Posts on 7nolikov | Dmitrii Novikov

Everything I shipped but never ran was broken

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had a free day, so I made coffee and sat down to read my own documentation against the code. I hate errors in documentation. I expected to fix a few stale sentences and move on.

Choosing a static site generator is the easy part

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I run three static sites - this blog, a relocation guide, and a sandbox. All Hugo. A few smaller things sit on Next.js and SolidJS.

The generator turned out to be the least important decision in all of it.

Return to office would cost me a country

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have worked remotely from two countries. Last summer I moved between them.

The work did not change. Everything else did - the tax system, the language, the price of groceries. My wife’s paperwork is still in progress. But the job came with me, and that is the only reason the move was possible at all.

My plan said Testcontainers. The code never imported it.

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The build plan for my last project allocated 90 minutes to a task called “Integration tests with testcontainers”. It sketched the directory layout. It named the file.

The library was never installed. Not once, in the whole repository.

Free hosting cost me a kernel panic

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I run a blog, a relocation guide and four sandbox sites. All of them are free, and they stay free. I am careful about it.

I got careful the hard way.

I use Make in every project and never for building

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t use Meson. I have never used Meson.

I have a Makefile in every project I own. Not one of them builds anything.

Standalone Spring tests

7nolikov@gmail.com (Dmitrii Novikov) — Wed, 04 Dec 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I was surprised that Spring Test library doesn’t support standalone acceptance tests format out of the box. Here’s how I tackled this issue and why standalone tests are useful for modular Spring applications.