About

Hi, I'm Serhii

I'm a solutions architect with 19 years of software delivery behind me. Today I run eight production systems, and I let AI do a fair share of the typing.

Serhii Horstka
  • 19 years of software delivery
  • 8 production systems today
  • 70,000 end users on the largest, roughly
  • 1,000+ projects since 2007
Today

What I do these days

I'm head of IT at a large organisation. In practice that means I'm the one who said yes to running eight production systems, a job people tend to back away from slowly. I keep the organisation's name off this site, so I describe the systems by what they do.

Eight production systems. I architect and run them. They share one modular monolith and one set of infrastructure, which is a grand way of saying I keep things in one place on purpose.

Scale. The largest serves roughly 70,000 end users, most of whom only notice it when it's down.

Hands on the code. I write 40% of the systems themselves and 100% of the infrastructure, the supporting systems and the rules for how the code gets made. About 20% of my time goes on presentation and process discovery, which is a polite name for asking "why?" until someone draws a diagram.

Track record

What I built before all this

Custom software since 2007, for clients and for my own products.

1,000+ projects. Four of the products are still in production, which in software years makes them pensioners.

Integrations. 100+ property feeds (MLS and IDX), plus CRMs, payment providers and analytics APIs.

Teams. Anywhere from 3 to 14 people, depending on the decade and on what the world economy felt like that year.

Distributed work. Teams spread over seven countries and every timezone. Someone was always awake, and it usually wasn't me.

Clients in 23 countries. The US, Canada, the UK, Australia, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Greece, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, South Africa and Thailand.

Method

How I work, with AI doing the typing

AI agents write a lot of the code here, so the process around them has to do the worrying. Three habits carry most of the weight.

  • Plan first, then touch the code

    Nothing starts until its plan is written down and approved. It's slower for ten minutes and quicker for the rest of the week.

  • Decisions written down

    Every real choice gets a short note: what I picked, what I weighed and why. Future me reads them more than anyone.

  • One commit per phase

    Work lands in small phases, each its own commit, so every step gets reviewed on its own. Checking one giant change is like inspecting flatpack furniture after it's built.

Purpose

Why I write any of this down

AI ships code faster than anyone reads it, so the guardrails matter more than the speed. That's the idea behind everything here.

The problem. Since AI tools arrived, plenty of teams ship more code than they can comfortably review. It's a bit like hiring a very fast builder who never mentions when he's guessing.

The rhythm. Each week I write up one problem, one challenge and one lesson. Each one ends in a rule a team could try, with what it costs and where it stops working.

Serhii Horstka