Aleksandr Kondaurov

6 posts by Aleksandr Kondaurov

Building a simpler AWS deploy tool

Apr 10, 2026

I’m a software engineer with over 12 years of experience across different languages, teams, and dozens of projects. I love what I do, and I’m drawn to solving real problems with clean tools.

I’ve been building serverless applications on AWS for years. Across multiple jobs and projects, I’ve used Serverless Framework and AWS CDK. And there was always this friction — the gap between having an idea and getting it running in the cloud felt wider than it should be.

This is the story of why I finally snapped and built my own deployment tool — one that skips CloudFormation entirely and deploys AWS resources with direct API calls.

Best use of LLMs isn't code

Apr 2, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

The best use of LLMs has nothing to do with code.

I’ll be honest — I don’t love the hype around LLMs. And yes, I know it sounds tedious to remind people that an LLM is not intelligence. It’s a language model trained on a massive amount of data. But I think it matters to keep saying it.

Here’s what actually changed for me.

Hiring without feedback is broken

Mar 31, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

I pass every screening call. I answer every technical question. Then I get rejected — and nobody tells me why.

The pattern is always the same. Screening goes well — experience aligns, good conversation, we move forward. Technical round — databases, architecture, system design. Nothing that makes me pause. I answer everything.

Then — a week of silence. And either a polite “we went with someone closer to our stack,” or nothing at all.

You can’t debug a process that returns no error message.

Automate your resume, don't write it

Mar 29, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

You don’t need to write a resume.

Every time I sat down to update mine, something felt off.

Not “I don’t know what to write” off. More like — this process doesn’t make sense. I’m an engineer. I think in steps, I build systems, I debug things. But writing a resume? I was just rearranging bullet points, hoping the order would somehow matter.

No clear path. No way to verify the result. Just gut feeling and formatting choices. And don’t even get me started on templates — Awesome CV or minimalist? One column or two? Every choice feels arbitrary, and none of them change what you actually have to say.

It always bugged me. And it took me a while to figure out why.

From 85% rejections to interviews

Mar 25, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

I kept getting rejected — and I couldn’t figure out why.

Job searching is hard. Remote job searching is harder by an order of magnitude. I was sending out 30 applications in a couple of days. Getting 25 auto-rejections back. My experience was relevant, my skills were real.

Then I realized: the problem wasn’t my resume. It was my process.

The generalist's hiring problem

Mar 17, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

I know too many things. Apparently that’s a problem.

I started with PHP. Then spent years in the JVM world — Scala, Java, building distributed systems. Did backend, DevOps, CI/CD, built frontends with React and Vue. Now I’m deep into TypeScript, serverless, and cloud infrastructure.

I could pick up Go or Python on any project — learning new tools has never been the hard part. The hard part is convincing someone to let you in the door.

But try explaining that to an ATS.