Let’s talk

Hi - I’m Ruslan. If you’re reading this, you probably have something on your mind, and I’d genuinely like to hear about it.

Maybe your system is starting to buckle under load. A design that worked great for years is no longer keeping up. You’re preparing for a migration, a re-platforming, or a scale event, and want a second opinion before you commit. An architecture decision is on the table where the trade-offs aren’t obvious and the cost of getting it wrong is high. Your team is stuck on an incident pattern that keeps coming back. Or you’re building something new and want to stress-test the foundations before you pour concrete.

Or maybe you’re rolling out LLMs or agents against a real production database and the results aren’t matching the demo - silently wrong answers, queries that work on toy schemas but fall apart on yours, MCP servers exposing more than they should. Figuring out what has to change in your schema, your tooling, or your team’s habits before AI can be trusted with anything that matters is a space I spend a lot of time in, and I’m always interested in how other teams are navigating it.

Or you just read something on this blog that didn’t quite match your experience, and want to compare notes.

Or there’s a topic you’d like me to break down - a shape of incident you keep hitting, a pattern that keeps coming up in reviews, a database feature everyone uses but nobody really understands. Suggestions for what to write about next are genuinely welcome.

Or you spotted a typo, a broken link, or a technical error in one of the posts. Please point it out - I’d much rather know and fix it than have it sit there compounding.

Whatever it is - send it over. I read every email personally, and I reply to all of them.

Email me directly: [email protected]

• Ruslan Tolkachev