Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 02

Abstract Thinking and Programmers

2017-04-02T20:16:00+03:00

Programmers have absolutely no abstract thinking.

Proof: everyone has read and knows Erich Gamma’s “patterns” (judging by applicants’ résumés). But in practice they know and use only the singleton. And even that is because it’s the same thing as a global variable, and they were taught that in Pascal lessons (essentially, an antipattern).

Until you rub their noses in it, a programmer can’t figure out on their own that a given pattern can be used in this context. Usually in such cases programmers’ eyes go wide, they freeze, and they look as if they’ve heard revelations from God.

Why Doesn’t the University Teach You to Be Successful?

2016-11-02T21:24:00+02:00

A year ago I wrote a note called "The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful" (The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful). This thesis had been rattling around in my head for several years, but I was missing a few pieces to formulate it clearly.

A year and a half has passed, and I’m ready to formulate for myself an answer to the following question: "So why doesn’t the university teach you to be successful?".

The relationship between student and teacher is very important for a quality education. Does the student believe the teacher’s words? Does he trust the teacher himself? How the student absorbs knowledge depends on this. Students come to a university with certain expectations of getting knowledge that will help them establish themselves in life after university. A first-year student is ready to believe any teacher who happens to come along. But the credit of trust has to be paid back regularly. With a simple check, the knowledge from lectures turns out to be useless on the local labor market, because this lecture knowledge was taken from a book, not gained in the process of the teacher achieving success. The student stops trusting the teacher.

Another thing that undermines trust in the teacher is his low social status, determined by the government’s budget policy and then by the culture of society. How would you describe a grown man who earns only 30 dollars a month by giving lectures? A loser? A failure? Thanks for the compliment! Is that who you should learn success from? A student will not believe a person who has not achieved success in life himself.

I’ll leave the question "Should a teacher who took money from a student for a grade on an exam be considered successful" unanswered. How to answer it is everyone’s personal choice.

The university doesn’t teach you to be successful because there are no people there who know what it is.

Disrupt of the Week: Swagger

2016-02-02T23:58:00+02:00

Please welcome a new column: "Disrupt of the Week." In this column I talk about the most breakthrough technologies that substantially change the rules of the game in various fields.

This week’s disrupt is Swagger (pronounced "swogger") — a specification for describing web service APIs.

Why is this needed? Since the specification is machine-readable, you can use it as the basis for various useful things:

a) automatically generate documentation for a web service;

b) automatically generate API clients for this service;

c) automatically generate web service templates;

This is very relevant for microservice architectures, where one microservice can be used by other microservices written in different languages.

The specification is described in YAML or JSON. I prefer the first option because it is the most human-readable. This is what a specification looks like:

This is what a fragment of documentation built from this specification looks like:

And now for the most interesting part: there is an API client generator for many languages:

android, async-scala, csharp, dart, flash, python-flask, java, javascript, jaxrs, inflector, jmeter, nodejs, objc, perl, php, python, qt5cpp, ruby, scala, scalatra, silex-PHP, sinatra, slim, spring-mvc, dynamic-html, html, swagger, swagger-yaml, swift, tizen, typescript-angular, typescript-node, akka-scala, CsharpDotNet2, clojure

Here is a small fragment of an API client for the Objective-C language:

The implementation details of data exchange over the HTTP protocol are hidden from the developer. There’s no need to focus on those details. There are already ready-made high-level methods for working with the web service. You can describe the API once and generate two clients at once, for example, for a mobile application and for a website.

This way of describing a server API and generating clients increases a developer’s productivity by at least 10 times.

Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-12-02T23:07:00+02:00

On November 28, the sixth meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 13:30.

Below is a brief summary of the meeting.

Empire of Code (Volodymyr Obrizan)

Empire of Code is another game where knowing the Python language gives you an advantage. Website address: http://www.empireofcode.com The game was developed by the same developers as the site http://www.checkio.com The game is a clone of Clash of Clans, but with a theme about asteroids and robots. The twist is that here you can improve your base by solving little Python or JavaScript problems, and you can also write algorithms for defending your base and strategies for attacking other people’s bases.

A Walkthrough of One Tricky Little Problem (Volodymyr Obrizan + everyone)

The problem is this: develop a function that validates a password (returns True or False). The conditions are: the password must be longer than 9 characters, have at least one uppercase letter, at least one lowercase letter, and at least one digit. The function prototype is: def func(password). Try to solve it on your own. But there is one more constraint: the real high-wire act is fitting the implementation of this function into 99 bytes.

I can give two pieces of advice:

Write a test program that will check whether the function checks the password correctly. Because if you keep changing the program, trying to fit it into 99 bytes, at some point it may stop working.
Read the article about functional programming. It will give you hints on how to shorten the code substantially. Link to the article: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html

Data Science: Big Data, Machine Learning, and More Using the Python Language (Vladimir Rustinov)

Vladimir Alekseevich began giving an introduction to the big data technology stack. We didn’t manage to cover much, but the topic isn’t small either. You can’t cover it in half an hour to an hour.

Here is the link to the presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwMuwA59_aNuWUFrLXJqcnRXemJXUnhaS0RncTdKUVc3SWJB/view?usp=sharing

The topic of big data is appealing because of the wide range of technologies and knowledge required to successfully solve the corresponding tasks.

Previous meetings:

No. 5 11/21/2015 Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 3, No. 4 11/07/2015, 11/14/2015 Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How can you get news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club?

Subscription to news about meetings of the "Python at APVT" club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-reg The mailing list will be the main channel for information about meetings.

Groups on VKontakte and Facebook: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt respectively.

A Q&A site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

Questions? You can contact me personally: volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com

Schoolkids Are Curious 5: Do We Need Fiction?

2015-11-02T08:44:00+02:00

The other day I was talking with schoolkids at a college, so today in the “Students Are Curious” column, a question from them:

Tell us about the influence of fiction on a specialist. Should one read fiction?

Fiction should be read while you’re still in school. There’s a lot of free time, you can read anything and everything, and all these made-up plots can really hold a reader’s attention.

When you get older, made-up worlds and characters are no longer that interesting, and the time for that has sharply decreased. What becomes interesting is how the real world works, what real people did, how they achieved success, what they did well, what they did badly. Fiction books won’t help here in any way. Specialized literature will help: technical, political, books on business, psychology, self-development, and so on.

Though I do know people who, at 30, keep living in the world of elves and reading about a little mithril chainmail shirt.

In previous installments:

— Students Are Curious about choosing a major.
— Students Are Curious about completing a course after the deadline.
— Students Are Curious about choosing a programming language.
— Students Are Curious about submitting a thesis.

Interested in my opinion on any issue of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. You can also ask questions through the anonymous questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

Philosophical

2014-07-02T15:11:00+03:00

Open your notebook, write this down.

Some people think that, like, they were taught trigonometry in school for nothing: it never came in handy in life. But in fact, some people live their lives so boringly and pointlessly that they don’t even have anywhere to apply trigonometry.

Class dismissed. Goodbye!

On Office Programs

2013-11-02T09:21:00+02:00

— Yesterday I needed to prepare a contract, so I installed Microsoft Office.
— Microsoft sucks! Install OpenOffice!

I don’t understand how people can seriously recommend OpenOffice as a program for editing office files. OpenOffice is useful only as an argument that “there is an alternative to Microsoft Office,” and nothing more. I’m sure the apologists for OpenOffice have never tried to edit a document longer than one paragraph. And edit it so that the document looks the way the user wants it to, not the way OpenOffice happened to feel like making it look.

And those very same people say something completely different when it comes to getting from point A to point B.

— Maybe by trolleybus? Or in a Zhiguli?
— Are you an idiot? I’m only going in a Mercedes!

On PHP Frameworks

2013-04-02T23:48:00+03:00

Every self-respecting PHP programmer should know at least two PHP frameworks. This is so that, when you come onto an existing project, you can criticize the current implementation and propose redoing everything on another framework. But it’s better to know three or even four frameworks, in case other PHP programmers have already managed to work on that project.

Daria Stepanenko Is Leaving the University

2011-10-02T09:39:00+03:00

Education news:

A student at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Daria Stepanenko, who on September 22 hit Ukraine’s Minister of Education, Science, Youth and Sports Dmytro Tabachnyk in the face with a bouquet of flowers, has decided to terminate her corporate agreement with the university.

...

“The university is not worthy of awarding me a diploma,” Stepanenko believes.

Student Who Hit Tabachnyk Leaves Mohyla in a Scandal

So this is how it works: first the kids breathlessly tell everyone what a cool place they study at, but then the wind blows the other way, the weather vane swings one-eighty, and now it’s “the university is not worthy.”

But there’s an opinion that Daria Stepanenko could get a much better education at another well-known institution. We await news along the lines of “Daria Stepanenko hit the education minister with a cheeseburger.”

Life Is Like a Zebra: a White Stripe, Then a Black One

2011-04-02T10:26:00+03:00

There’s an opinion that all processes in life happen in cycles. Here things are going badly for us. Then something gets a little better, then everything is absolutely wonderful. We’re at the top. At this point we realize that happiness can’t last forever, and the next downturn begins. And when we’re at the bottom, we can say: “It won’t get any worse.” And the climb begins. And so it goes, round and round. This cyclicality is illustrated below.

Let’s try looking at our life from another angle, about 33 degrees. Here we’re in a steep climb, then a plateau (we need to rest a bit and catch our breath), and then another steep climb. And so on.

In fact, the first and second charts are the same. But the value of the second perspective is that there’s no room in it for a bad mood.

The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes

2010-10-02T16:48:00+03:00

Our university, where I spent 11 years of my life, like any other university, has its own corporate website http://kture.kharkov.ua and corporate email in the domain of the same name. Surely from the title of the post and the first paragraph you’ve already figured out what I’m going to write about.

So, I am deeply convinced that a university that claims it will produce a student who will become the future Bill Gates and outshine “Microsoft” should first invest money in developing key infrastructure: the website, email, internet access, and other IT services.

Over these ten years, I don’t remember the university website ever giving me any joy. The design changed many times; at rectorate meetings the importance of keeping information up to date was often emphasized. In the end, we have a site in broken English with spelling mistakes. The key date in the website’s development was April 18, 2008. On that very day, the last news item was entered using the CMS’s built-in tools. After that day, all news items were entered manually, directly into the HTML code of the front page. Someone, to be fair, tried to maintain a separate news archive (also manually), but stopped doing that after September 17, 2009.

If you have time to spare, you can take a walk through the sites of various faculties and departments. You can see all kinds of things there.

The mailbox is limited in size. If I’m not mistaken, the quota for an ordinary instructor is 10-20 megabytes. When the mailbox fills up, the sender gets a “disk quota exceeded” bounce, and the message is not saved. What to do after that, how to get in touch with a person whose mailbox is full, is unclear. Supposedly there is an administrative (not technical, but paper-based) ban on accessing the mailbox from outside the university walls. That is, while at home or on a business trip you are deprived of access to your mailbox. If you’ve gone away for a week and people have been actively sending you mail during that time, then the thing this paragraph began with will happen.

About five years ago I discovered that it was possible to get access to the mail after all. I looked through the email headers and found that they were being sent from the address mg.kture.kharkov.ua. Opening that address in a browser, I saw the mail web-face. In principle, that was enough. A few weeks ago that address stopped working. After a brief exchange with the administrator, I was once again told that there is no access from outside. I climbed into the headers again and saw that the address had changed to mail.kture.kharkov.ua. I went there and was again able to use my mailbox. But the happiness did not last long. This time the admin beat me.

Please don’t write to me at kture.kharkov.ua anymore, because I rarely have classes, and going to the university every day just to check mail is stupid.

Rumors have reached me that the monthly traffic to our department has a 3 GB limit. There are more than 20 staff members in the department. That comes out to 150 megabytes per person per month. That is, 7.5 megabytes per day. And there are also more than 30 computers in the department. They need to be updated regularly. We all know what happens to unupdated operating systems.

I hope that with the development of the Microsoft Innovation Center at KhNURE, our university will be filled with innovations.

News from Domestic Football

2010-10-02T10:03:00+03:00

I open my RSS reader in the morning, and there’s this:

Football.ua readers consider Dynamo the most popular club in Ukraine

As it turned out, the rich history and long hegemony of Kyiv Dynamo in our football have still not been forgotten — it was the capital club that took the palm in the poll — 38.2% of those who voted, 29394 people.

The rapid rise of Donetsk Shakhtar has not yet helped it climb to the top of popularity in Ukrainian football, but the Miners’ progress was not for nothing — the orange-and-blacks have a very weighty figure to their name (31%, 23,817).

Naturally, the first two places surprised few people, but the third may have come as a surprise to many. “Bronze” Metalist and its fierce rival Dnipro let Lviv Karpaty get ahead of them. Apparently, the white-and-greens’ recent successes have paid off right now. Almost 13% of users (9801) cast their vote for the Lviv side. Metalist’s figure is 10.1% (7746), Dnipro’s — 5.9% (4546).

football.ua

That is, let’s repeat the voting results once more:

Dynamo — 29,394 users.
Shakhtar — 23,817.
Karpaty — 9,801.
Metalist — 7,746.
Dnipro — 4,546.

While the editor of Football.ua is surprised by third place, I was surprised by first. Let’s try to make sense of these numbers.

It is known that the internet is the most convenient means of expressing your opinion publicly without breaking the mental connection between ass and chair. But it is also known that words can diverge from deeds.

There is only one correct way to assess the popularity of a given club. The method is ridiculously simple — you need to count the number of fans attending the club’s matches. To attend a game, clicking a button on the internet is not enough. You have to get up from the chair, get to the ticket office, enter into commodity-money relations with the cashier, wait for match day, go to the stadium in harsh weather (those who were at the match on Thursday will understand), and support the team. This statistic is available on the Premier League website; you only need to look at the match reports.

Let’s look at the attendance statistics for five clubs over 11 rounds of the current championship. Home and away games are included.

****	Total	Average	Min.	Max.
Shakhtar	260,887	23,717	1,460	38,520
Metalist	196,526	17,866	1,430	38,600
Dynamo	138,425	12,584	5,100	38,600
Dnipro	125,208	11,383	2,000	22,846
Karpaty	112,714	10,247	4,500	35,008

Now the statistics for home matches only (everyone has five home games; Shakhtar has six). The stadium capacity data is taken from the Premier League website (the figures are outdated in places).

****	Total	Average	Min.	Max.	Stadium
Shakhtar	196,007	32,668	29,132	38,520	51,504
Metalist	155,050	31,010	20,700	38,600	41,307
Dnipro	80,508	16,102	12,962	22,846	31,003
Dynamo	42,725	8,545	5,500	14,000	16,873
Karpaty	40,000	8,000	6,000	10,000	27,925

I dare suggest that the television audience is distributed in direct proportion.

This kind of count was already carried out for the 2009/2010 season by FC Metalist’s press service. Home-match statistics:

Shakhtar — 399,923 (on average — 26,662).
Metalist — 393,780 (on average — 26,252).
Dnipro — 207,012 (on average — 13,800).
Karpaty — 201,076 (on average — 13,405).
Dynamo — 162,050 (on average — 10,803).

The main conclusion is that Dynamo’s mega-popularity exists only on the website; in reality, it is fifth in attendance.

For anyone who doesn’t understand the difference in the method of counting popularity, I’ll explain. A club’s popularity statistics according to a website poll affect only the amount of shit in the comments to that poll. Attendance statistics for a club’s games affect the interest of sponsors, advertisers, and television channels buying up the rights to broadcast matches.

And finally, you can look at the interesting statistics of the Ultras League. Teams are ranked based on the number of fans in the away section and the distance from their home city.

KhNURE — 79

2009-10-02T08:30:00+03:00

And here we are again in the middle of autumn, and here we are again with the birthday of our dear university. The administration believes that this is specifically the 79th anniversary of its founding, but nevertheless there are also other opinions on that score.

In fact, it’s not so important how old these old walls are, or how many years ago the name was changed (and it changed several times: KhIGMAVT → KhIRE → KhSTURE → KhNURE). A university is the people who work and study in it, not the walls. People study and work here and now. I want to wish these people good health and daily success. To me, a good university is one where students study, teachers teach, and all relationships are built on love and respect for one another.

Happy holiday!

Time Management Basics for a Freshman

2009-05-02T22:47:00+03:00

Freshmen sometimes ask: “How do you keep up at the university? You have to go to all the classes, do labs, write papers, do homework”... Indeed, the first year of university is a big step, one that not every high school graduate gets to take.

Let’s look at the main differences between studying in school and at a university. Over 10-11 years of school, we get used to care and heightened attention from parents and teachers. Certain control measures have been developed and are practiced: regular parent-teacher meetings, written certification of the child’s successes for the week in the diary, as well as quarterly in the report card, one-on-one meetings between parents and teachers on the street or on public transportation, since everyone conveniently lives nearby. Hardly any fact, however small, about your studies will escape your parents.

There is no such control at the university. By and large, nobody gives a damn about the students. For example, it is considered beneath one’s dignity to call the parents even after a student has been absent from classes for a month. This is what we dreamed of all through our last years of school: “If only we could get the hell out of here and be free.” This is where many students make the biggest mistake. They confuse “freedom from” with “freedom to.” In the case where studying at the university becomes freedom from excessive control at school, we can observe how straight-A students slide into mediocrity; they can no longer deliver the productivity they delivered at school. Maybe it seems to them that the store of knowledge they accumulated in school will be enough, but that is a delusion, because university requirements are much higher. But there is no control, and there is no person nearby who will say: “Slow down!” On the other hand, I know many cases where studying at the university becomes freedom for self-realization in the required direction. Here even C students and layabouts from school can reveal their talent and become good specialists.

Students often underestimate how hard university studies are. Some see the university as a hobby club: have a smoke by the flowerbed in the morning, hang out at the extender in the afternoon, have a little beer at the stadium in the evening. My attitude toward studying at the university is as toward a full-fledged job, with a 40-hour workweek. For example, if during the week a student had 12 class periods (18 clock hours), then he should work another 22 hours at home.

Let’s look at a few simple, practice-oriented tips that can be useful immediately after you start applying them.

Time planning

In life, we cannot increase the number of hours in a day. We can only spend the 24 hours we have. You can spend them effectively, or you can spend them any old way. You can draw an analogy with money. If you don’t plan your spending before going to the store, you may end up without some necessary thing, because the money will already have been spent on something empty and unnecessary. A proven method is to get yourself a planner and write down in advance all university classes, independent work, personal meetings with friends, helping your parents, going to the movies, sports, and so on. Those who say planning itself takes a lot of time have probably never actually tried doing it. I can’t say planning takes me more than five minutes a week. Students with laptops or smartphones can use numerous programs that automate personal time planning.

If you take the trouble to schedule your time for a week or more, you will be pleasantly surprised to find that, as it turns out, you can manage to do far from everything. It is exactly the same in life: you will not be able to do everything. So, in order not to miss the goals you have set in life, you need to set priorities correctly.

A simple way to prioritize tasks

There are urgent tasks, and there are non-urgent ones. There are important tasks, and there are unimportant ones. Since you are a student, your important tasks are going to classes and doing homework. Usually this is made the number-one priority. No less important are sports and various work at home, such as helping parents and loved ones. Tasks can be ranked by urgency: “for today,” “for tomorrow,” “this week,” “this month,” and so on. It is very convenient to write all tasks down in a table, as shown below. The upper-left corner is important and urgent tasks; you need to focus on them and do them first. The lower-right corner is unimportant and non-urgent activities. You can skip them altogether.

You have no money, but you have time

Most likely, neither your parents nor, all the more so, your instructors will be interested in your fate. Therefore, you will have to answer to yourself. Maybe you have no money, but you have time. It turns out time can be invested too. Invest it in yourself. This means that if you devote several years to studying and practicing programming, the dividends will be success in the profession. If you spend time on stupid hangouts near the institute, if you don’t listen to the professor in lectures, if you play solitaire in labs, then that spent time will never come back to you in any way. You can deceive your parents and friends, but you are unlikely to be able to deceive yourself.