Hi, I'm Ruslan Diachenko
I’m a software engineer focused on distributed systems . Code is becoming easier to generate, but designing and building systems that remain reliable under real workloads is not. That’s the work I want to keep doing, and LLM inference is where I’m exploring it now.
I’ve been building backend systems since 2012, mostly in Java, across online media, gaming, fintech, healthcare, marketing, and education. At Apple , I worked on a near-real-time event processing system and dealt with just about every Kafka issue imaginable.
At HubSpot , I built an agentic workflow and a video generation pipeline around it. Users could ask how to do something in the platform and get back a short narrated video showing it step by step.
Since 2014, I’ve contributed to Checkstyle and mentored students through Google Summer of Code. I worked with one student to create the Google Java Style configuration , now the default for many Java projects. More recently, I designed an OpenRewrite-based autofix system and spent two GSoC summers guiding students as they built its foundation and first recipes.
I started RD Blog in 2023 to improve my own understanding. Building reveals where the gaps are, and writing forces me to close them. The K-Means image compression in Rust post started when I tried to implement an algorithm I thought I understood. That post made it into This Week in Rust .
Beyond the keyboard
I started running in 2022 and ran my first marathon in April 2026. I’m now training for the Cape Town Marathon in May 2027. It will be Cape Town’s first race as a World Marathon Major and my first Major too.
Since 2021, I’ve read nearly 200 books and written short reviews of some of them on Goodreads .
Back in 2014, at GSoC’s 10-year reunion, I had beers with Linus Torvalds and a few other mentors. I was too hesitant to ask him for a photo, and I regret that now. Still, it’s a good memory.
Let’s connect
If you’re building distributed systems, working on LLM inference, or found something in one of my posts worth discussing, email me at ruslan@rdiachenko.com . You can also find me on X , LinkedIn , and YouTube .
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