Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 17

IT now vs. 20 years ago: how requirements for professionals have changed

2026-09-17T15:53:05+03:00

I gave High Bar Journal my comments on "IT now vs. 20 years ago: how requirements for professionals have changed"

https://highbarjournal.media/post/cyfrova-transformaciya-vymogy-do-it-fahivciv

If You’re the CTO

2018-07-17T22:09:00+03:00

If you’re the CTO and you haven’t programmed in a long time, I recommend taking some current project and implementing a new feature or fixing a couple of bugs.

It’s like being a “secret shopper” in a supermarket. It may turn out that the goods are expired, the displays are a mess, the floor is dirty, the cashiers are rude, and in general you’ll never set foot in that supermarket again.

And I bet the programmers are telling you how great everything is over there?

There’s a Bit of Joke in Every Joke

2016-06-17T10:33:00+03:00

There’s this genre of cartoons that makes fun of office slavery. For example, here’s a woman who keeps running and running, out of breath, and realizes there will never be a finish line:

And here’s a manager saying: “Run faster!”, as in, you’re not working hard enough, the required KPI isn’t being reached! KPI is Key Performance Indicator, a number that makes it easy to compare which employee is better and which is worse.

In the 21st century, any absurdity and any joke can be turned into unfunny reality:

Now of course you’ll rush to the comments to write about how harmful it is to work sitting down all day, and that standing is better, and better still in a wooden wheel, like a hamster. In response I’d start explaining to you that it’s better to work less, but more efficiently, but you won’t understand what “more efficiently” means. All you want is a new office gadget. Heh-heh-heh.

I Don’t Have Time

2015-12-17T09:22:00+02:00

It grates on the ear when people say, “I don’t have time.”

Remember this once and for all: saying “I don’t have time” is very embarrassing. It’s just as embarrassing as replying to a girl, “I don’t have money,” when she suggests going to the movies.

The Lord God gave everyone the same amount of time — 24 hours every day. It’s up to each person to choose what to spend that time on: studying, sports, meeting with loved ones, work, cultural events, travel, computer games, TV series, or some listless lying around on the couch.

You can go and earn money. Time is easier: you don’t have to go anywhere; you just need to throw the extra, unnecessary, secondary stuff out of your life.

Informational Style in Higher Education

2015-07-17T22:56:00+03:00

There’s a lot a university doesn’t teach. For example, it doesn’t teach your native Russian. Over the years I worked as an instructor, hundreds of student papers passed before my eyes: reports, abstracts, term papers, theses. Usually I start scribbling comments in the very first paragraph and send it back for revision after the first page.

What do students take as a model for their written style? Shitty sites like Habrahabr, where there is no editorial policy at all, where crooked translations of foreign articles get posted. Good technical-writing style can be found in old Soviet books (published before the 1980s), but who reads them these days? So I had to explain at least some elements of academic style to students orally.

One of this year’s discoveries was Maxim Ilyakhov’s informational style. I became interested in his work from the very first article, because he deals with exactly what student papers lack: the meaning of words, the meaning of the text. I’ve come across “crap” in term papers and theses, and using informational style is exactly what removes the “crap” from the text. It’s simply a feast for the eyes and the brain!

Read the mailing-list archive about informational style: http://maximilyahov.ru/blog/?go=all/availability/

Besides articles, Ilyakhov published an application that automates checking a text fragment for compliance with informational style: http://glvrd.ru/

Let’s look at a paragraph from the introduction of one student term paper:

Modern web technologies do not stand still. For many years now, website creation technologies have been continuously improving, and now the pace of their improvement is so high that textbooks manage to become significantly outdated even before publication. The main ones include the following: HTML(XHTML), CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ajax, and WordPress.

And here is the result of processing it with “Glavred”:

Very convenient: the stop words are underlined, examples are shown, and there is a link to an explanatory article.

Informational style is mandatory for all students for any kind of work under my supervision. Don’t bring me papers without having read the “Glavred” mailing list.

They also have an amusing page on their site with a server error message.

A Grade for the Domestic Higher School

2011-09-17T22:47:00+03:00

Let’s take a look at McDonald’s advertising campaign for zombifying employable teenagers.

McDonald’s copywriters have gotten so fucking brazen that they dared to declare, on big posters all over Ukraine, that in one workday in fast food you can learn “much more than in several years at a teachers’ college.” In Poltava there is only one pedagogical university — Poltava National Pedagogical University. The status of “national” was granted by decree of the President of Ukraine in 2009. The status of “national” implies that PNPU is a national asset of Ukraine, protected by the state. Does the rector Mykola Ivanovych Stepanenko and the university’s faculty know how highly the “number-one company” has valued teachers’ labor?

This ad is a spit in the face of all schoolteachers and lecturers who still remember what higher education is. There are problems in the domestic education system, but even so there is no company in the world where a workday would give you more than a year of study at a Ukrainian university.

There is an opinion that anyone who has worked at McDonald’s for at least a week is already a Candidate of Pedagogical Sciences.

And here’s a joke on the subject. — Professor, when you meet your graduates, what do you say to them? — A medium Coke and a Big Mac, please!

Yevpatoria

2011-02-17T21:40:00+02:00

09/25/2010—09/26/2010

Yevpatoria is a resort town. You’re supposed to go there to relax by the sea. You can go for a long time, or you can go for a weekend. So this time the group suggested going for the weekend. As always, someone turned up who “knows a good place to stay cheap.” The good place to stay cheap turned out to be somewhere out in the steppe, 10 km from town and 3 km from the sea. The scenery is quite dreary: no vegetation except thorny weeds, no black soil, just clay and dust.

There isn’t much entertainment at the tourist camp. We practiced the so-called “kite” (in our language, a toy kite), which had been brought along in case of total gloom and hopelessness:

It’s a pretty interesting toy. If there’s a nice breeze, it can even drag a hefty human carcass along behind it.

Next to the tourist camp stands a lighthouse.

After we’d had enough of playing with the kite and walking around the tourist camp, it was decided to go to the sea. The shortest route is through the enemy tourist camp. Naturally, passage costs money. Naturally, the ticket office is closed on weekends. The honest security guard categorically refused to take the fee for passage for himself. We went around.

In the off-season (late September), nobody looks after the beaches. There had been a storm during the night, and several centners of bird and fish shit and other underwater fauna had been washed ashore; under the gentle rays of the September sun, they began leisurely decomposing, causing the beachgoers, to put it mildly, some discomfort.

Having relaxed by the sea, the decision was made to take a walking tour of the city of Yevpatoria.

On the street signs in Yevpatoria, both the modern and historical names are shown. And the modern name (on top) is in one font, while the historical one (below) is in another. The horizon isn’t tilted; this pole really does stand like that.

In the historic center of the city, tourists are driven around in electric carts.

Who do you think lives in this little house? Correct — transformers.

In the artist’s imagination, Christ’s face is blue. The Creator has the right to depict the Creator however he wants. Especially since no one has ever seen him.

Walking around the streets of Yevpatoria, we observed a certain number of souvenir stalls. We stopped near one of them to wait for the stragglers. The souvenir saleswoman pounced on us with reproaches that we were standing too close to her stall, thereby ruining all her business. We moved away, but the assortment of her goods interested me. I very quickly found the reason for her commercial fiasco: all the souvenirs were boring. Among hundreds of trinkets, not a single one of them in any way reminded you of Yevpatoria. All her souvenirs were exactly the same souvenir junk sold in any city.

Nevertheless, waiting for the stragglers paid off. Looking around, I found an old lady selling old books. After a quick scan, my eye stopped on Yuri Koptev’s book “Radiocarbon Tells the Story” (1976). The book cost all of two hryvnias and turned out to be quite interesting. It talks about radiocarbon analysis, dendrochronology, space, and also climate changes over centuries and millennia. (Yes, global warming is a fiction.)

The designer diligently prepared a modular grid, but the production engineer didn’t give a damn about it. I was about to hit Backspace, but it was too late.

A variety of ads for other resorts turned up. Apparently, this is advertising for locals, to whom Yevpatoria doesn’t seem like a resort at all, and who want A VACATION OF SEA.

The functional and aesthetic components of urban design: the animals won’t chew it up, and the little eyes are pleased.

The Yevpatoria tram.

And so we reached the embankment.

In September, Yevpatoria is a fairly deserted place. There aren’t many people in the greasy spoons, so all the waiters line up at the entrances and stare for hours at the empty street: “Well, what if someone wanders in here for a bite to eat?”

Strolling through the streets in the center of Yevpatoria, we noticed some familiar plotlines.

The work of translation morons, close up:

This is how the little sea makes noise in Yevpatoria:

I don’t think I’ll come back here to vacation again.

Ded Moroz Is Bringing Presents to the Kiddies*

2010-12-17T22:45:00+02:00

In the modern world, not everything is so simple*.

Source: Sergeev Pavel*

Let’s Go Back to the Original Sources

2009-06-17T11:26:00+03:00

In the introductory classes for the optimization course, the students and I discuss a question like “When should you start optimizing?” You can often hear the answer attributed to Donald Knuth: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.”

Usually, this phrase (actually taken out of context) is interpreted this way: you must not start optimizing a program until it has been written and tested. The motivation here is as follows: a) until development is complete, it is impossible to assess the performance of the entire system as a whole; b) optimizations can lead to unreadable code, which is also very hard to debug. These statements are accepted as dogma, despite the fact that certain lines of reasoning led the author to this phrase, and without them the quote itself is meaningless.

Let’s go back to the original sources. The quote in question can be found in the article: Knuth, D. E. 1974. Structured Programming with go to Statements. ACM Comput. Surv. 6, 4 (Dec. 1974), 261-301.

In the original publication, Knuth talked about programmers spending a great deal of time thinking about the performance of noncritical pieces of code, where attempts to optimize them have a negative effect on the program as a whole. In his view, one should not pay attention to the little things, but should focus specifically on the critical places, and only after those places have been precisely identified. Here I agree with the author completely.

I defend the point of view that program optimization is a set of planned actions that receive due attention during the development of the entire system. Performance testing should be carried out on par with functional testing, with respect to the system’s performance requirements. Obviously, for a broad class of applications, a discovered performance problem has a higher priority than the main development tasks: computer games, audio/video codecs, control systems for critical facilities. Fixing a performance problem is exactly the optimization that is done on time, long before the program’s development is finished. Fixing such problems in a timely way reduces project risks. And conversely: problems left for “later” lead only to missed project deadlines and failure to meet performance requirements.

The following recommendations can be formulated:

define performance requirements (for example, how many frames per second a game should display, or how long processing a file should take);
develop performance tests with respect to the stated requirements (they can be done as part of unit testing);
test performance on par with functional testing;
when problems are found, focus only on those pieces of code that will yield the maximum gain.

And in general, judging by the abstract, the article is about how to get rid of the go to statement. Naturally, students in the SCS specialty can freely familiarize themselves with this article by contacting me by email. :)