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Vladimir Lovtsov — experience and approach ↗
Technology leadership, career, portfolio, Innotech, T1 Group, banking fintech, engineering management.
Case studies and results ↗
Decision Engine, 5 months to production, 14-day TTM, Big Data, Mirion, tech guilds, architecture, teams.
Expertise and collaboration ↗
Advisory, architecture reviews, engineering management, partnerships, and working sessions.
Speaking ↗
HighLoad++, Analyst Days, AI in engineering, data, architecture, and technology leadership.
Contact ↗
Telegram, LinkedIn, email. Contact Vladimir Lovtsov.
Leadership roles ↗
CTO, Technology Director, Engineering Director, CV, and scope of accountability.
A Right to Our Own — manifesto ↗
SoDelo: platform development, an IT cooperative, shared products, member rights and an invitation to join.
Manifesto arguments and sources ↗
Kondratiev, long waves, Maslow, economics, cooperation and member rights.
Applied AI / ML ↗
From documents and graphs to prediction: my own implementations explore the complete path from data to a working service.
Confidential product ↗
Several mobile applications and a substantial web service. I oversee development; the product concept remains confidential.
Planograph AI ↗
An intelligent planning assistant that connects backlogs, people, and dependencies into feasible plans, from a sprint to a year.
SoDelo — a platform for a cooperative ecosystem ↗
Shared resources, products we own and a market for work. I develop the SoDelo digital platform as technical co-founder.
LAF — autonomous AI development ↗
Set the goal and the boundaries. LAF coordinates the task queue, agents, and verification while you focus on the product.
RAG assistant for project knowledge ↗
Helps people and agents find answers across documentation, code, and decision history, grounded in retrieved sources.
AI in development: where it helps and where it creates new risk ↗
A practical model-selection guide: 19 October 2026 API prices, self-hosting, task acceptance and the full cost of AI-assisted delivery.
API From A to Z: Semantics, Contracts, and Practice ↗
How to choose between HTTP APIs, SOAP, GraphQL, JSON-RPC, and gRPC, then review methods, errors, compatibility, limits, and failure behaviour.
Architecture Without Magic: Cost of Change and Operational Maturity ↗
A decision guide for modular monoliths and microservices, based on change cost, ownership boundaries, and a team’s ability to operate a distributed system.
A Career in IT: My Model for Choosing the Next Move ↗
Four questions for comparing a management step, deeper expertise, or a move into a different kind of project.
Five Common Systems Analysis Mistakes on IT Projects ↗
Common systems analysis mistakes on large banking and fintech projects: vague requirements, legacy integrations, regulation, failure scenarios, and late validation.
How to Interview a Client When You're the Analyst on an IT Team (a Checklist) ↗
A step-by-step algorithm for interviewing a client when there is no business analyst on the team: preparation, running the interview, analysis, and confirming requirements.
Building an Alternative Is Only the Start: Calculate the TCO ↗
Compare a product, fork, compatible implementation, and bespoke build through total cost of ownership: upgrades, operations, skills, risk, and exit.
The Shoemaker’s Own Shoes: Rebuilding My CV ↗
How I removed technical noise from an executive CV, made the career trajectory visible, and established a clear CTO direction.
Data Exchange Formats: JSON, XML, Protobuf, Avro, and MessagePack ↗
Choose a format through contract evolution, backward and forward compatibility, tooling, and measured processing cost rather than fashion.
Can an Overly Detailed Specification Weaken Engineering Initiative? ↗
A working hypothesis about the relationship between requirement detail, delivery predictability, and team autonomy.
DPUPP on a Weekend: The Kremlin, Family, and an Engineer's Brain ↗
A Sunday walk through central Moscow with my family, seen through the eyes of an engineer who still notices alerts and load tests away from the screen.
EventStorming: Benefits, Limits, and Practice ↗
A practical guide to EventStorming: what the method helps a team discover, where it falls short, and how to prepare a session that produces useful outcomes.
“Like FAANG,” Without the Cargo Cult: Bring the Context With the Practice ↗
Architecture practices cannot be separated from scale, team structure, and operational maturity. Here is how to spot accidental complexity before adopting them.
Building an IT Team Fast: Risks and Benefits ↗
How to speed up hiring without pretending speed is free: what to test before the offer and how to reduce early hiring risk.
Building Fintech Products: Seven Paths to Production ↗
A delivery map for banking products: team capability, governance, changing needs, infrastructure, cross-team contracts, the delivery platform, and operations.
How a Software Development Team Actually Works ↗
One practical model for software delivery from discovery to release: six overlapping stages, common roles, and the team’s shared responsibility for outcomes.
Word of the Day: Idempotency ↗
What idempotency actually means in HTTP and distributed systems, why a UUID alone is not enough, and how to handle retries safely.
IT Conferences for Analysts: A Practical Guide ↗
How to choose an event, prepare useful questions, and turn a talk or visit into durable professional connections.
Does an IT Professional Need a University Degree? ↗
What university can genuinely offer an engineer or analyst, what that route costs, and when another form of education may be a better choice.
Message Brokers: Where the Guarantees Stop ↗
A practical comparison of RabbitMQ, ActiveMQ Classic, and Kafka: messaging models, acknowledgements, partition ordering, and the real limits of at-least-once and exactly-once.
Microservices or a Modular Monolith? A Decision Checklist ↗
A concise decision guide based on domain boundaries, independent releases, scaling, data consistency, and the cost of operating a distributed system.
NER for Business: From Entities to a Working Process ↗
What NER actually does, how it differs from intent classification, and how to build a testable hybrid pipeline for Russian text.
RAG for a company: from document search to a useful assistant ↗
RAG explained from the ground up: indexing, retrieval, small-team and enterprise architectures, published implementations, evaluation, and the path from answers to useful actions.
Taking a Banking Product Real-Time ↗
Lessons from an early real-time product built in 2023–2024: streaming architecture, production testing, and delivery decisions.
Hiring Signals from a Manager’s Perspective ↗
Behavioural patterns, an interview radar and the manager’s own blind spots: assess working risks without pretending to diagnose a personality.
Are Retrospectives a Waste of Time? Sometimes ↗
When a retro becomes a ritual, how to restore its purpose, and why a change without an owner rarely improves anything.
SQL in Practice: Your First PostgreSQL Queries ↗
A self-contained SQL exercise for analysts: create two tables and practise SELECT, filtering, JOINs, aggregates, data changes, and transactions.
Unhealthy Behaviour in a Tech Team: Signals and Actions ↗
Observable signs of an unsafe working environment and practical actions for an individual contributor or manager, without diagnoses or labels.
Analyst Days 16: Behold the Path of Data, Padawan ↗
A reconstruction of the main ideas from my Analyst Days 16 talk: how data gains context, why roles see the same dataset differently, and what an analyst should verify.
Analyst Days 14: Don't Paint the Grass — Data Risk in a BANI World ↗
A reconstruction of my Analyst Days 14 talk on data quality and ownership: distinguishing a working control from attractive reporting.
Saint HighLoad++ 2024: Moving a Banking Product to Real-Time ↗
How Vladimir Avramov and I turned an early real-time product built with Flink, Kafka, and Tarantool into a focused technical talk.
Community Synergy: How a Large IT Company Can Use Its Own Expertise ↗
How Tech Guilds helped me connect teams and knowledge. Reuse across a company, the structure of a Tech Hub, the economics of shared solutions and the conditions that make people want to participate.
Tech Lead: A New Challenge for an Analyst ↗
Moving from analyst to project IT lead: building a team, establishing delivery practices, and discussing constraints with the business.
Analyst Roles in IT: A Map Without a Ranking ↗
A practical, author-defined map of analysis roles based on the subject of the work, expected outcome, technical depth, and route into the field.
UML in Practice: When a Diagram Helps and When It Does Not ↗
Choosing a UML diagram for a specific question, defining how long it should live, and keeping modelling from becoming a project of its own.
User Stories: From Need to Acceptance Criteria ↗
How to frame a user story around who, what, and why, add testable acceptance criteria, and avoid turning it into a miniature specification.
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