by Bozho | Dec 25, 2016 | Aggregated, anemic, Developer tips, object-oriented programming, Opinions
I thought for a while that object-oriented purism has died off. But it hasn’t – every now and then there’s an article that tries to tell us how evil setters and getters are, how bad (Java) annotations are, and how horrible and anti-object-oriented the anemic data model is (when functionality-only services act upon data-only objects) and eventually how dependency injection is ruining software. Several years ago I tried to counter these arguments, saying that setters and getters are not evil per se, and that the anemic data model is mostly fine, but maybe I believe I was worse at writing then, so maybe I didn’t got to the core of the problem. This summer we had a short twitter discussion with Yegor Bugayenko and Vlad Mihalcea on the matter and a few arguments surfaced. I’ll try to summarize them: Our metaphors are often wrong. An actual book doesn’t know how to print itself. Its full contents are given to a printer, which knows how to print a book. Therefore it doesn’t make sense to put logic for printing (to JSON/XML), or persisting to a database in the Book class. It belongs elsewhere. The advice to use (embedded) printers instead of getters is impractical even if a Book should know how to print itself – how do you transform your objects to other formats (JSON, XML, Database rows/etc..)? With an Jackson/JAXB/ORM/.. you simply add a few annotations, if any at all and it works. With “printers” you have to manually implement the serialization logic. Even with Xembly you still have to do a tedious, potentially huge method with add()’s and...
by Bozho | Dec 14, 2016 | Aggregated, contract, Developer tips, legal, Opinions, side projects
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default (in many countries, including mine) is that the creator owns the copyright, regardless of whether they were hired to do it or not. That in turn means that any side project, or in fact any intellectual property that you create while being employed as a developer, is automatically owned by your employer. This isn’t necessarily too bad, as most employers wouldn’t enforce their right, but this has bugged me ever since I started working for software companies. Even though I didn’t know the legal framework of copyright, the ownership clause in my contracts was always something that I felt was wrong. Even though Joel’s explanation makes perfect sense – companies need to protect their products from a random developer suddenly deciding they own the rights to parts of it – I’ve always thought there’s a middle ground. (Note: there is a difference between copyright, patents and trademarks, and the umbrella term “intellectual property” is kind of ambiguous. I may end up using it sloppily, so for a clarification, read here.) California apparently tried to fix this by passing the following law: Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise. But this...
by Bozho | Dec 14, 2016 | Aggregated, contract, Developer tips, legal, Opinions, side projects
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default (in many countries, including mine) is that the creator owns the copyright, regardless of whether they were hired to do it or not. That in turn means that any side project, or in fact any intellectual property that you create while being employed as a developer, is automatically owned by your employer. This isn’t necessarily too bad, as most employers wouldn’t enforce their right, but this has bugged me ever since I started working for software companies. Even though I didn’t know the legal framework of copyright, the ownership clause in my contracts was always something that I felt was wrong. Even though Joel’s explanation makes perfect sense – companies need to protect their products from a random developer suddenly deciding they own the rights to parts of it – I’ve always thought there’s a middle ground. (Note: there is a difference between copyright, patents and trademarks, and the umbrella term “intellectual property” is kind of ambiguous. I may end up using it sloppily, so for a clarification, read here.) California apparently tried to fix this by passing the following law: Anything you do on your own time, with your own equipment, that is not related to your employer’s line of work is yours, even if the contract you signed says otherwise. But this...
by Bozho | Dec 2, 2016 | Aggregated, Opinions
I’ve been an advisor to the depury prime minister of Bulgaria for the past year and a half. And on this year’s OpenFest conference I tried to report on what we’ve achieved. It is not that much and there are no visible results, which is a bit disappointing, but we (a small motivated team) believe we have laid the groundwork for a more open, and properly built ecosystem for the government IT systems. Just to list a few things – we passed a law that requires open sourcing custom-built government software, we opened a lot of data (1500 datasets) on the national open data portal, and we drew a roadmap of how existing state registers and databases be upgraded in order to meet modern software engineering best practices and be ready to meet the high load of requests. We also seriously considered the privacy and auditability of the whole ecosystem. We prepared the electronic identification project (each citizen having the option to identify online with a secure token), an e-voting pilot and so on. The video of the talk is available here: And here are the slides: Now that our term is at an end (due to the resignation of the government) we hope the openness-by-default will persist as a policy and the new government agency that we constituted would be able to push the agenda that has been laid out. Whether that will be the case in a complex political situation is hard to tell, but hopefully the “technical” and the “political” aspects won’t be entwined in a negative way. And our team will continue to support (even...
by Bozho | Oct 22, 2016 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
Yesterday Dyn, a DNS-provider, went down after a massive DDoS. That led to many popular websites being inaccessible, including twitter, LinkedIn, eBay and others. The internet seemed to be “crawling on its knees”. We’ll probably read an interesting post-mortem from Dyn, but why did that happen? First, DDoS capacity is increasing, using insecure and infected IoT devices with access to the internet. Huge volumes of fake requests are poured on a given server or set of servers and they become inaccessible, either being unable to cope with the requests, or simply because the network to the server doesn’t have enough throughput to accomodate all the requests. But why did “the internet” stop because a single DNS provider was under attack? First, because of centralization. The internet is supposed to be decentralized (although I’ve argued that exactly because of DNS, it is pseudo-decentralized). But services like Dyn, UltraDNS, Amazon Route53 and also Akamai and CloudFlare centralize DNS. I can’t tell how exactly, but out of the top 500 websites according to Moz.com, 181 use one of the above 5 services as their DNS provider. Add 25 google services that use their own, and you get nearly 200 out of 500 centered in just 6 entities. But centralization of the authoritative nameservers alone would not have led to yesterday’s problem alone. A big part of the problem, I think, is the TTL (time to live) of the DNS records, that is – the records which contain the mapping between domain name and IP address(es). The idea is that you should not always hit the authoritative nameserver (Dyn’s server(s) in this case)...
by Bozho | Oct 12, 2016 | Aggregated, Opinions
I’ll being this post with a rant about the state of scientific publishing, then review the technology “disruption” landscape and offer a partial improvement that I developed (source). Scientific publishing is quite important – all of science is based on previously confirmed “science”, so knowing what the rest of the scientific community has done or is doing is essential to research. And allows scientists to “stand on the shoulders of giants”. The web was basically invented to improve the sharing of scientific information – it was created at CERN and allowed linking from one (research) document to others. However, scientific publishing at the moment is one of the few industries that haven’t benefited from the web. Well, the industry has – the community hasn’t, at least not as much as one would like. Elsevier, Thomson-Reuters, Springer and other publishers make huge profits (e.g. 39% margin on a 2 billion revenue) for doing something that should basically be free in this century – they spread the knowledge that scientists have created. You can see here some facts about their operation, the most striking being that each university has to pay more than a million dollars to get the literature it needs. It’s because they rely on a centuries old process of submission to journals, accepting the submission, then printing and distributing to university libraries. Recently publishers have put publications online, but they are behind paywalls or accessible only after huge subscription fees have been paid. I’m not a “raging socialist” but sadly, publishers don’t provide (sufficient) value. They simply gather the work of scientists that is already funded by public...
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