Ilya Brin - Software Engineer

History is written by its contributors

WireGuard: The Most Elegant VPN Ever Built

2026-05-04 9 min read Security Networking Vpn Ilya Brin

Hey, paranoid friend! 👋

WireGuard isn’t just another VPN protocol. It’s a reimagining of what network code should look like: ~4,000 lines versus 400,000 in OpenVPN. Less code = fewer vulnerabilities = smaller attack surface.

But most WireGuard articles are just “copy this config and run” tutorials. Today we’re going deep: how it works under the hood, which parameters actually matter for privacy and speed, and why Linus Torvalds called it a work of art.

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Why Write Articles When Everything Has Already Been Written

2026-05-03 7 min read Career Ilya Brin

When I started blogging, a colleague asked me directly: “Why? Stack Overflow already has answers to everything, Medium is flooded with tutorials, and there are dozens of books on any technology. Who needs yet another blog?” I couldn’t give a clear answer back then. Now, after several years of blogging and working as an engineering manager, I can.

Spoiler: it has nothing to do with readers.

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Go Runtime: How GC Impacts P99 Latency in High-Load APIs

2025-12-27 10 min read Go Performance

You have a great API with median latency of 5ms, but P99 suddenly spikes to 500ms? Clients complain about periodic freezes? Welcome to the world of Go Garbage Collector and its impact on tail latency.

In this article, we’ll tackle a real problem: how a 10ms GC pause turns into 500ms latency for users, and what to do to keep P99 latency under control.

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