Turning Ideas Into Working Products
My name is Yuriy Zhar. I write about the things I build and the problems I solve. Passionate web developer who loves Elixir/Erlang, Go, Deno, and Svelte, with a deep interest in ML, LLMs, astronomy, and philosophy.
Featured Stories
Hand-picked articles that deserve your attention.
How I Ended Up Building My Own Multi-Domain, AI-Powered Blog Platform
I got tired of cloned WordPress SEO farms, so I built a multi-domain, multi-language blog platform in Elixir with fast SEO-optimized pages, integrated analytics, AdSense, affiliates and AI agents that research trends and draft high-quality articles automatically.
Yacht & Tours: A Fast, Clean Boat-Booking Platform Built for Real Business Needs
Yacht & Tours is a booking platform I built to make renting boats fast and straightforward. It includes advanced pricing filters, a clean calendar and pricing manager, real-time notifications, Stripe payments, invoicing, user and quote management, chat between guests and hosts, and full integration with the MMK system. It’s lightweight, reliable, and designed for needs of my client that actually works without constant support.
Redomap: A Drop-In Map System That Actually Works in the Real World
Redomap is a lightweight, install-free map system you can drop into any website. Users scan a QR code and get maps, audio guides, and navigation instantly. I built it over several iterations, adding paid map sales, a map-building dashboard, AI-assisted content creation, and analytics that show what people really explore. It's been running for more than five years and is now used by hotels, tourist locations, and businesses that want a clean, fast visitor experience.
Building Arcatech custom CRM
I built a custom CRM using Elixir and Phoenix LiveView that uses AI to identify parts from photos, translate messages, and automate conversations with suppliers over WhatsApp. To support WhatsApp Web, I created a separate Go microservice using the Whatsmeow library, which stays online and exchanges messages with the Elixir nodes via WebSockets.
Explore topics
Browse categories to dive into the subjects that matter most to your audience.
Projects & Work in Progress
A simple showcase of what I’ve built and what I’m building right now. Real projects, real challenges, and the solutions that came out of them.
System Design
System design stories and patterns focused on latency, scalability, and reliability, with concrete examples from booking engines, in-memory indexing, and Elixir/BEAM architectures.
Fresh from the Blog
Stay up to date with our latest stories, tutorials, and insights.
Why You Might Not Need A Vector Database When PostgreSQL Can Power Your RAG
Want to build RAG without dragging a new vector database into your stack? In this guide we walk through how to turn plain old PostgreSQL into a serious RAG backend, step by step, using pgvector, Elixir and a single dataset_chunks table to power BM25 text search, dense vector similarity and even binary Hamming and Jaccard searches, so you can see what actually works on your data before you add more infrastructure.
How I Ended Up Building My Own Multi-Domain, AI-Powered Blog Platform
I got tired of cloned WordPress SEO farms, so I built a multi-domain, multi-language blog platform in Elixir with fast SEO-optimized pages, integrated analytics, AdSense, affiliates and AI agents that research trends and draft high-quality articles automatically.
How I Ended Up Pricing Boats With Bitmaps And ETS
I wanted a booking search that felt instant, not “wait while I join five tables and cry”, so I ended up encoding availability and prices into tiny bitmaps and shoving them into ETS. Here’s how and why that works.
Yacht & Tours: A Fast, Clean Boat-Booking Platform Built for Real Business Needs
Yacht & Tours is a booking platform I built to make renting boats fast and straightforward. It includes advanced pricing filters, a clean calendar and pricing manager, real-time notifications, Stripe payments, invoicing, user and quote management, chat between guests and hosts, and full integration with the MMK system. It’s lightweight, reliable, and designed for needs of my client that actually works without constant support.
Redomap: A Drop-In Map System That Actually Works in the Real World
Redomap is a lightweight, install-free map system you can drop into any website. Users scan a QR code and get maps, audio guides, and navigation instantly. I built it over several iterations, adding paid map sales, a map-building dashboard, AI-assisted content creation, and analytics that show what people really explore. It's been running for more than five years and is now used by hotels, tourist locations, and businesses that want a clean, fast visitor experience.
Building Arcatech custom CRM
I built a custom CRM using Elixir and Phoenix LiveView that uses AI to identify parts from photos, translate messages, and automate conversations with suppliers over WhatsApp. To support WhatsApp Web, I created a separate Go microservice using the Whatsmeow library, which stays online and exchanges messages with the Elixir nodes via WebSockets.
Stay updated
Subscribe to our newsletter and get the latest articles delivered to your inbox.