here to escape problems in Russia. Local legal entities write code for their own parent offices, and transfers for their salaries are recorded by the state…
The internet applauds "ideal husbands" who silently solve others' problems without asking for anything in return. Many consider this the norm, but few see behind the facade the figure of an endlessly convenient person. We've already seen this pattern in the example of the kelin institution—over the years, self-suppression breaks the system, turning patience into contempt. I've analyzed how the…
They say unmarried men risk dying 46% earlier than married ones. A convenient conclusion: a wife literally saves lives with her presence. But science disagrees. Let's figure out what the selection effect has to do with it, why a stamp in a passport doesn't heal, how a bad marriage kills faster than loneliness, and what men should learn from women to live longer.
One day, the government announces an investment of $10 billion in the Ekibastuz AI cluster and cuts social benefits by 860 billion tenge. It sounds like a digital breakthrough, but if you strip away the PR and crunch the numbers, the math stops adding up. Where will a gigawatt of energy come from in a strained grid? Who will foot the bill if the only confirmed billion so far comes from the state's…
Ten-year-old Turar lived with his father in a prison cell, and as a teenager endured beatings from the bais and bore a false surname to escape blood vengeance. How did an orphan running errands for an investigator manage to change history, lead Turkestan, and save millions from famine? The true, unembellished biography of Turar Ryskulov is a story of the era's cruelty, incredible tenacity, and…
Every day, tens of thousands of Almaty residents sit in traffic jams on Ryskulov Avenue, never giving a thought to the man whose name the street bears. Yet his life is a poignant drama. The son of a poor man who shot his oppressive boss, he grew up near the Verny prison, spending nights in a cell with his father. This boy rose from being a yard cleaner to the corridors of the Kremlin. He…
The average debt of a Kazakh gambling addict is 10 million tenge. Gambling addiction doesn't smell like alcohol and leaves no marks on the hands, but it takes away homes, destroys marriages, and drives people into a pit of microloans. While official statistics show only nine patients across the entire country, hundreds of thousands continue to place bets, hiding it from their loved ones. Read…
A beautiful idea: every Kazakh child receives $130 from the National Fund. But while we rejoice for the children, trillions of tenge are being siphoned from the same "oil piggy bank" to patch budget holes. Over 12 years, the fund has not grown but shrunk by $12 billion. With one hand, the state makes a symbolic gift to the future generation, and with the other, it hands them a real bill for our…
Kazakhstan promised to produce 100,000 IT specialists, but the reality of 2026 turned out to be harsh. While the state churns out graduates from courses and universities, businesses are ready to hire far fewer. The situation was compounded by artificial intelligence: AI took over the routine work that beginners used to start with, for a pittance. How did an ambitious state plan turn into a trap…
Borrowing one hundred thousand to repay one hundred twenty thousand, then covering it with a new loan—this is what a typical debt trap looks like in our country. By mid-2026, one out of every four tenge borrowed from microfinance organizations (MFOs) had become overdue. Why do the National Bank's strict limits only work on paper, how are courts saving bankrupts, and why does the SMS "Money…
Have you noticed how easy it is to lose three hours scrolling through social media feeds, and how hard it is afterward to recall even a single video? Our perception of time operates on two different counters: one tracks focus in the moment, while the other evaluates the past based on the number of memories. Short videos deceive both systems. They devour an evening and leave no traces in memory,…
The industry is convinced that after 30, a coder's brain goes downhill. That's why interviews target younger candidates, while seniors are rejected for being "overqualified." In reality, data processing speed does decline, but "crystallized intelligence"—the ability to see the entire architecture and avoid making a mess—only peaks around age 40. Let's discuss how ageism contradicts neuroscience,…
At Max Korzh's concert in Istanbul, fans raised flags of Ukraine and Russia side by side under a banner reading "to hell with politics." On the surface, it looks like an anthem of brotherhood between peoples. In reality, "music is above politics" is a central line of Kremlin propaganda, used to reframe aggression as a family quarrel. How Russia turned music into a weapon—from Leps, who paid for a…
The payment didn't go through at night, and I'm once again scrolling through four black windows with logs on a six-dollar server. What I wanted was simple: all records from every service in one place, searchable with plain SQL, stored for months. But the market has little interest in such a scenario—serious systems can't fit into a gigabyte, while lightweight ones require learning their own query…