Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website - 31

The Most Important Hire: Looking for a Personal Assistant

2017-10-31T19:35:00+02:00

Before the end of the year, I want to manage to make the most important hire of my life.

I need a personal assistant, full-time in the office.

Candidate profile: a “seven-armed octopus.”

My daily tasks:

Managing and developing Design and Test Lab.
Managing and developing the First Institute of Reliable Software.
Small personal projects.

Assistant’s tasks:

Search for information on the internet. For example: find the email of the director of some IT company. Or compile a list of companies selling industrial equipment in the state of Texas, indicating business develpment managers with emails.
Buy movie tickets, train tickets, book accommodation on AirBNB.
Put documents into envelopes, run to the post office, send them.
Structure information. For example: take 10 resumes from candidates for a vacancy and make a nice table with characteristics: full name, age, work experience, and so on. If something is missing, then correspond with the candidates and clarify the missing information.
Format documents and a presentation.
Something else I can’t remember off the top of my head.

For now, nothing fanatical: Monday through Friday, no accompanying me on business trips. We’ll see from there.

Requirements:

Decent written English.

Paid in food and science, like Stradivari in Amati’s house. Prospects are similar.

Please send your resume and cover letter to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com

Richard Branson’s Book “Screw It, Let’s Do It”

2016-01-31T21:31:00+02:00

I recently read Richard Branson’s book “Screw It, Let’s Do It” (100 UAH in electronic form).

I’d heard a lot about Branson, seen places where people take pictures with his cardboard cutout. For some reason all business seminars have these cutouts. After reading the book, I realized that Branson is basically like an icon in a church. You’ve got to give the suckers at business seminars at least some fun with a selfie with a piece of cardboard.

There’s a joke about this book: “All Western business-motivation books boil down to a billionaire from Beverly Hills advising a person from Bumfuck, Nowhere to get out of their comfort zone.” Richard is a rich kid; he grew up in a wealthy family, had the opportunity to go to college in London and use family loans, which he used to build his startups.

The book is more interesting for Branson’s travels. It describes several flights in a Montgolfier balloon (that kind of aerostat) across the Atlantic Ocean and other trips where he got into situations he might not have come back from alive.

This is more of a biographical book about Branson than any kind of business textbook. A citizen of the Soviet Union is unlikely to take away anything useful from it. One feature should be noted, something rarely found among our citizens: setting up at least some kind of half-decent business. For example, when Branson was a schoolboy, he bought fir seedlings, planted them, they sprouted, and he sold them and made decent money.

I can’t recommend this book as any kind of business textbook. But for those interested in adventure or Branson’s biography, I recommend it.

Summary of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-12-31T15:01:00+02:00

On December 12, 19, and 26, the eighth, ninth, and tenth meetings of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meetings were held in room 318 from 11:15 to 13:00.

Eighth meeting

1. Roman Podoliaka. Basic (list, dict, set) and advanced collections in Python

Roma Podoliaka talked about basic collections in Python. The talk was accompanied by live examples in the Notebook.

Roman Podoliaka talks about collections in Python

Presentation for the talk: Collections in Python.pdf (270 KB). If you want to repeat all the experiments in the Notebook, here are the source files in an archive: Basic collections in Python.ipynb.zip (17 KB).

Why is knowing basic collections important? Because they are the foundation for modeling and solving any applied problem. An applied problem is never stated in this form: "Take a list of objects, sort it, and return the element at index 0." Usually, applied problems sound like this: "Who in the group of students has the highest rating?" This is where you need abstract thinking: describe a student with a dict structure, put it into a list, call the sort function, and access the element with index 0.

2. Volodymyr Obrizan. Functional programming in Python

This talk is a translation of the article A. M. Kuchling. Functional Programming HOWTO. In Python, you can write in different programming styles: object-oriented, functional. Functional programming is representing the problem being solved as a composition of functions that have no internal state. The advantages of functional programming: modularity, ease of debugging and testing, the ability to reuse functions. Slides for the talk: Functional programming in Python.pdf (342 KB).

Ninth meeting

The ninth meeting was devoted to solving timed problems in pairs.

Five problems were proposed:

Determine whether a triangle is right-angled.
Return a list of all divisors of the number n, including one and the number itself.
Reduce a proper fraction.
Determine whether the sequence l is an arithmetic progression.
Encrypt strings in a certain way.

Repository with the problem source files: https://bitbucket.org/obrizan/apvt-python-competition-2

Teams in the process of solving the problems:

Valentina, Nikita, and Alexander’s team solved all the problems faster than everyone else:

The winning team in the process of solving:

Tenth meeting

1. Volodymyr Obrizan. Web programming in Python on Google App Engine. Working with a database

At previous meetings, we had already discussed Google App Engine — a platform for creating web applications in Python in the cloud. This time we looked at how to pass information from the client to the server and save it in a database.

Link to the source texts: https://bitbucket.org/obrizan/gae-web-tutorial/src

Google has a very similar tutorial; you can master it on your own: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/introduction

2. Valentina Pikalova. Solving Python Challenge together

http://www.pythonchallenge.com/ is a collection of problems to work through. The difference from other similar sites is that the problem statement is given "with a catch," i.e., before solving anything, you first have to understand the problem. :)

Valentina talks about the problems

Club members solve problems together

3. Club members’ stories about taking courses

After solving the problems, we helped Tatyana figure out her homework — or, more precisely, why it would not start from the command line.

And the pre-New Year’s meeting ended with gifts. Svetlana Viktorovna gave us New Year’s cards, and Valentina gave us coloring books. :)

Previous meetings:

No. 7 05.12.2015 Summary of the Seventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 6 28.11.2015 Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 5 21.11.2015 Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 3, No. 4 07.11.2015, 14.11.2015 Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 2 31.10.2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 24.10.2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How do 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.

Site for questions and answers about Python and about the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

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

And the winner in the “Email of the Year” category is…

2011-12-31T17:06:00+02:00

And I completely forgot!

New Cat in Kharkiv

2010-12-31T10:28:00+02:00

And in Kharkiv it’s a typical New Cat. Our New Cat is so stingy you couldn’t even beg snow out of him in winter.

Thank you, New Cat, that at least the temperature is below zero, and not like the previous times — slush and puddles.

Signed Up for Twitter

2010-07-31T09:09:00+03:00

Signed up for Twitter this morning. Well, I figured, since everyone’s on Twitter already, it’s time for me too. Otherwise Kolyan was saying yesterday: “I read this joke on Twitter, everyone retweeted it, it even made it into top tweets!” Or my friend Dimon says: “I get all my news from Twitter. On other sites everything is an hour late.” People told me about some mega-popular dude who has a whole 100 followers, and that everyone needs to follow this dude. So I thought I was somehow out of the loop, and I felt awkward in front of the guys.

So, basically, I decided to sign up for Twitter too. Registration is fast and convenient, not like on other sites — you can die before you finish filling out the profile. The design is nice. The only bad thing is it’s all in foreign, so some things are hard to understand. I still haven’t figured it out: where do you read the jokes here? Where’s the news? Where do you enter the tweets so other people can read them?

I’ll ask Dimon tomorrow; he knows everything about computers.

Update

For those who still didn’t get it — this is a joke.