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VirtusLab's Articles

Backend Engineering|Jun 4, 2026

Why Tooling Engineers Think Differently

Interview with Krzysztof Romanowski, Head of Development Productivity at VirtusLab Software engineering loves process, structure, best practices, and architectural purity. Tooling engineering often lives somewhere else entirely - in edge cases, uncomfortable tradeoffs, and systems that only work because somebody deeply understands how they break. We sat down with Krzysztof Romanowski to talk about why tooling engineers often think very differently from the rest of the industry.

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Artificial Intelligence|Jun 3, 2026

GitHub All-Stars vol.17: CodeBurn - The $200/Day Therapy Session Your Terminal Didn't Know It Needed

A slightly unsettling realization hit us at VirtusLab not long ago - our collective list of starred GitHub repositories had quietly ballooned into something that could generously be called "a problem." Instead of pretending it wasn't happening, we decided to lean into it: every two weeks, we pick a trending open-source project, pull the hood off, and tell you what we find underneath. We focus on fresh, relatively unknown repos - not the usual suspects that everybody and their tech newsletter already covered (because let's be honest, you don't need us for that).

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Scala|May 28, 2026

The Engineers Behind the Engineers

Interview with Jerzy Muller, Scala Evangelist & Dev Tooling Expert at VirtusLab Sometimes Google returns zero results. That’s usually where tooling engineers begin their work. In large-scale engineering organizations, their job is to make impossible systems work together and keep thousands of developers unblocked when everything starts breaking at scale. We sat down with Jerzy Müller, Scala Evangelist and Dev Tooling Expert at VirtusLab, to talk about what this work actually looks like behind the scenes.

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Artificial Intelligence|Apr 13, 2026

Interview with Krzysztof Grajek, Principal Software Developer at SoftwareMill and the lead engineer behind Visdom Governance

As AI tools take over more and more of the actual coding work, a new question emerges: who's watching what they do? Visdom Governance is a tool designed to bring that control back. Krzysztof Grajek, Principal Software Developer at SoftwareMill and the lead engineer behind Visdom Governance, talks about why the rise of AI-generated code demands a completely new approach to trust, auditability, and documentation.

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Artificial Intelligence|Apr 13, 2026

Visdom: Your CI is an Oracle... that lies too

This is post #3 in The Agent-Ready SDLC series. In post #1 we laid out the Ferrari-in-a-Fiat-500 problem - the engine is great, the chassis isn't. In post #2 we covered the first bottleneck: context. Now we're at the second bottleneck - the one that sits between your agent and reality.

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Artificial Intelligence|Apr 10, 2026

AI in the SDLC: Faster or Just Busier?

As AI accelerates code generation, many teams are discovering that speed gains often come with hidden costs in review, validation, and complexity. We sat down with Krzysztof Romanowski to unpack what’s really happening inside modern engineering organizations.

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Business insights|Apr 9, 2026

Build or Delegate? The Hidden Cost of Developer Experience (DX)

As developer experience (DX) becomes a competitive advantage, many organizations are investing in internal platforms and tooling. However, building and maintaining DX capabilities in-house is costly and complex. This raises a key question: when should organizations manage developer productivity internally, and when is it more effective to engage external partners?

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Backend Engineering|Sep 24, 2025

Gradle vs. Bazel for Android projects: A deep dive

Discover how Gradle and Bazel compare for Android builds, from IDE support to scalability. Learn which tool suits your team’s size and project goals.

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Backend Engineering|Jan 8, 2025

Overcoming monorepo challenges with Bazel for your projects

In this article, we will examine common monorepo challenges and show how Bazel helps turn a large codebase into a more manageable, efficient ecosystem. Also, we included a link to a working repository where the ideas described here are implemented.

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Scala|Dec 17, 2024

Scala, Bazel, Akka, and monorepos: A technical perspective of monorepo migration

Companies, especially mid-sized and larger ones, face the challenge of structuring projects at scale. Arguably, almost every technology and paradigm can be used by a single developer to write a small piece of code, but obviously, this is not enough for any organization—engineering solutions must allow people from multiple disciplines to develop and maintain the application efficiently throughout the whole application lifecycle.

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Backend Engineering|Nov 28, 2024

9 Developer Experience (DX) tools to use in 2025

Being software engineering consultants we have a unique perspective on how different developer experience tools work with our client’s tech stacks. We have gathered a collective experience of our engineers and prepared this list of 9 developer experience tools that our clients and their developers found helpful.

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Backend Engineering|Nov 26, 2024

Bazel-fueled monorepos for microservices

Code organization is easy when work is done in a small team, and the codebase is not yet extensive. However, as the project's scope grows and new sub-teams appear, the question of how to subdivide and manage the growing codebase becomes increasingly important.

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