Migrating SAP Commerce Content with Graph Databases: A Neo4j and Memgraph Guide | June 10 2026, 03:12

Published a new article on Hybrismart after a long hiatus. It’s about how to migrate data from an old site to a new one using a graph db (specifically, I used neo4j and memgraph). The case is as follows: there is an old site and a new site, and you need to transfer CMS data – components, pages, layout from the old to the new, while along the way making various transformations – for example, in the new site the styles are different, the layout is different, some of the components are different. For this task, I used a graph db.

It’s been a while since I wrote on my blog about SAP Commerce Cloud. I worked at SAP for two years, and thought it inappropriate to write about their products while formally having access to internal documents. Currently, I am working on two projects simultaneously – one about migrating SAP Commerce Cloud, and the other significantly about graph databases. At the junction of these worlds, the article was born.

https://hybrismart.com/2026/06/10/migrating-sap-commerce-content-with-a-graph-database/

Migrating SAP Commerce Content with a Graph Database

Two Simple Rules for Controlling Hunger | June 09 2026, 21:33

Two rules were born that still work:

1. If you want to eat – try drinking some water. If you drink and still want to eat – see point 2.

2. Take soup or a half portion. If you ate and still want to eat – take another half portion.

P.S. Yuki said he doesn’t like the rules. He had a New York sous-vide steak with buckwheat from Cuckoo for lunch today, and in an hour, he will have cheese with wine while watching the series Succession (he always gives the wine to me). He still doesn’t understand why we sprinkle his New York steak with buckwheat with dry food.

Understanding the Surprising Subterranean Lives of Bees | June 09 2026, 01:12

I learned today that 70% of all bee species live underground. Another ~25% live in wood, and only ~5% live in hives, build combs, or live in colonies. Male bees are homeless; they’re only allowed home for sex. Outside, it’s cold, hungry, and dangerous. To protect themselves from predators, males of some species gather in “sleeping camps”. They hang onto grass blades with their jaws, stretch out their legs, and fall asleep in clusters of several dozens. They defend themselves from predators through the “dilution effect” – the more bees in a pile, the less likely you are to be eaten. The idea is simple: a predator can eat only a limited number of victims in one go. If you’re sitting on the stem alone and a predator comes – you’re eaten, the chance of dying is ~100%. But if there are fifty of you on the stem, the predator will still take one or two bees, but your chance of becoming the victim drops to a couple of percent. Red currant likely protects itself in a similar manner.

You might ask, who are the predators that eat bees? Mainly in those regions, it is the bug Apiomerus flaviventris. The bug pierces the sleeping male with its proboscis and sucks out the contents. Don’t ask where it pierces

Understanding Your Dishwasher: Hot Water Connections and Built-In Heat Exchangers | June 08 2026, 12:43

I know how a dishwasher works. I’ve fixed it a couple of times => read the technical details. In the USA, it’s connected to the hot water supply on entry. Dishwashers have a weak heating element; it increases the temperature by only ~3°C/min, so heating up a full tray from scratch takes a while. It’s a good practice to run the hot water tap to warm up before starting the dishwasher. In countries with 220V, dishwashers often heat the water themselves. Bosch has an interesting solution: a heat exchanger in the wall. While the water heats up and is sprayed by the spray arms, a new batch of water pours into the heat exchanger. Then, the temperature of the new water batch slowly rises – while the ambient temperature in the chamber gradually drops, to avoid thermal shock for glasses when switching from dirty to clean water. And additionally, the heat exchanger provides a cold surface for drying – water from steam condenses there.

And everything stops not just on a timer (or rather, not only), but also by a turbidity sensor — an aquasensor. An infrared LED and a phototransistor inside the tray. It shines a beam through the water: strong signal received — water is clear, dishes are clean, time to wrap up; weak signal — too much dirt, need to keep running. That is, the machine itself decides whether to add a rinse. It also estimates the volume and dirtiness of the load — partly by the same turbidity, partly by how much the water cools when it’s sprayed onto the cold dishes (thermal mass) => the same Auto program can last either 1.5 hours or 3.

And here’s the most counterintuitive part. You should not rinse dishes before loading them. It’s not just soap, but a cocktail of surfactants (reduce surface tension), emulsifiers (make fats mix with water), dispersants (keep washed off dirt suspended so it doesn’t settle back), and enzymes (protease, amylase). Enzymes need food to latch onto. The main dirt on dishes is not fat (handled by surfactants and emulsifiers), but dried/burnt proteins and starches – large polymer molecules, insoluble in water and just mechanically adhering to the plate. You can’t knock them off with a jet, and there’s no one to rub them off. Enzymes — biological catalysts, cut these long molecules into small soluble pieces (protein into peptides and amino acids, starch into sugars), and these bits then easily wash away with water. Protease works on proteins, amylase on starch, sometimes lipase is added for fats. If you rinse everything off in advance – they just have nothing to do, washing off idly. If the aquasensor sees clean water at the start, it decides there’s not much to do, shortens the cycle, reduces intensity. Rinsing — you make the machine wash worse (but faster). Just scrape off solid chunks and load as is.

Insight about capsules. With each drain, water also carries away the dissolved detergent, so the machine injects the main dose only in the main wash — after it has drained the dirty preliminary water. But the pre-wash compartment is open, with holes, and the detergent leaks out right away. The capsule only opens in the main cycle, so for the first 10 minutes the machine runs clean water idly and no one is dealing with the fat then. That’s why powder is better than capsules: you can charge both compartments, and the pre-wash immediately tackles the fat.

The Evolution of Telegrams: A Luxury Legal Service in the USA | June 07 2026, 15:04

WHOA, in the US, telegrams haven’t yet been blocked, and they have transformed into an insanely expensive elite legal service, monopolized by American Telegram and iTelegram (both successors of Western Union). An urgent cable costs $34.95 base plus $0.79 per word. Additionally, they officially charge a $20.00 surcharge for home delivery, $25.00 for sending on a weekend, and up to $200.00 if you dictate the text to a live operator. Even sending a regular e-mail through their service will set you back $14.95.

The main source of income is the emergency cancellation of commercial contracts under the federal “3-day rule.” By law, contracts are terminated the second a telegram is sent. Companies are required to recognize the timestamp of American Telegram, authorized by the FCC, which provides ironclad protection in court. For 100% legal force, the service cunningly imposes on clients a delivery report and an archive copy — at $12.95 for each checkbox.

Their rates still include astonishing rules: “a word” is considered any group of characters up to 7 signs (more than that counts as two words), and a fee of $10.00 is automatically imposed for text in any language other than English. Special “War Zone” rates for messages to soldiers still apply ($20.00 base + $0.89 per word) and international cablegrams to sea vessels are sent strictly at the “risk and peril of the sender” with no guarantee of response.

Imagine, to save money, entire code books were published in the early 20th century that replaced complex thoughts with a combination of letters that looked like a word (link in the comments). POTUS and SCOTUS are from there.

Helicopter Installs Anti-Drone System on Moscow Residential Building | June 06 2026, 16:26

I read the news that a “Pantsir” anti-drone system was installed by helicopter onto the roof of a residential high-rise (“House in Sokolniki”) in Moscow. Yes, it’s a full-fledged Pantsir, specifically its anti-drone modification (SMD-E), but I couldn’t resist making this AI photo.

[SKIP]

Exploring the Dynamics of Russia’s Kyykka Sport Federation | June 06 2026, 13:49

DID YOU KNOW that in Russia there’s a Russian Skittles Sport Federation with a president, a first vice-president, and a regular vice-president. All in blazers. There’s a presidium, and it has a chairman of the commission on international relations. There’s an entire apparatus for the president of skittles sport with three advisors and a responsible secretary. They hold conferences, at least in 2018 and 2020. They have a skittles march, music by A. Roshchin, lyrics by V. Avdeev, I. Vinogradsky. There are 18 regional departments and 28 regional federations with their own hierarchy.

The website has a section “Anti-Doping”. Interesting, doping in skittles sport… There’s a subsection called “methodological recommendations”. Also, their charter talks about online skittles competitions. Imagine that, online!

In 2024 there was a World Championship in Skittles Sport. Apparently, they are supposed to hold it every three years. And it had a Grand Closing. Apart from Belarus, athletes from Germany and Kazakhstan participated in the world championship. From Germany, in addition to Sergey, Vitaliy, and Konstantin, there was Eugen Schlein, or simply, Zhenya. From the development program for 2026-2029, it turns out that players from Congo, Ghana, Guinea, and Ecuador are actively training now. In the selection criteria for the national team, there is a requirement for “game thinking”. To be admitted, you need to come with a certificate, oh, a certificate of passing the anti-doping education from an institution, whatever that means.

At the world championship, the disciplines are “classical skittles” and “European skittles” (and separately Finnish ones). The goal in both is to knock the skittles out of the town. European ones appeared in Germany because the emigrants from the USSR were told that it’s not customary here to throw three-kilogram stones and were given lighter ones.

In short, it’s all serious.

Exploring Lippmann Plates: The Wonders of Early Color Photography | June 06 2026, 05:30

I learned today about a method of color photography invented in 1891, called the Lippmann plates. The Lippmann method is a beautiful hybrid of photography and holography. A layer of transparent gelatin with silver halide nanoparticles was applied to a glass plate, which was backed by a mirror made of liquid mercury (!). Light, passing through the glass, was reflected by the mercury, collided with itself, and created a standing wave. Inside the microscopic layer of gelatin, the light literally “froze,” burning silver nanostructures in strict accordance with the actual wavelength.

In all modern methods, color is achieved by overlaying three colors, just as on the screen from which you are reading this, red, blue, and green. Thus, there is no true yellow or purple in photographs. But on the Lippmann plate, all colors are real.

It’s also interesting that the Lippmann plate contains not a drop of pigment or dye. It is absolutely transparent! The color in it is born physically (due to structural interference) — just as the wings of butterflies or soap bubbles shimmer.

And obviously, you cannot make a copy from such a “photograph.” I’ll give a link to a good video below.

Indeed, this optical magic had its own quirks. Perfect mirror-like layers inside the plate were only obtained from pure, concentrated color. If a complex “dirty” or dull light entered the frame, the microstructures began to overlay each other, blurring the accuracy of color reproduction. Moreover, two opposite effects were born in the emulsion at the same time: the physical silver mirror created a colorful positive picture, but the silver itself remained just a regular black-and-white negative. Because of this optical conflict, the brightness of the frame was severely compressed, creating a vintage effect of a “hand-painted” photograph. Therefore, the method required jewel-like work with light and perfectly bright set pieces.

The Secrets of Painting and Maintaining a Water Tower | June 05 2026, 20:02

Why does the water tower (next to the house) have a tent during the day in thirty-degree heat, but not at night? That’s what I thought too. It turns out – I thought wrong.

It turns out that the tent is temporary, necessary for painting the tower. Once painted, it will be removed. At night, the paint is aired out and dries.

By the way, the tower is metallic, which means it changes size with temperature fluctuations. Hence, the paint is elastic.

Interestingly, how they check if everything has been covered with paint (because otherwise it will start rusting). They use a method, amusingly still called Holiday Detection since the early days of shipbuilding, which is essentially spark testing for defects.

A specialist takes a device that looks like a mop with a metal brush, to which a high voltage is applied (up to several thousand volts). Since dry epoxy resin is a dielectric and the steel wall behind it is a conductor, the inspector slowly moves the brush over the freshly painted wall. If there is even the slightest microscopic defect in the coating, the electrical circuit is completed, a loud beep sounds and a spark jumps. This spot is immediately marked and repainted.

Also, by the way, just in case someone didn’t know, these towers don’t even come close to creating enough pressure for the water to reach your faucet. They act as accumulators, softening the uneven consumption. And at the same time, they serve as a shock absorber.

And another interesting fact is that in the northern states the problem is not with heating but with freezing in the winter. A layer of ice forms on the surface and along the walls, comparable to a meter or two in thickness. And there, they really do have water heaters.