It’s been a while since anyone wrote anything here. Déjà vu, right?

So, since my last post, I quit Ozon after working there for a year and a half and joined Picodata as a lead developer. Though, almost immediately, they made me a team lead, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. Over the past year and a half, we’ve built several plugins for Picodata, like Radix—a Redis implementation on top of Picodata.

But enough about work for now. I’ve also welcomed another daughter into the world, which is absolutely wonderful.

A few more guns have found their way into the safe, and I still manage to squeeze in some target practice.

But this post isn’t about any of that. My phone died a week ago. Dropped it on the floor, and the screen went black. It’s technically still alive—notifications come through, sounds play, and even NFC works for payments. But the screen is completely dead. I was seriously bummed because I didn’t have a single ADB-authorized computer handy, and without the screen, I couldn’t add a new one. That means all my 2FA, digital signatures, and account transfers are dead in the water. A Yubikey might help with some 2FA, but transferring a Google account without the old device is a nightmare—it keeps asking for confirmation on the old phone.

Plus, all my banking apps, government services, work chats—everything’s stuck on my computer now. And I still need to pick a new phone, order it, wait for delivery, etc. The obvious solution? Get a decent Android phone for under 15,000 rubles (about $150), set up all critical apps, and poke them every couple of weeks to keep the auth tokens fresh. If my main phone dies, switch to the backup. Buy a new primary, migrate to it, and stash the backup back in the drawer.

You might say, “Wait, why not just buy a new phone and use the old one as a backup?” To which I’d reply: “Sure, you could. But its battery is already shot, and if you’re like me, you might end up lugging a backup phone around in freezing weather”. So I highly recommend getting a separate, cheap backup phone specifically for this purpose.

Oh, and I started a Telegram channel for cross-posts going forward. It’ll be in russian but with Deepseek and friends it shouldn’t be any problem at all.

PS: Third time’s the charm—here’s hoping this little blog actually comes back to life.

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