by Bozho | Jan 23, 2018 | Aggregated, Opinions
Blockchain, AI, big data, NoSQL, microservices, single page applications, cloud, SOA. What do these have in common? They have been or are hyped. At some point they were “the big thing” du jour. Everyone was investigating the possibility of using them, everyone was talking about them, there were meetups, conferences, articles on Hacker news and reddit. There are more examples, of course (which is the javascript framework this month?) but I’ll focus my examples on those above. Another thing they have in common is that they are useful. All of them have some pretty good applications that are definitely worth the time and investment. Yet another thing they have in common is that they are far from universally applicable. I’ve argued that monoliths are often still the better approach and that microservices introduce too much complexity for the average project. Big Data is something very few organizations actually have; AI/machine learning can help a wide variety of problems, but it is just a tool in a toolbox, not the solution to all problems. Single page applications are great for, yeah, applications, but most websites are still websites, not feature-rich frontends – you don’t need an SPA for every type of website. NoSQL has solved niche issues, and issues of scale that few companies have had, but nothing beats a good old relational database for the typical project out there. “The cloud” is not always where you want your software to be; and SOA just means everything (ESBs, direct integrations, even microservices, according to some). And the blockchain – it seems to be having limited success beyond cryptocurrencies. And finally,...
by Bozho | Jan 12, 2018 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
Every now and then I open the admin panel of my blog hosting and ban a few IPs (after I’ve tried messaging their abuse email, if I find one). It is always IPs that are generating tons of requests (and traffic) – most likely running some home-made crawler. In some cases the IPs belong to an actual service that captures and provides content, in other cases it’s just a scraper for unknown reasons. I don’t want to ban IPs, especially because that same IP may be reassigned to a legitimate user (or network) in the future. But they are increasing my hosting usage, which in turn leads to the hosting provider suggesting an upgrade in the plan. And this is not about me, I’m just an example – tons of requests to millions of sites are … useless. My advice (and plea) is this – please fix your crawlers. Or scrapers. Or whatever you prefer to call that thing that programmatically goes on websites and gets their content. How? First, reuse an existing crawler. No need to make something new (unless there’s a very specific use-case). A good intro and comparison can be seen here. Second, make your crawler “polite” (the “politeness” property in the article above). Here’s a good overview on how to be polite, including respect for robots.txt. Existing implementations most likely have politeness options, but you may have to configure them. Here I’d suggest another option – set a dynamic crawl rate per website that depends on how often the content is updated. My blog updates 3 times a month – no need to crawl it...
by Bozho | Nov 29, 2017 | Aggregated, Developer tips, Opinions
You’ve probably heard about GDPR. The new European data protection regulation that applies practically to everyone. Especially if you are working in a big company, it’s most likely that there’s already a process for gettign your systems in compliance with the regulation. The regulation is basically a law that must be followed in all European countries (but also applies to non-EU companies that have users in the EU). In this particular case, it applies to companies that are not registered in Europe, but are having European customers. So that’s most companies. I will not go into yet another “12 facts about GDPR” or “7 myths about GDPR” posts/whitepapers, as they are often aimed at managers or legal people. Instead, I’ll focus on what GDPR means for developers. Why am I qualified to do that? A few reasons – I was advisor to the deputy prime minister of a EU country, and because of that I’ve been both exposed and myself wrote some legislation. I’m familiar with the “legalese” and how the regulatory framework operates in general. I’m also a privacy advocate and I’ve been writing about GDPR-related stuff in the past, i.e. “before it was cool” (protecting sensitive data, the right to be forgotten). And finally, I’m currently working on a project that (among other things) aims to help with covering some GDPR aspects. I’ll try to be a bit more comprehensive this time and cover as many aspects of the regulation that concern developers as I can. And while developers will mostly be concerned about how the systems they are working on have to change, it’s not unlikely...
by Bozho | Nov 24, 2017 | Aggregated, Opinions, programming, software engineering
I’ll start this post with a quote: "Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it." – Patrick McKenzie — The Practical Dev (@ThePracticalDev) February 14, 2017 Good developers are good problem solvers. They turn each task into a series of problems they have to solve. They don’t necessarily know how to solve them in advance, but they have their toolbox of approaches, shortcuts and other tricks that lead to the solution. I have outlined one such set of steps for identifying problems, but you can’t easily formalize the problem-solving approach. But is really turning a task into a set of problems a good idea? Programming can be seen as a creative exercise, rather than a problem solving one – you think, you ponder, you deliberate, then you make something out of nothing and it’s beautiful, because it works. And sometimes programming is that, but that is almost always interrupted by a series of problems that stop you from getting the task completed. That process is best visualized with the following short video: That’s because most things in software break. They either break because there are unknowns, or because of a lot of unsuspected edge cases, or because the abstraction that we use leaks, or because the tools that we use are poorly documented or have poor APIs/UIs, or simply because of bugs. Or in many cases – all of the above. So inevitably, we have to learn to solve problems. And solving them quickly and properly is in fact, one might argue, the most important skill when...
by Bozho | Nov 12, 2017 | Aggregated, Opinions
Over the years I’ve observed an inevitable shift from Eclipse to IntelliJ IDEA. Last year they were almost equal in usage, and I have the feeling things are swaying even more towards IDEA. IDEA is like the iPhone of IDEs – its users tell you that “you will feel how much better it is once you get used to it”, “are you STILL using Eclipse??”, “IDEA is so much better, I thought everyone has switched”, etc. I’ve been using mostly Eclipse for the past 12 years, but in some cases I did use IDEA – when I was writing Scala, when I was writing Android, and most recently – when Eclipse failed to be ready for the Java 9 release, so after half a day of trying to get it working, I just switched to IDEA until Eclipse finally gets a working Java 9 version (with Maven and the rest of the stuff). But I will get back to Eclipse again, soon. And I still prefer it. Not just because of all the key combinations I’ve internalized (you can reuse those in IDEA), but because there are still things I find worse in IDEA. Of course, IDEA has so much more cool features like code improvement suggestions and actually working plugins for everything. But at least some of the problems I see have to do with the more basic development workflow and experience. And you can’t compensate for those with sugarcoating. So here they are: Projects are not automatically built (by default), so you can end up with compilation errors that you don’t see until you open a non-compiling...
by Bozho | Oct 24, 2017 | Aggregated, Opinions
The blockchain hype is huge, the ICO craze (“Coindike”) is generating millions if not billions of “funding” for businesses that claim to revolutionize basically anything. I’ve been following all of that for a while. I got my first (and only) Bitcoin several years ago, I know how the technology works, I’ve implemented the data structure part, I’ve tried (with varying success) to install an Ethereum wallet since almost as soon as Ethereum appeared, and I’ve read and subscribed to newsletters about dozens of projects and new cryptocurrencies, including storj.io, siacoin, namecoin, etc. I would say I’m at least above average in terms of knowledge on how the cryptocurrencies, blockchain, smart contracts, EVM, proof-of-wahtever operates. And I’ve voiced my concerns about the technology in general. Now it’s rant time. I’ve been reading whitepapers of various projects, I’ve been to various meetups and talks, I’ve been reading the professed future applications of the blockchain, and I have to admit – it’s all Greek to me. I have no clue what these people are talking about. And why would all of that make any sense. I still think I’m not clever enough to understand the upcoming revolution, but there’s also a cynical side of me that says “this is all a scam”. Why “X on the blockchain” somehow makes it magical and superior to a good old centralized solution? No, spare me the cliches about “immutable ledger”, “lack of central authority” and the likes. These are the phrases that a person learns after reading literally one article about blockchain. Have you actually written anything apart from a complex-sounding whitepaper or a hello-world...
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