Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 04

Lecture Series on Modern Cloud Technologies

2016-04-04T11:33:00+03:00

On April 5, 6, and 7 (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday), I will give three lectures on modern disruptive cloud technologies for master’s students of the APVT department.

Microservice architecture.
Docker — application containerization.
Swagger (Open API specification) — a specification format for web service APIs.

The lectures will take place on April 5, 6, and 7 (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) at 11:15 in room 318 of the APVT department at KhNURE. 14 Nauky Ave., Kharkiv.

Admission is free with registration: https://goo.gl/D14WXP

Lecturer: Vladimir Obrizan, director of Design and Test Lab, senior lecturer at the APVT department of KhNURE.

Reading 54 Books in a Year

2016-02-04T21:59:00+02:00

I used to think I read a lot. Well, that’s how it seemed to me. I ordered books on Amazon, read books in the original that hadn’t been translated into Russian and that were impossible to buy here in Ukraine. A trip to the stores never ended without buying a book.

Sometimes it seemed like I wasn’t reading much. Especially when I hadn’t picked up a book for a month. Or when my eye caught on an unfinished book on the table.

Sometimes I was so impatient to read the next book that I started reading two books in parallel. Well, why torture yourself and deny yourself when you can enjoy two at once! (Hussars! Silence!)

Six months ago I realized that without a system, I couldn’t move forward. So I decided to make a plan and read one book a week. That is, read 54 books in a year.

It turned out not to be that hard. Besides, I’m running with a small cushion of about one week. I can say with complete confidence that regular reading has become a habit. And now I understand how little I used to read before. If you read 54 books a year, then in ten years you can read 540. Five hundred and forty books!

And I can already even see ways for myself to read not one but two books a week, that is, to bring the plan up to 100 books a year. Reading books fits perfectly into a lifestyle in which I gave up reading news, subscribing to public pages, and so on.

Welcome to the "54 Books in a Year" club. Admission is free.

The Book “Don’t Distract Me!” by Edward Hallowell

2015-12-04T00:18:00+02:00

I recently finished reading “Don’t Distract Me!” by Edward Hallowell (120 UAH in electronic form).

Let me brag: I have good luck with books. As soon as something in life starts bothering me, a book on exactly that topic lands in my hands.

It all started with the voice in my head beginning to repeat: there’s little time, lots to do, need to get more things done in less time. For a while this voice just talked inside my head, but then it started looking for practical implementation.

For example, the voice would say: “Hey, why are you just sitting there? Oh, the project takes a long time to compile? Well then open your mail and write some emails! Or google the solution to that problem, you remember, the client complained a week ago. No, not yesterday, not yesterday, a whole week has passed, and you still haven’t helped the person, you heartless beast”!

Or the voice would say this: “Hey, doesn’t it seem to you that when you get to the office, putting the kettle on, then taking off your coat and making tea is more optimal than first taking off your coat, then putting the kettle on and doing nothing for a whole 2.5 minutes? Were you planning to live forever, the way you throw time around???” (Repost if you’ve done this too.)

Very often it would suggest: “Listen, how about you open 7 chats at once and answer everyone at once in the same amount of time”? (Like if you do this constantly.)

And the voice would often say this too: “Shhh... trouble, someone’s coming into the room! Close Facebook, open your mail, and pretend you’re very busy. And now tell this person that you’ll solve their problem someday on some other day, for example tomorrow!” (Like and share if this is about you too.)

This went on for several years. The 2.5 minutes won while boiling the kettle couldn’t compare in any way with days of getting nothing done. And sometimes weeks of getting nothing done.

In the book “Don’t Distract Me!” I read that this is situationally induced attention deficit. Most often it showed up as a constant desire to look at my mail — had anything important arrived? — or refresh social media — what if someone wrote something? In the end, instead of productive creative work, there were constant switches to everything else that doesn’t have much to do with work. On public transportation, where you can’t exactly pull out a computer, my smartphone replaced it for me. There I could check both mail and the little social networks. And since I have about 5 of them, by the time it comes to checking the fifth, you can already start going around the circle and checking the first one again — well, what if something new appeared? Life got stuck in a loop.

In the book, the author looks at various factors that affect concentration: the computer, multitasking mode, and a person’s morale, their thoughts, and their relationships with the people around them. Also, in the second part of the book he gives recommendations for how to improve concentration.

I don’t even know who I could possibly not recommend this book to. So I recommend this book to everyone.

On Narrow Fonts in the Interface

2013-05-04T19:05:00+03:00

The screen area of any smartphone is significantly smaller than that of a laptop or desktop computer. Which means much less information fits on it. Let’s look at an example of a “news feed” type application below:

The standard Helvetica font is used here. You can see that only 2–3 words fit fully into the news headline, which is clearly too little to understand what the news is about. How can the situation be improved? One option is to reduce the font size. But in my work I use a different approach: the font size stays exactly the same, but a different typeface is used, one that has a narrower letterform. The figure below shows the same program using the PT Sans Narrow Bold font:

Thus, while keeping the font size the same, 3–4 words already fit into the news headline.

I prefer to use Paratype fonts because they include Cyrillic letters. The figure below shows what will happen if you load a font into the program whose authors only took care of Latin:

Here only the word Windows is narrow; all the other characters are taken from the standard Helvetica font.

The gain in the amount of information on the screen becomes noticeable when the headline is displayed in two lines:

Modern Apple smartphones have screens with excellent resolution. This should be taken advantage of to increase the density of information presentation.

An example of enabling a narrow font in an iOS project can be looked at on GitHub: https://github.com/obrizan/NarrowFontTable

On the Situation with the Russian-language Stack Overflow

2013-05-04T17:55:00+03:00

Stack Overflow is a site where people go out of their way to help other people find answers to programming questions. My colleagues won’t let me lie: more than half of all questions can be solved by searching this site. The idea of creating such a site turned out to be so successful that its authors launched the Stack Exchange platform with numerous sites on other topics. For example, about the English language and its usage, for sysadmins, about photography, Christianity, and many others, 101 of them in total. But Stack Overflow remains the most popular: 5 million questions, 10 million answers, 6 million visits per day.

There is a special site called Area 51 (named by analogy with the American military base in the state of Nevada, where secret technologies are tested). On this site, new sites that could be launched on the Stack Exchange platform are discussed and cultivated. Among other sites for beer lovers and pickup specialists, a proposal to create a Stack Overflow site in Russian is being discussed.

A lot has already been said both for and against creating a similar site in Russian. Like, programmers should all know English, every last one of them. Or that, in accordance with an old Russian tradition, instead of concrete answers, the site will convince the topic starter what an asshole he is.

As for me, I believe that studying programming is always better in your native language. This lowers the barrier to entry into the profession. It is known that the programming profession lets you live decently, gives hope.

So, a Russian-language site with questions and answers about programming is an excellent place where, for example, schoolchildren and students could ask questions and, most importantly, get answers to them from experienced colleagues.

But let’s get back to the proposal. For a site like this to be launched, at least 200 people willing to ask or answer questions have to be gathered, and among those 200 people there must be 100 users who have a reputation of 200 or more points on any other site on the Stack Exchange platform. Obviously, we’re talking about the English-language Stack Overflow. At the time of writing, 145 users had signed the proposal, 41 of whom have a substantial reputation. I.e., the proposal is 41% signed. Another 59 users with a reputation of 200+ are needed.

It would seem like such a good cause: supporting a site where your own fellow citizens, colleagues, could quickly solve current professional issues in their native language. Nevertheless, some of my acquaintances refused (albeit with arguments) to sign this proposal.

Besides, there is another question: will the site be launched if the proposal does eventually reach all the required user metrics? Let’s look at the experience of other countries. The picture below shows the proposals by the Turks, Chinese, Potruguese and Brazilians, and Spaniards (this proposal has not yet reached all the metrics, but it will soon).

If we go into these proposals, we’ll see the following message:

A loose translation: “Temporarily, sites cannot be launched because tags do not support letters of national alphabets. The launch of the site will be announced separately.” So, for example, the site in Chinese could have been launched back on December 16, when the required number of users had been gathered. More than four months have already passed, and the site still has not been launched. Nor have either the Turkish or Portuguese sites been launched.

But this is not a reason not to go and sign the proposal for a Russian-language Stack Overflow.

On Nine-Finger Touch Typing

2009-05-04T20:42:00+03:00

Students have to type texts on a keyboard very often. That includes preparing reports, term papers, lab assignments, typing program source code, as well as using email and communicating in blogs, forums, and chats. From personal interaction with this contingent, I know that typing any even slightly complex text is torture for them. In the information age in which you and I have had the good fortune to live, the ability to type text on a keyboard very quickly is a very important skill. A method of nine-finger touch typing has been developed that will substantially reduce the time it takes to enter information into a computer.

Now let’s get down to business. In order to succeed at nine-finger touch typing, you need to follow one single rule: always, when working at a computer, keep your hands in the correct position on the keyboard. Here is what it consists of. Take the starting position: the fingers of your left hand should occupy the ASDF keys, the fingers of your right hand should occupy the JKL; keys (in the Russian layout, ФЫВА and ОЛДЖ, respectively). To find this position without looking at the keyboard or without light, the keys located under the index fingers, F and J, have special raised marks (little dots or bars). When typing text, you need to make sure to press the keys only with the designated finger, as shown in the figure below. Here all the green keys are pressed with the index fingers, the yellow keys are pressed with the middle fingers, the orange keys are pressed with the ring fingers, the pink keys are pressed with the little fingers, and “Space” is pressed with the thumb of either hand.

Everything is very simple. There are no other rules or restrictions. You can even keep looking at the keyboard. All that is required of you is discipline and patience. Initially, your typing speed will drop several times over. You will have to lift your hands to look for the needed keys. Over time, you will stop doing this, because you will remember where each key is, and — most importantly — your fingers themselves will remember which key to press when. At this point an important thing will happen: you will realize that there is no longer any need to look down, and you will be able to shift your gaze to the monitor. This plays a very important role, because in addition to the quantitative changes, which consist in the speed of typing characters, you will also have qualitative ones: now you will have the ability to look at what you are writing and correct errors in the text immediately as they occur.

I repeat: all that is required of you is discipline and patience. You will pay for acquiring this skill with two or three months of inconvenience, but it will stay with you for the rest of your life.