Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 18

A Fine Student Custom

2016-08-18T09:51:00+03:00

What do students chant in unison after their fourth year?

— BA-CHE-LORS! BA-CHE-LORS!

What do students chant in unison after getting their diploma?

— UN-EM-PLOYED! UN-EM-PLOYED!

What do students chant in unison a year after getting their diploma?

— FREE-CASH-IER! FREE-CASH-IER!

University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful

2015-04-18T19:09:00+03:00

University doesn’t teach you to be successful in life. Success can be understood in different ways; let’s put the following into it: a good job, well-being, a social role in life, the ability to set high goals and achieve them (the kind of people for whom nothing is too hard). At university they teach programming languages, engineering methods, social disciplines. After five years of study, the person is already a graduate, not a student, and has a large store of knowledge, but what do you do with all of it next? How do you apply it? Alas, university does not give answers to these questions.

Give a person in need a fish, and he’ll be fed for one day. Teach a person in need to fish, and he’ll be fed for life. And what happens if the person in need was simply given a fishing rod, but not taught to fish? That’s what happens at university: they gave out a set of rods, but didn’t teach anyone to fish.

I often talk with students. Besides answers to purely technical questions, like “how to solve this or that problem in Objective-C,” we also have to discuss the question: “So where should I even be heading?”.

Here I’ll single out four levels:

Ideal motivation.
Goal.
Plan.
Way of life.

About ideal motivation. Ideal motivation is the kind of motivation that is necessary, but not sufficient, for achieving any goal, however high. Maybe someone dreamed as a child of becoming a programmer, or someone is inspired by the stories of other successful people, dreams of creating their own social network, their own operating system, a new fantastic computer game, someone dreams of building their own team of like-minded people (in any field; let’s not shut ourselves inside IT), someone wants to earn a lot of money in order to help people in need (look into what Bill Gates is doing in retirement), and so on. Maybe the dream is even so distant that you won’t get to it in a year, or in two. Maybe that’s even better. The main thing is for that dream to exist. I believe that always, if you listen to yourself, you can find this ideal motivation. In difficult cases, true, you’ll have to isolate yourself from the outside world (the internet, TV), so the information noise doesn’t keep you from hearing that inner voice.

If there is no ideal motivation, then there is no goal. Ideal motivation is necessary for achieving a goal. And if there is no motivation, then the goal always remains unreachable or unjustified. Without ideal motivation, there is nowhere to draw the energy for achieving the goal from.

A goal can be set like this: “Become the technical director of a software development company” or “Become a software engineer.” This may not be the goal of your whole life, but it can be a goal for the next 5 years of your life, and it still has to be sufficiently high relative to your current position.

If there is no goal, then there is no plan. If we don’t know what we want to achieve, that means our plan has no corresponding actions. Remember Alice in Wonderland:

— Which road should I take?
— And where do you want to get to?
— I don’t care.
— Then it doesn’t matter which road you choose.

How do you make a plan? The plan comes from the goal. For example, if a student has set himself the goal of becoming a software engineer, then in the labor market there are certain requirements (standards) placed on programmers. Yes, they may differ across organizations, but they are quite freely available in job descriptions, in conversations with employees of organizations, for example at career-guidance events or open houses. The plan will consist of studying the required disciplines and acquiring practical skills. That’s when it will turn out that all those unclear and difficult disciplines at university (discrete mathematics, data structures and algorithms, software engineering) are exactly what is required of a graduate. It’s better to understand this in the third year. But some understand it a year after graduation and come back to finish learning with a diametrically opposite view of these subjects.

One of the traps of choosing an IT career is its apparent ease. Some students prefer “seeming smart” to being smart. In my practice this happens: a student explains how everything is obvious and easy to him, while others sit quietly and do the work. In the end, the other guys have a practical result, while the student for whom everything is easy has no result — not after a week, not after a month, not after a year. The ease and accessibility of IT technologies does not mean that everything will be easy and that little work is needed. It means that every person, having mastered IT, can do a lot, make a big impact on our society.

And you’ll ask me: "Vladimir Igorevich, so what is the solution to this problem?".

The solution is searching for and forming ideal motivation. Most likely, no one else can help here except the person who is looking for it. Hold an "internet Shabbat": live a day without a phone, computer, internet, TV. Listen to your inner voice. What is it telling you? I want to become a programmer? Or I want to play a round of Dota?

Make IT a way of life. Start constantly doing something. In the first half of the day, that’s classes at university. Don’t mock the instructor and his subject. Don’t complain and don’t whine about the difficulty. Believe me, in the profession you’ll have to solve problems an order of magnitude and two orders of magnitude more difficult. In the second half of the day, homework and work on your personal or collective project. Join various clubs, look for like-minded people. Take up counter-regression.

The Logic Game 2048

2014-04-18T22:18:00+03:00

The secret to the success of any logic game is that the people playing it seem smarter to themselves than they actually are. However, the skills they acquire won’t find any use either in everyday life or at work.

Facebook

2014-04-18T16:48:00+03:00

I can’t wrap my head around why Facebook employees can’t write a decent iPhone app for their social network.

The site has two modes for presenting the feed: top stories and most recent. Not a whole lot is known for certain about how top works, but the fact that some stories can be excluded in this mode is a fact. Since I don’t give a fuck about Facebook’s algorithms for picking news for me (they will never work properly), I always switch the feed to "most recent" mode. Until recently, the site stubbornly refused to remember this setting, shoving its shitty "top" at me every day. Thank God, with the latest change to the site’s design, it finally remembered how I read the news.

With the mobile app, though, everything is much worse. You have to choose this setting all over again every time you launch it.

Facebook already screwed the pooch once when it bet on HTML5 technologies (see Under the hood: Rebuilding Facebook for iOS. Jonathan Dann). But moving the app to native platform code did not improve the situation much. Scrolling through the feed jerks every time (some genius is blocking the message-processing loop), and the feed updates with a substantial delay after the app starts. It’s scary to think how it works over there on Android. If you add to this Facebook’s atmosphere of pseudo-elitism, then a visit to the social network feels like a visit to the monkey house at the zoo. The latter, admittedly, is already only indirectly related to technology.

VKontakte’s client app is night and day compared with Facebook. None of the shortcomings mentioned are there, even though the networks have the same functions.

On Generating Ideas

2014-03-18T18:47:00+02:00

Sometimes you meet a person who self-identifies as an “idea generator” and, by that fact alone, asks for a place aboard an organization. Such people should be driven as far away from the organization as possible, for the following reasons.

First, there is no shortage of ideas, just as there is no need for a snow salesman in winter.

Second, having a ready-made idea or several ideas means nothing. Success comes only to those who have managed to carry out implementation and adoption. At these stages, an “idea generator” is completely useless.

Third, idea generators often exaggerate their productivity: the number of ideas generated per unit of time. The skeptical reader can step away from the computer for a minute and try, for starters, to write down at least five ideas for a popular mobile app. If you raise the bar to ten, it already turns into torture, resulting in no thoughts in your head at all.

It is known that all ideas are floating around in the air. It follows from this that an idea cannot be invented; it can only come to mind or not. Another experiment for the skeptical reader: take five minutes away from reading and find, in a search engine, any idea from the list compiled above. The reader will be pleasantly surprised by the “originality” of his ideas.

This is also the place to mention that there is no such thing as “stealing an idea,” because all ideas are floating around in the air, and also because having a ready-made idea in someone’s head means nothing. I invite the reader to steal an idea whose implementation will earn him billions of dollars: develop a device that lets you obtain more useful work than the amount of energy supplied to it. Good luck!

The reader will ask: “So how do you solve the problem of generating ideas when they are so necessary?” Very simply. Start a notebook, write down ideas that just come to mind. At work, at school, on vacation, on the go, standing, sitting, lying down. And write down ideas in an open window too. Let an idea come to mind just once a week. But later, when lots of ideas are needed, you can simply take the list and read out all the ideas, analyze them, choose a decent one, and get down to implementation.

Well, good implementation is a whole other story.

Your IP address has been blocked

2011-04-18T09:37:00+03:00

I go to http://cist.kture.kharkov.ua in the morning to check the schedule, and here they tell me: “ORA-20001: Your IP address has been blocked.”

What’s that about? To check the class schedule at KhNURE, do you have to go to the institute?

P. S. They unblocked it sometime around lunch.

Aviation Day

2010-08-18T12:17:00+03:00

Physicist, Mechanic, Astronomer, Philosopher, and Mathematician

2010-07-18T16:39:00+03:00

I’m reading biographies of scientists. For example, Galileo Galilei — a physicist, mechanic, astronomer, philosopher, and mathematician. Or Leonardo — an artist (painter, sculptor, architect) and scientist (anatomist, mathematician, physicist, naturalist). Or Isaac Newton — a physicist, mathematician, and astronomer. The list goes on. It turns out that these and many other scientists distinguished themselves in several fields at once. Exemplary curiosity about the world around them. In that respect, everyone ought to learn from them.

Think about what they’ll write about us. Vasily Pupkin — programmer. And that’s it?

A New Useful Blog

2009-09-18T19:56:00+03:00

Today I learned about the existence of a new useful blog, “Tips for Increasing Personal Productivity with Software and Online Services,” or, for short, ProductivityBlog.com.ua. I don’t know whether there’s any point in describing this blog after such an informative title?

For example, among the posts there are:

How to generate an Excel calendar?
A useful program for keeping notes, tasks, and assignments
Quick writing of reports on time and money spent

The blog’s author is Alexander Babich, an IT trainer with hard-core experience: just look at the collection of posts about trainings delivered and prepared, numbering 199 (one hundred ninety-nine) in all. Sasha is a well-known popularizer of new methods in education. I still remember the wonderful trip in the spring of 2006 to Poltava Pedagogical University for an education seminar that Sasha organized.