Recent content on Int Maker
Currently doing the redesign of Private Captcha website and I needed to get some contractors onboard. Upwork is the usual suspect for hiring, but the amount of noise is the problem. My usual filter on Upwork is just to check who actually reads the assignment, but I had something better in mind this time. 
 I already (almost) knew what will happen, but still it was quite fun to watch. 
…
One of my past managers once said: 
 
 Why all open-source developers just won’t stop publishing new versions of their libraries? 
 He certainly didn’t hate progress as such. This phrase was said when after some dependency update, together with a fix for a security vulnerability, the update introduced a few breaking changes and halted actual product work for a good part of…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 Enshittification of Serverless 
 Enter LLMs 
 
 AWS CDK vs AWS SAM 
 Doing test runs 
 Migrating the main application 
 
 
 The aftermath 
 
 
 
 I often find people surprised when I say that my “offline” cross-platform desktop application, written in Qt/C++, has a “backend”. What…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 Zapier / Make.com / N8N 
 Lambda functions 
 
 Logs monitor for other lambda functions 
 VPS Firewall updater for CDN’s IPs 
 “Just In Time” access to servers 
 One-off Healthcheck Timer 
 Synthetic tests 
 DynDNS 
 Paddle webhook router 
 
 
 Technologies 
 
 Provider 
…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 Scream-driven development 
 Monitoring != alerting 
 Logs in AWS 
 Alerting in AWS 
 Solving the problem 
 
 Structuring the logs 
 Searching the logs 
 Automating the search 
 
 
 Aftermath 
 
 
 
 After reading Julia Evan’s blogpost “Monitoring tiny web services” , I got…
I’m looking for an intern to help with Xpiks project. Xpiks is a swiss-army knife for people who prepare photos, vectors and videos for sales on microstock agencies. It is a great opportunity if you want to work with a C++/Qt project, get experience with cross-platform development, first-class development practices and be mentored by an ex-Microsoft/ex-Starship veteran. 
 Qualifications…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 The search 
 
 Paid providers 
 Free, OSS solutions 
 
 
 The project 
 Operation 
 Sending emails 
 
 Templates 
 Compute 
 Analytics 
 Software 
 
 
 Workflow 
 Afterword 
 
 
 
 Do you know how expensitve is to have email marketing list? Most of the providers have a 1000…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 So what is notarization? 
 How to notarize an app? 
 
 1. Registration (usually done once) 
 2. Preparation (usually done once) 
 3. Signing 
 4. Notarize the bundle 
 5. Rinse and repeat for .dmg 
 Pitfalls 
 The end 
 
 
 
 
 
 This is a part 2 of the journey started in part 1 . 
 When you…
These are the projects that I created. Some have grown up big and some have not. Nevertheless, they are very important to me. 
 Private Captcha 
 Website 
 Private Captcha is a Proof-Of-Work CAPTCHA service to protect forms and APIs with a strong emphasis on EU sovereignty. It is available as a SaaS and self-hosted version. Backend is written in Go and frontend - in…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 What global problem I was trying to solve 
 What was already done in order to solve this problem 
 What should be done next in order to solve this problem 
 
 OneNote pages 
 GitHub subtasks 
 Puzzle-driven development 
 TODO-driven development 
 
 
 Profit 
 
 
 
 Hobby projects are very important…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 Level 0: warming up 
 
 Qt world 
 
 
 Level 1: additional files 
 Level 2: custom libraries 
 Level 3: additional applications 
 
 Qt world 
 
 
 Bonus level: DMG creation 
 The end 
 References 
 
 
 
 This is part 1 of the deployment process overview. Part 2 will cover code signing…

 Table of contents 
 
 
 
 
 Hardware/Firmware 
 Temperature Server 
 Web server 
 Front End 
 “Production” prototype 
 The end 
 
 
 
 
 
 That’s awesome how many Full-Stack Developers are out there nowadays: full Node.js stack or ASP.NET or what not is popular. However, this is a story of a completely…
Everybody who wanted to customize UI of ComboBox in QML knows that it is only possible though crutches and hacks. Usually that’s not a problem and people start implementing their own custom ComboBoxes that are docked to somewhere. You can see an example of such implementation below (the code is simplified). These sort of implementations have few big problems which I will cover afterwards.…
Have you ever needed a small, really small encryption in your C++ project for some piece of text? Say, credentials, login details or any other sensitive data? Of course, the best way is to keep just hash of salted password, but… What if you just need to do it and the size is so much critical for you? 
 There’re openSSL library and Crypto++ library which are monsters with tons of…
Welcome to the Int Maker! 
 This website is another iteration of my personal blog that nowadays I barely have any time to update, due to working on my projects . 
 My name is Taras, originally I’m from Ukraine but I called many countries “home”. I’m a solopreneur, self-taught marketer, architect and mentor. Currently I’m working on my SaaS Private Captcha .…