Andrey

Andrey Kurkov’s latest novel to be translated into English, The Silver Bone, has begins in dramatic fashion. Its hero, Samson Kolechko, is walking in the streets of revolutionary Kyiv. It is the spring of 1919. Suddenly, two Russian Cossacks appear. They chop off his ear with a sabre before riding off. “Hot blood poured down his cheek and seeped under his collar,” Kurkov writes. Samson’s unfortunate father is cut down and killed.The severed right ear – recovered and placed in a tin – plays a central role in Kurkov’s…

The Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov was having dinner with friends at his home in Kyiv on the evening of 24 February 2022 when Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Within hours he was advised that his name probably featured on a Russian list targeting prominent Ukrainian figures for arrest, or worse, and he should leave the city. As Kurkov and his wife joined the thousands of Ukrainians who grabbed what possessions they could and headed to the west of the country, he began a stream of articles, speeches, interviews,…

The Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina did not leave the huge literary legacy that she might have done, had she been given more time. When a Russian rocket exploded in Kramatorsk on 27 June, the poet and novelist was just 37 years old. The rocket caused injuries from which she would not recover.Yet in her short life, Amelina still managed to achieve a great deal. She emigrated to Canada with her family at the age of 14, but decided to return to Ukraine, to her native city of Lviv, soon after. She graduated from the Lviv…

Strange things are happening in Lviv, a cosmopolitan metropolis in western Ukraine, in Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv. In the novel that made it to the International Booker prize longlist this year, seagulls are circling and the air smells salty even though Lviv is a considerable distance from the sea. PREMIUM The city of Lviv in Ukraine (Konstantin Brizhnichenko / Wikimedia Commons) The narrative begins at a cemetery, where a group of elderly hippies gather to pay tribute to Jimi Hendrix and, more…

An example of web app backed by TorchServe model serverImage by author. Exposing an ML model as decoupled model server is way more scalable, extensible and maintainable pattern.In the previous post I showed an example of serving an image classification model with the TorchServe framework. Now let’s extend the example and make it a bit closer to the real world scenarios.Let’s say I want to develop a web app to let users apply the filters to their images. As you know there’s a lot of such applications. One of the feature…

Optimize your costs and efforts migrating to the clouddesigned by Starline — Freepik.comOptimize your costs and efforts migrating to the cloud.Cloud migration strategy requires significant initial investments before it starts bringing you benefits. It is a complicated process, often requiring many difficult decisions. At some point, the need to migrate to the cloud falls upon your tech experts, from data scientists to machine learning engineers, who could be unprepared to handle this task alone. To alleviate the…

Andrey Kurkov – Ukraine’s most celebrated living author – has stopped writing fiction. Since Russia’s full-blown invasion last year, he has become a roving ambassador for his country and its embattled people and culture. Kurkov’s reports on the war have appeared in newspapers and magazines across Europe and the US, including in the Guardian and the New Yorker. Radio 4 has broadcast his work as Letter from Ukraine.Last autumn, Kurkov published his Diary of Invasion. It is a vivid personal journal and a portrait of a nation…

It was a sad day in 2019 when scientists finally scotched the urban myth that London’s many wild parakeets are descended from a pair of pet birds released by Jimi Hendrix in his Carnaby Street days. Luckily, in his newly translated novel, the Ukrainian writer Andrey Kurkov rides to the rescue with some Hendrix lore of his own invention. According to the book, which has been longlisted for the International Booker prize, the guitar hero’s right hand was smuggled into the USSR with the connivance of the KGB and buried in a…

A complete end-to-end example of serving an ML model for image classification taskImage by authorThis post will walk you through a process of serving your deep learning Torch model with the TorchServe framework.There are quite a bit of articles about this topic. However, typically they are focused either on deploying TorchServe itself or on writing custom handlers and getting the end results. That was a motivation for me to write this post. It covers both parts and gives end-to-end example.The image classification…

Multi-regional BI solution with BigQuery as DWHImage by Lars Kienle on UnsplashI created a post a year ago about migration from Postgres to Snowflake, and here is another case of migration. This time I’m going to concentrate on the business case, architecture, and design rather than the technical aspects but I’ll also try to share some tips that might be helpful.It’s a B2B (Business to Business) business. The company is an AaaS (Application as a Service) provider. It has its software product available as an online service…