Hi, I am Mikhail!

I write code for the web and make irregular updates to this page.

Zero Isn’t Zero, Part 2: Keeping Strangers From Waking My Apps

November 4th, 2026 — Nine in ten requests waking my Laravel Cloud apps were bots and scanners. Here are the free Cloudflare rules I set up to stop them at the edge.

Zero Isn’t Zero: What Laravel Cloud Actually Costs When Your App Is Asleep

October 22nd, 2026 — I moved three side projects to Laravel Cloud for a month. The bill was $4.87. Here’s what scale to zero really costs, and what never sleeps.

Ten Years Later, It Just Works

September 27th, 2026 — A decade of Particle boards, Raspberry Pis, and homemade relays, and it took Matter and two small SONOFF switches to finally make home automation just work.