Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 09

Disrupt of the Week: Docker

2016-02-09T22:08:00+02:00

This week’s disrupt is Docker (pronounced “Docker”) — an open platform for developing and deploying applications for microservice architectures. Unlike virtualization technologies, Docker uses Linux kernel capabilities to isolate applications, running them on a single operating system but in an isolated environment — a container.

A comparison of virtualization technologies and Docker is shown in the figure:

To launch a new application, there’s no need to start a guest operating system. This significantly reduces the time it takes to start and stop a container, and saves RAM and CPU time. Starting and stopping containers most often takes mere milliseconds.

If a typical virtualization technology is the perfect computer. Then Docker is the perfect operating system.

Docker containers are launched from images. There is an image registry — Docker Hub. An image is represented in a special scripting language that describes the actions needed to configure a given application: choosing a base image, installing programs, compiling, copying files, running scripts and programs, and so on. The image registry already has all the popular programs.

For example, here’s a script (a Dockerfile) describing the Nginx web server image:

What do you need to do to launch a container from this image? All you have to do is type one single command in the console:

docker run nginx

After the image is downloaded to the local computer, a container with this application will be launched. Just one command on the command line and you have a web server running. Hell, now even a schoolkid or your grandmother can be a sysadmin!

Containers can be started, stopped, deleted.

It already sounds amazing, and we still haven’t even discussed container composition or managing a cluster of Docker containers.

I strictly recommend that programmers and sysadmins drop everything and run to learn Docker.

Previous disrupts of the week:

— Swagger

Eric Larssen’s Book “No Mercy for Yourself”

2016-01-09T08:35:00+02:00

I recently read the book “No Mercy for Yourself” by Erik Bertrand Larssen (76 UAH in the electronic version).

I read this book on 11/25/2015, and I already remember almost nothing. That’s not surprising, since after reading a book you retain 5%. Well, or 10% if you’re a genius.

The book was written by a retired military man who talked about his path. How he didn’t get into an elite unit on the first try because he didn’t pass the tough selection process: out of 20 people they took only 2, and by ranking he ended up third. About how he promised himself that in a year he would become first, and he did.

There’s also an interesting story about how he got into an accident on the highway during black ice: a bus skidded and was hurtling toward his car. He tucked himself in, covered his head with his arms, and after the collision he was thrown around the walls and ceiling of the car like a ball, but not only did he stay alive, he was also conscious, climbed out of the car, and directed the rescue of others: called the police and an ambulance, sent people up and down the road to stop traffic and prevent another accident. He also gave first aid to the passengers on the bus. The most interesting part was when the police arrived and asked where the driver of the passenger car was, and he said: that would be me.

Despite such pep, the accident didn’t just pass without consequences: for a whole year afterward he was tormented by wild pain in his head and neck. The author describes this period as the hardest in his life, but nevertheless, he found the strength to recover and go on living.

After that, Larssen describes how he became a coach on this subject and how he supported others.

Overall, the book is very good and interesting; it left me with a very good impression. It talks about how you shouldn’t lie on the couch, but should work on yourself in order to achieve success in life. I highly recommend this book to boys, since in our fatherland a great many boys grow up without fathers and are raised at best by their mothers, so they absolutely need to read a book like this.

When I was reading this book, I also thought of some very similar ones that help turn a boy into a man. These are “Men’s Conversations About Life” by Dmitry “Goblin” Puchkov and “A Man with an Axe” by Andrey Kochergin.

Four Years Sober

2015-05-09T22:58:00+03:00

Four years ago, on May 8, 2011, I woke up early in the morning and realized that I would never drink alcohol again in my life. The day before, we had celebrated my best friend’s birthday (hi, Kolya!) with vodka, shashlik, games, a guitar, and a lake. There had been plenty of drinking bouts in my life; this one was nothing special, but it was that very morning that I realized the idiocy called “drinking alcohol” had to be brought to an end.

I had tried several times to “quit,” with varying degrees of success: from one week (got drunk on Friday, hungover on Saturday, and then again the next Friday) to several months (wanted beer every day, but held out). But that morning the conviction was crystal clear, and I was 100% sure that yesterday’s shots of vodka were the last in my life.

Four years have passed. In that time I have not once wanted to have some vodka with a nice little snack. Or a cold beer with dried fish on a warm summer evening. Or some cold dry wine with a bit of cheese. Everything that for many people is a cult, a tradition, and for some the dream of the entire workweek, lost all meaning for me once and for all. It feels very good to be sober, to see this world in all its colors, to feel it. The mere thought that I might get drunk makes me nauseous. It will never happen again.

If you think you are not dependent on alcohol, try living a year without a shot or a glass. The suffering will start within a week. Can’t live a year? Then you are dependent. Please, don’t tell me about the aesthetics of consuming elite varieties of alcohol; to me it is all one and the same.

People sometimes ask me, so how do you relax then? Any physical and emotional tension can be relieved at the very least by a full night’s sleep. Besides that there is sports, culture, communicating with people close to you, creative work. And in general, the best thing is not to get tense in the first place.

Quitting alcohol brought positive effects: my health improved, my immunity increased, I started getting infectious and cold-related illnesses less often, my productivity increased, my sense of smell and taste improved. The interesting thing about smell and taste is that now, by smell and taste, I realized that beer is diluted piss and vodka is diluted alcohol, and that there is no “taste” there (in the normal sense). At 30 I feel healthier and stronger than I did at 20.

I want to write a separate paragraph about sharpness of mind, improvements in thinking. Since 2011 I have learned the programming languages Objective-C, Java, Python, Java Script, programming for iPhones, Androids, cloud services, and set up two courses at the university, which I am now teaching for the fourth year. My social skills, my skills in communicating with people, have improved. I started managing a team of up to 10 software developers. Ironically, in that same year, 2011, we made an iPhone app for Alcoholics Anonymous in the United States: AA Slogans.

In our office I banned bringing in, and especially drinking, alcohol. For several years now we have been celebrating birthdays and New Year’s with tea and coffee.

Over these four years I have understood two important things:

The biggest mistake of my life was starting to drink alcohol.
The most important event in my life was giving up alcohol.

May 8 is my second birthday.

Are there any negative effects? Yes, there are. My alcoholic acquaintances started turning away from me. Either I no longer have any common topics with them besides alcohol, or they think I am a cultist. But being sober is the best cult I could have ended up in. Thinking about the loss of relationships with some people, I came to the conclusion that this too is a positive effect, and I want to talk about it separately.

More than a year ago I gave up colored carbonated drinks. One winter evening I was meeting with university friends (hi, Tanya!). I shared my experience of quitting alcohol, to which they replied, so why are you drinking Coca-Cola then, it doesn’t do your health any favors either? And I decided to try. It turned out to be fairly easy too. For more than a year now I have not been drinking Coca-Cola, Sprite, or any other sweet carbonated drink.

A month ago I decided to give up media, blogs, and public pages. Global, national, and regional alike. I do not know what is happening in the country or the city right now. I left all groups and public pages on social networks. Besides that, I banned 3516 groups so they would not show up in my feed. This list grows every day by 3–5 groups. The motivation here is very simple: any media outlet provides, besides facts (and are they even facts?), a narrative as well — an explanation of one event or another. In other words: the news has already been chewed up for you and put into your brain. And since a great deal of this information is pouring in, you no longer have time to subject all of it to any kind of critical consideration.

People told me, come on, how can you do without the news, what if you miss something important for yourself. I thought about it: I ran back through previous news in retrospect and did not remember anything that important for myself. And after this month, nothing like that happened either, nothing that would have affected my life in any way.

But a lot of positive effects appeared. I have more time, which used to go into reading news and blogs. My mood has improved. My attitude toward people has improved, because now no one is putting into my head who is good and who is bad. Thanks for the tips, but Biblical truths about good and evil are quite enough for me to understand whether a person is good or bad. I no longer need the services of journalist-interpreters.

I satisfy my need for information with long forms: articles and books. Believe me, there are a lot of books, so I still have plenty of reading to do. And a book is not a dump in a public page or in the media. At the very least, a book has to be written. My choice is dinner at a restaurant, not fast food.

This thought came into my head: giving things up is cool. You cannot give up everything at once, but little by little you can try. For example, I need to sort out food, namely give up unhealthy food. And there will also be a very big job to do with thoughts: many thoughts need to be given up too.

Overall the formula came out like this: give up the bad, fill your life with the good. Give up alcohol, the company of bad people, give up the media. Recommended.

Monument

2010-09-09T22:12:00+03:00

Information is an invaluable resource for an animal, a bird, a fish, and all the more so for a human. As soon as the fish grasped the importance of information and knowledge, of accumulating and preserving them, it began its path of evolution.

Meanwhile, the fund has already raised UAH 180,000 for a monument to a student programmer near KhNURE. The spot for the pedestal is ready; we’re waiting for the sculpture itself.

What’s your opinion of the monument? Pretty/ugly? Needed/not needed? Maybe they’d have been better off putting in a little fountain?

Weather News

2010-08-09T18:15:00+03:00

The programmers of this weather station didn’t know it would get this hot here.

Sports News

2010-08-09T10:14:00+03:00

The Kharkiv Internet news service “Mediaport” is in a hurry to acquaint Kharkiv residents with the results of sporting competitions:

In fact, Metalist played at home in Kharkiv, which means they were the home team. It was Vorskla that played away. Krasnopyorov did not score from a penalty. He scored after going one-on-one with the Metalist goalkeeper. And it was Devych who scored from a penalty in the 52nd minute.

The spelling is shaky in places. But everyone knows that in Internet journalism, facts and spelling play a secondary role.