My tech year in review (2025)
AI, conferences, and DDD rants to end the year
Building web in 2026
kalabro.tech by Kate Marshalkina
Latest posts
A story of one regexp
An anecdote from my recent experience with regular expressions featuring Java and PHP. Enjoy!
React Alicante 2025
Full list of talks with my short comments.
Bullet points from CityJS London 2025
Highlights from the conference and what's next
React Paris 2025
Full list of talks with my short comments.
Full Stack coding interviews - how it was in 2024
In this article, I want to zoom in on coding interviews for Senior Full Stack JavaScript roles at small to medium-sized companies in Europe.
“Balancing Coupling in Software Design” (book review)
Overview of the new Balancing Coupling model with examples and interactive quizzes. Enjoy!
React Alicante 2024
Full list of talks with my short comments.
Tidy first? (book review)
My highlights from the first in the series of books on software design by Kent Beck
My tech year in review (2023)
Reflecting on 2023, my best tech year to date
Advent of Frontend Architecture - supporting materials
Supporting materials for my 'Advent of Frontend Architecture' talk at BarcelonaJS
Learning at work: common obstacles and how to overcome them
It took me years to find the right mindset for learning at work. In this article, I share my experience and hope it will help you grow as a developer.
React Alicante 2023
My takeaways and useful links from the conference.
Onboarding yourself as a Senior Software Engineer
In this article, I share onboarding tips that I've learned from my experiences on both sides of the process.
It depends! Exploring my favourite Renovate features for dependency updates
My top 5 features of Renovate, an open source tool for automated dependency updates.
Budgeting my communication capacity
As an introvert, I have a limited communication capacity that I refer to as my "extravert budget". In this post, I will share how I learned to spend it more wisely in order to stay in sync with the IT reality.
Thinking Architecturally (book review)
Thinking Architecturally by Nate Schutta is a short practical book for developers who want to stay current and grow in the rapidly changing tech industry. My favourite part is about “ilities”. Read on to learn more.
Fast by default with Next.js
Next.js is a great example of a “fast by default” mindset. It popularises web performance best practices by making them easy to use. In this article I share my favourite performance features of Next.js framework.
Three tricks to get in focus mode
In modern working conditions, software engineers often struggle with focus. I discovered a few tricks that I share in this article.
The road to Software Architecture (frontend edition)
According to the State of JS report, the “Code Architecture” problem is the main pain point in frontend development. This post is an attempt to connect the Software Architecture discipline with the modern frontend.
Flutter guide for React developers
In this guide I map common Flutter concepts to their equivalents in web development. If you are a React developer interested in Flutter, it will help you find your fit on the new territory.
Where to find a mentor
Last year I had several mentorship experiences, and the results impressed me. In this article, I reflect on what worked for me and suggest how to get started.
“Learning Domain-Driven Design” - the software architecture 🐒 book that makes sense
My review of “Learning Domain-Driven Design” book about DDD and how it maps to the common software architecture patterns.
My approach to the command line
Terminals can be very cool and fun! But you don't have to be a command line geek to be a successful developer.
3 simple management tricks I learned as a Tech Lead
Developers often blame “bad management” when something goes wrong. I’ve been there too, I remember the pain. For me, it was useful to sit…
Let Cloudflare CDN speed up your classic website like it's static
Improve your website performance by caching dynamic pages in Cloudflare (or any other) CDN. No need to rewrite everything in Gatsby :)
How to investigate technical solutions
We, developers, tend to value practice over theory because this is how we learn most of the things. Often though, we don't know how to start, which library or service to pick, etc. Quick investigation process described in this article helps me in such situations.
The Tech Lead rule: Management first, coding second
It took me two years to realise that “How to find time to code?” is the wrong question for a Tech Lead. In this blog post I'm explaining why.
Why 1:1 meetings are so valuable for Tech Leads
1:1 is a simple and powerful management tool that is often underestimated by novice Tech Leads. Check out my practical recommendations to make the most of it.
Practical thinking
What I noticed in behaviours of great developers is that they find a moment to think outside the box and apply results of their thought process to reality. This is what I call practical thinking.
My tech year in review
A few tech highlights from 2019.
Automated releases in a cross-language monorepo
Sharing my recent experience in automating software releases in a monorepo.
Don't get lost in never ending learning curve
Maintaining mental health for Senior Software Engineers
Reading list: on technical leadership
I've got a couple of great resources to share with those who eventually found themselves in a team lead / tech lead shoes...
Decode Alias and Union Types in Elm
I’m so exited to open this blog with a post about Elm, a functional programming language for building web frontend. As a user, I interact with Elm almost every day...