Volodymyr Obrizan: personal website

Professional user

2026-10-24T00:00:00+03:00

There’s a familiar role on a team: tester, test engineer, software quality assurance — someone who tests an application professionally.

But it would be cool to have a professional user: not a professional tester, but someone who uses the product professionally. For example, if a company is building an ecommerce platform, the team would include someone who sells products on that marketplace and someone who buys there. They could work part-time or join for individual sessions. They wouldn’t need to write test plans — just use the product. Their responsibility would be to provide feedback and report user experience problems.

This is somewhat like beta testers, but as I see it:

beta testers are invited too late;
they usually aren’t employees or contractors of the organization developing the product, so they have no obligation to report anything at all.

A job as an in-house user could be well protected against the threat of AI and agents. People in the industry still say testers are unnecessary because an agent will replace them. But a business owner would have to be out of their mind to say, “Users are unnecessary.”

Does your organization have a professional user role? Have you heard of anything like this?

A new large language model isn't always better than the old one

2026-10-19T12:52:53+03:00

Sometimes it seems (or marketers assure us) that everything new is better than the old stuff.

I'm migrating a translation service that uses language models. The old version uses gpt-4.1, and the new one uses gpt-6-luna. Users complained that the new version was translating more slowly.

I thought: how can that be? The new model is supposed to be better than the old one! But remembering the joke about how "in one village they ran a survey, and in the other they took measurements," I put together a small benchmark to measure whether the new model really was slower.

And sure enough: gpt-6-luna is, on average, 1.3 times slower than gpt-4.1 at translating texts of different lengths.

Translation quality and cost are outside the scope of this benchmark, though they can matter too.

Unfortunately, gpt-4.1 was officially deprecated on October 14, 2026, and will be shut down for good on January 14, 2027.

The key mistake in adopting AI — misunderstanding delegation

2026-10-08T10:11:23+03:00

For example: what I need is a configured, tested, reliable SaaS application. I don't need ChatGPT for that. I need someone who will take responsibility for the result. Whether they use AI or not is a secondary question.

Delegation: hiring a person or a company to take responsibility for the end result. When I delegate, my working time goes down and my free time goes up. The responsibility for reaching the goal is on someone else.

The "I'll do it myself with AI" approach: install, develop, test, deploy, damn it, I've hit the limits, oh, something's crashing, and all the other joys of software development (if you know, you know). Working time goes up, free time goes down, and all the responsibility is still on me. That's anti-delegation!

An example for non-programmers. I need a clean home. I can grab a vacuum cleaner, a broom, a mop, and clean in my free time. But I don't want to! I want to go to the movies and delegate the cleaning to someone, so that when I get home, everything is sparkling.

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

With AI, the need for knowledge doesn't disappear — it changes

2026-09-16T11:23:14+03:00

With AI, the need for knowledge doesn't disappear — it changes.

I've noticed an interesting paradox.

On the one hand: when I suggest trying my own product, testinel.dev, people tell me: "Pfft, why do we need that? We just give the logs to AI and it fixes everything."
On the other hand: engineers complain that AI is expensive, that they need to save tokens, that sessions run out quickly, what are we supposed to do for five hours without AI?

Meanwhile, my product is being built precisely to optimize spending on AI.

What I hear is something like: "Let's delegate the work to AI that we can't afford." A conflict between the marketing slogan "AI will replace us all" and a real engineering problem involving limits on budget, operator skills, and time.

Does AI replace an engineer when it comes to diagnosing problems? In many ways, it does.

Do you need to know how to configure and optimize all this? Of course you do!

And how do you learn to configure it and optimize costs and speed? Figure it out and study it! 🙂

Why I like tennis

2026-09-15T07:49:43+03:00

What I like about tennis — you can't play it on your phone over the internet, and you need at least one other person.

Think about it.

My code review model: LGTM-5.6

2026-08-14T10:41:43+03:00

I trained my very own LLM for code review.

Called it LGTM-5.6.

It has just one token: LGTM.

For any input, it responds with

LGTM

On code review quality benchmarks, it's no worse than 80% of senior developers. :)

ChatGPT was writing my letters back in 2013

2026-08-11T23:38:32+03:00

I have proof that ChatGPT was writing letters for me way back in 2013. :)

Because what normal person would use em dashes — in letters.

AI wrote this post too. Good night. :)

Empirical proof that AI doesn't increase productivity

2026-08-08T11:19:13+03:00

To avoid wasting your time, let me give an important definition. Productivity is how much money you earn for the time you put in.

If you earn $1,000 in 160 hours without AI, let's call that your baseline productivity: 1X.

If you earn $5,000 in 160 hours with AI, your productivity is now 5X.

If you earn $1,000 in 80 hours with AI, your productivity is now 2X.

If you earn $1,000 in 160 hours with AI while producing 10 times as many "tasks," "code," "pull requests," "posts," or whatever it is you produce — you haven't become 10 times more productive. Your code has become 10 times cheaper.

And why is the proof empirical? Because I keep seeing programmers start saving tokens, waiting for their sessions to reset, juggling different accounts. Why don't they just throw $10,000 at tokens, if AI increases their productivity — meaning their earnings — so much? Well, if I put $100 into something and earn $1,000, then putting in $200 should bring in $2,000! It's a money printer. But no matter how many tokens they throw at it, they can't earn more. So their productivity hasn't increased. The price of the output has simply plummeted.

I like reading documentation

2026-08-07T16:02:50+03:00

I read documentation this week. And last week too. And next week I'll be reading documentation too. I like reading documentation.

Why should I spend time writing to AI, waiting for "thinking longer for the better answer"™, when I can just Google the documentation I need, open it, and enjoy a leisurely read from beginning to end? Bear in mind: AI can't reproduce copyrighted material word for word — it has to paraphrase it. So why read text paraphrased by AI when you can read the actual original source?

The Biggest Stupidity in Domestic Retail and Service

2018-07-26T08:54:00+03:00

The biggest stupidity in domestic retail and service is that everything starts working at 10:00. A couple of stores that managed to overcome themselves, step outside the box, do some work on themselves — they open at 9:00. But not a single store or service will open at 8:00.

Because of this, you can often see a line of people outside a store 15 minutes before it opens. The poor people came early so they could be the first to buy, because, like, it’s ten in the morning, and they still have to make it to work.

This is a clear sign of our provincialism — the inability to go and buy, say, a kettle at seven in the morning.

P. S. When it comes to getting something to eat, thank God, we’re fine: ATB is open 24/7.

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?

Practice Only, No Theory!

2018-07-11T10:32:00+03:00

The stupidest thing in the world is educational events under the slogan “Practice only, no theory.”

Know this: the presenters at such events are charlatans and crooks.

A person who doesn’t know the theory of their field is an ignoramus, incapable of learning, incapable of analytical and abstract thinking.

An employee who doesn’t know the theory of their field cannot be considered a professional.

An employee who does their job without knowing the theory is like an animal in a circus. It, too, was shown simple movements and promised food after performing them.

Forward this post to every organizer of an event under the slogan “no theory, practice only.”

Or maybe you personally run such events?

A Key Difference of a Professional

2018-03-27T04:24:00+03:00

One of the key differences between a professional and a nonprofessional is that a professional works just as well without internet access as with it. A professional doesn’t need Google, a tutorial, or a reference manual. The first sign of a nonprofessional is the phrase: “Everything is on the internet.” A professional knows that there’s nothing on the internet and that you can rely only on your own knowledge and your own experience.

A very simple experiment: turn off the router in the office. You’ll hear the first shouts after just 5 seconds — that’ll be the juniors yelling — they’re blocked without the internet and can’t do anything. A professional will find out there’s no internet only an hour later, when he comes to the kitchen for a cup of coffee.

The Education Crisis

2018-03-07T10:04:00+02:00

It hurts me a lot to watch the education crisis in our country. I experience it as a personal tragedy. What made me write this note was an incident that happened in one of the programming-related chats.

One day, a chat participant posted a photo of the theoretical problems he had been given at an interview. Among the other problems and questions were these: “How many bits are in a byte? Convert a number from decimal to hexadecimal. Count the number of bits in a number.” I was surprised by the reaction from beginner programmers:

— Ha ha ha! Where in real projects do you need to count the number of bits in a byte?
— Pffft... What kind of idiotic assignments are these, why would a frontend developer need this?

The drama unfolded the very next day. One of the chat participants asked for help with this problem:

— Save me! Help! I’m adding 0.1 and 0.2, and the result I get is not 0.3 but 0.30000000000000004!

The very people who had mocked the assignments about bits in a byte just yesterday tripped over their own ignorance today, and over their unwillingness to study the fundamental basics of how computers work.

Modern computers are discrete. Numbers are stored as integers and real numbers. Real numbers are stored in fixed-point format or in floating-point format. The main feature is that the weight of each digit is a multiple of two. For integers, that’s 2⁰, 2¹, 2², 2³, and so on. And for fractions it’s the same thing, but in the denominator: 2⁻¹, 2⁻², 2⁻³, and so on. That is, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, and so on. If we allocate two binary digits for the fractional part, then we can represent numbers that are multiples of 0.25: 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1, and so on. But with that kind of digit grid, you can’t represent 0.2, or 0.1, or 0.3.

And how many other courses and disciplines are ignored by today’s community of programmers? Discrete mathematics, algebra, higher mathematics, graph theory, probability theory, statistics, data structures and algorithms, object-oriented programming, database management systems, systems engineering, information and coding theory, mathematical modeling, and so on, all the way through a full four years of a bachelor’s degree.

The geopolitical crisis led to an economic crisis. The economic one led to a cultural one. The cultural one led to an education crisis. The education crisis led to a professional one. The professional one is leading to an industrial crisis.

A New Word: Softogenic

2017-11-27T22:25:00+02:00

I’ve coined a new word:

softogenic (software + -genic) — being the consequence, the result of using some piece of software.

The word programogenic can also be used in this sense.

In English: softogenic (software + -genic).

For example: a softogenic disaster — a disaster caused by errors in software.

Write it down, you’ll be needing it soon. :)

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

Education Reform

2017-09-15T21:24:00+03:00

People are writing that, apparently, a new education reform has been passed. I have no idea what’s in it, but I’m obliged to have an opinion.

So. If it doesn’t specify a minimum take-home salary for a schoolteacher or university instructor of 10,000 (ten thousand) hryvnias, then it’s a useless reform, and it will only make education worse. The younger generation’s keen eyes are fixed on schoolteachers and instructors. A Teacher (with a capital T) should radiate successful success, not be driven into a corner by our state. This is a hello to Kravchuk, Kuchma, Yushchenko, Yanukovych, and Poroshenko. In 26 years, none of them did anything to raise the prestige of the profession. All I remember are horror stories about teachers in schools fainting from hunger at the blackboard. And why even reminisce — I myself was on a 2,800 UAH salary, and what is 2,800 UAH for a young man? The burden of a loser, not the life of a young playboy. (For those abroad: that’s 100 bucks.)

And now about the masters of pissing into the wind. Basically, a master of pissing into the wind steps out under the spotlights and gives a master class. Then another master comes out of the audience, moves the first one aside, and says: "You’re pissing into the wind wrong; this is how it’s done!" and pisses himself from head to toe even worse than before. And he soaked the neighbors so badly that four countries (Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Romania) appealed to the OSCE with a letter, like, are all those Ukrainian masters of pissing into the wind right in the head over there?

What I’m getting at. On the first of September I went into "Kofein" on Nauky Avenue to have breakfast and a bit of coffee. Mothers are sitting there, waiting for their kids from the university lyceum. The kids come in:

“Phew, they handed out books, again we have to carry all this heavy stuff!” — and he slams a big stack of books onto the neighboring table.

I turned to look at the book spines — I almost dropped my cup of "Kenya Gatomboya"! (highly recommend it, by the way) — all the textbooks there were in Russian!

Looking for an Intern

2017-05-03T15:33:00+03:00

We’re looking for an intern for two weeks, for manual testing of mobile applications and an Internet TV set according to pre-prepared test scenarios.

Required skills:
— English: reading test scenarios, reading Jira, writing reports, writing in Jira;

For the internship, the intern will receive compensation. The especially talented will receive a job offer.

Send a cover letter and résumé to obrizan@dnt-lab.com

Creative Plans

2017-04-14T07:36:00+03:00

I taught at the Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics from 2008 to 2016. When I was a student, I didn’t think I would become a lecturer and educator. Closer to graduation I realized that: a) I liked helping other students figure things out; b) in some things I was smart, and in certain things the smartest. Later I realized that I could actually create some new, unique knowledge that no one before me had recorded, but that was already much later than my student days.

And where else do you work as a lecturer if not at a university? Teaching at a university is very easy. You don’t have to sell yourself. You just have to show up in the classroom at a certain time, and the students will be led in by the hand. Whether you’re a good teacher or a bad one, on September first you are guaranteed to have new students. Thus, I took the path of least resistance.

I can’t say that I had any noticeable effect on the lives of Kharkiv residents or the whole country. Kharkiv has 1.5 million people, and over 8 years I taught, well, maybe 200 people. And if you count only the worthwhile ones, maybe 30–40 people.

Universities are that kind of classic thing that develops very slowly. A few percent a year. And KhNURE is generally developing with a negative coefficient. For a person as talented as me, that is a total dead end. I wrote several posts about this:

http://obrizan.livejournal.com/tag/университет

After leaving the university, I independently gave a master class on programming iPhone applications (http://mass.education). Once was enough to understand that I no longer want to give lectures in the standard university format. A lot of time gets spent, and only 5 people are learning.

The solution is to teach people over the internet. My current creative plans:

— in 2017, teach 1,000 people over the internet;
— in 2018, teach 10,000 people over the internet;
— in 2019, teach 100,000 people over the internet.

But I’m not sure about 2019. Maybe more than a hundred thousand. I still haven’t learned how to look three years ahead; it’s all foggy there.

Revelations from God and Programmers

2017-04-07T23:27:00+03:00

Programmers adore Revelations from God. That’s when some truth is obvious to everyone, while programmers arrive at it through long, expansive reasoning.

Today I read the article "TDD Harms Architecture". (http://blog.cleancoder.com/uncle-bob/2017/03/03/TDD-Harms-Architecture.html). The article is about how, supposedly, the culture of automated testing harms a program’s architecture. After long, expansive reasoning, the author ends with five paragraphs of text about how it’s programmers who make bad architecture, not tests.

Another programmer has delivered Revelations from God. To me this is just as funny as the label on a Superman costume: "Does not grant the ability to fly."

Abstract Thinking and Programmers

2017-04-02T20:16:00+03:00

Programmers have absolutely no abstract thinking.

Proof: everyone has read and knows Erich Gamma’s “patterns” (judging by applicants’ résumés). But in practice they know and use only the singleton. And even that is because it’s the same thing as a global variable, and they were taught that in Pascal lessons (essentially, an antipattern).

Until you rub their noses in it, a programmer can’t figure out on their own that a given pattern can be used in this context. Usually in such cases programmers’ eyes go wide, they freeze, and they look as if they’ve heard revelations from God.

On Khakhanov’s Dismissal

2017-01-28T00:30:00+02:00

On 01/25/2017, a conference of the labor collective of the CEU faculty was held, at which they voted to give Dean Khakhanov’s work an unsatisfactory evaluation.

Large organizations are hard to manage. Not everyone can manage themselves. Let alone manage another person, a dozen people, a hundred, or thousands. Over the past few centuries, nothing has changed in managing organizations. The method invented by Peter Drucker, management by objectives, still works in large corporations: Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Samsung. It is the best thing invented in management over the past hundred years.

The CEU faculty took first place in the ranking of all the university’s faculties in the 2015–2016 academic year. The ranking is calculated using a special formula and indicators. The indicators are chosen in such a way as to motivate departments to work better. For example, to bring money into the university, develop research, create a positive image of the university on the international stage, and so on.

And by these indicators, the CEU faculty under Khakhanov’s leadership took first place.

What would they have done at Intel or Hewlett-Packard? Khakhanov would have been given a big bonus, and the other managers would have been told: “Go learn from Khakhanov.” Oh, I forgot to add: one or two managers from the other end of the ranking would have been fired. Well, that’s in organizations like Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google.

But at KhNURE, after the ranking has already been published, the collective gets together to argue about which is bigger: 5 or 7? The result is Khakhanov’s dismissal. I wonder what it was like at the meeting of the labor collective of the RT faculty, which took last place in the ranking? I bet everything is fine, they’re satisfied with the dean’s work?

I understand that university employees don’t get examples from business, because none of them has a business education. They’re all scholars there, after all. I’ll give an example from mathematics: there is an objective function, and at the university Khakhanov has no equal at optimizing it.

When I studied at the Department of Computer Engineering, I thought it was about 20 years behind the times. Turns out it was behind forever.

Rubin Won

2016-12-24T23:24:00+02:00

Previously on: on December 15, in the election for rector of KhNURE, 499 voters (50.2%) voted for Semenets, and 354 (35.6%) for Rubin. On December 19, the Ministry of Education and Science dismisses Rubin from the post of rector of KhNURE. On December 20, the Ministry of Education and Science appoints Semenets to the post of rector of KhNURE.

Who Semenets is, I don’t know. In 16 years of my life at the university, I saw him once. I went in to Bondarenko’s office to get some document signed, but he wasn’t there, and instead of the office on the left they sent me to the office on the right. I’d heard something somewhere that his doctoral dissertation was cool. Personally, I know nothing about any developed and successfully implemented programs for developing our university. Although Semenets was a vice-rector of KhNURE for 17 (seventeen) years. Semenets himself doesn’t publish this (there’s nothing in the bio on the site), and the 499 people who know something about Semenets are silent as partisans.

Who Rubin is, I didn’t know before he arrived in December of ’15. Over his year in office, I personally spoke with the rector several times. All of Rubin’s programs were in plain sight, the results were published.

Bottom line:

Semenets — 17 years a vice-rector, a man of the system — support from 499 voters.
Rubin — 1 year rector, an outsider — support from 354 voters.

I consider this a big victory for Rubin. If you disagree with me, try coming into someone else’s team and winning over at least one person. And Rubin and his team spent this year spinning like tops.

KhNURE lost. Semenets’s program is kindergarten stuff. See http://nure.ua/wp-content/uploads/биография-и-первоочередные-задачи1.pdf For everything good, against everything bad. "Order must be brought to the system of control over the educational process." Well, it’s not like what we needed was for him to start creating disorder. And there are four pages of that kind of clusterfuck.

What the motivation and reasoning of those 499 people is, I don’t understand. I’d wish them luck, except they don’t know what to do with it.

School Starts December 2, 2016

2016-11-26T16:02:00+02:00

Starting December 2, I’ll give 11 lectures on advanced iOS development topics. Admission is free for students and staff of Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics. Space is limited; registration is required.

Information and registration: http://mass.education

The shortcoming of existing programming courses for the Apple iOS operating system is that they teach the syntax of Objective-C or Swift, and small fragments of the Cocoa Touch library. These courses don’t teach how to solve real-world problems.

The mission of Obrizan’s IT School is to pass on practical experience in application development. Metaphorically, to build a bridge over the chasm between knowing a language’s syntax and solving practical problems.

The school is being held at the Department of Computer-Aided Design of Computer Engineering of Kharkiv National University of Radio Electronics, with the support of the head of the Department of CADCE, Svitlana Viktorivna Chumachenko, and the rector of KhNURE, Eduard Yefimovich Rubin.

A Reply to E. Ye. Rubin and V. I. Kauk

2016-11-06T10:30:00+02:00

Yesterday Viktor Ivanovich Kauk reposted my post about “Why I quit the university” to the group “KhNURE - open group” (https://www.facebook.com/groups/vicerector/permalink/1806975352897269/). He added his own narrative to the repost. A discussion happened under the repost, including with the participation of the rector of KhNURE, Eduard Yefimovich Rubin.

Several people reached out to me, like, Vova, we’re confused: there are several interpretations of your post. Whom should we believe?

Anyone who doesn’t want to spoil their mood on this wonderful Sunday had better not read further.

V. I. Kauk on my resignation: “What is striking is that it was precisely the last year that became like this and pushed him toward this decision. Without people like that, KhNURE will have a hard time confirming the high level of IT even in the Kharkiv region. Without the young, active, professional, and talented, we will not survive. And if our system of organization and management is squeezing out people like Vladimir Obrizan, then something needs to be changed, and urgently.”

Let’s get straight to the main thing: the high level of IT at KhNURE was pissed away by Mikhail Fyodorovich Bondarenko. I enrolled in 2000 in the Computer Engineering department, and even back then people studied there through bribes, while in lectures they would talk with a smart look about 555-series chips from the 1970s. (For comparison: in 2000 Intel released the Pentium 4 microprocessor with 42 million transistors integrated). In 2005, at my groupmate’s diploma defense, he was asked: “How does a Mealy machine differ from a Moore machine?” He answered: “Let’s leave that question unanswered,” and they gave him an “excellent” and issued him a diploma. In 2004, another groupmate, immediately after receiving his bachelor’s diploma, left with the words: “They won’t teach me anything else here” (he now works as a programmer in Sweden). There were still 10 years left before Rubin and his team arrived, and KhNURE was already reliably working to incubate morons and drive out the sane.

E. Ye. Rubin on my resignation: “I spoke with him. He left not because of the problems of the last year, but because of the worsening situation at the university and the problems of the last two, three years. And in this he sees the problem not in me, but more in people like you. He also had important business matters.”

I have been observing problems since 1999. Back then, at our prep courses, a teacher showed up drunk for a math class and wrote formulas while leaning on the board. Thank God, he was good at math, and it did not affect the quality of the preparation much.

In 2000-2005 I was a student, and a pile of problems was visible in lectures. (See above.)

I was on the Council of Young Scientists in 2006-2007. Even then Slipchenko ignored us. (See Youth Forum).

In 2008-2009 I worked at the center for teaching students in foreign languages. It was a complete sham — nobody studied there, and grades were put down in the dean’s office just like that. When I was leaving the CNSIM, Gorbachev, instead of asking: “Why, what’s the problem?” yelled at me, like I was a slave and had to work there forever. By the way, KhNURE’s name was already then “thundering” on the international stage. In 2009 Kuwait stopped sending students to study at KhNURE: News from Domestic Education There were 6 years left before Rubin arrived.

When I worked as a lecturer until 2016 — good luck expelling anyone, because the students know: the incubator doesn’t give up its own.

And in recent years: who brought in a pile of foreign students who understand absolutely nothing about IT and forced me to teach them?

V. I. Kauk: “I have known Vladimir for a long time. And I carefully read his confession of why he left. April 2016 is not a year or two ago. Besides, read closely, Eduard Yefimovich, and you will understand what is happening with EDUCATION at a specific faculty. I am not lying about anything, and by the way, your way of insulting people is well known. What exactly did I lie about? Did I really not give Vladimir the opportunity to show himself as a teacher and a person?”

Viktor Ivanovich, my brain works like this: first there is the decision-making process, and then there is a bifurcation point when the decision has been made, when it is too late to thrash around. There were many consultations on this issue with colleagues over several years. I watched what was happening for a long time. I began writing the series of posts about lack of success at the university in April 2015 (University Does Not Teach You to Be Successful). Six months before Rubin arrived.

And as for education at a specific faculty — it’s just that at ours we weren’t chicken-shit about talking about it.

E. Ye. Rubin: “Viktor, you know him, but I spoke with him and clarified the reasons, so that is why I say you are distorting things. By the way, Vladimir is one of the main partners for the dual-education project and took part in all the negotiations.”

That is true. Already after I picked up my work record book (September 2016), I took part in the discussion of dual education, and I fully support this project.

V. I. Kauk: “In your opinion, is the fact that Vladimir stopped being a KhNURE teacher bad or good? If it is bad, then what did the administration do so that people like him would come to KhNURE and stay there?”

And here is a very subtle point that only a handful of people understood: I quit, but I did not leave. These are two very different things. I do not need to go according to the schedule to an empty classroom. I do not need to pretend to do a lab with foreigners. But I continue to work with motivated students at the Department of APVT. Rubin, Chumachenko, and I are discussing dual education. In my own organization, I am road-testing an advanced course on mobile-platform programming, which, by agreement with Rubin and Chumachenko, I will deliver at the Department of APVT as an elective for students of our university. Don’t be so quick to bury me!

Paragraphs for those who still have questions. Those who have no more questions are strictly forbidden to read further.

In the last election I voted for Rubin. The other candidates are a highway into the swamp.

People here say that Rubin is not a scientist, that he is not an educator. For some reason people think that the head of scientists and lecturers should be a scientist and a lecturer. The head of scientists and lecturers should be a professional manager. It is good that Rubin is not a scientist, so that he would not have the temptation, instead of strategy, organization, motivation, and control, God forbid, to start writing articles or monographs. I go to a professional dentist to get my teeth treated, not to a Doctor of Medical Sciences.

People also think that everything will change in one day. The university has a pile of Candidates of Sciences and Doctors of Sciences, but for some reason they have forgotten about the law of inertia. My organization has only 16 people, and we change veeery slowly, one small change every 2-3 months. Do you really think that in 10 months Rubin should have overcome organizational resistance and brought you happiness on a platter? Ha-ha-ha, how naive you are.

People also think that everything around them should change without their involvement. Like, Rubin will come, he will change everything, and I will sit and wait. No, with that attitude you are digging your own grave. Do not wait for a miracle from someone else; change yourselves. Have the courage to take responsibility for what is happening around you.

“Change yourself — and your life will change.” (Jim Rohn).

"Save yourself, and thousands around you will be saved." (Seraphim of Sarov).

Why I Quit the University

2016-11-05T10:05:00+02:00

Six months ago I wrote a post called "I’m Quitting the University" (I’m Quitting the University) and promised to explain why I left.

Students would often come up to me and ask: "Vladimir Igorevich, why are you still working here instead of going to the U.S."? Blushing, I would answer: "And who’s going to teach you, then?" or "I’m occupying my social role" or the downright philosophical: "If I had left, we wouldn’t have met".

From 2005 to 2016, I had four roles at the university:

— teacher;
— researcher;
— manager;
— clerk.

In the role of clerk, I was a member of the university’s Council of Young Scientists. It was an All Stars council, because it had the most active and smartest young people from our university. One of the brightest moments of our work on the Council was submitting a proposal on how to change the Youth Forum so that it would become attractive to young scientists from outside, and simply to set the bar higher, not be the disgrace it is now. But the university administration did not support us. After some time it became clear that we were a "pocket council".

As a manager, I supervised student projects at the APVT department. I also met a bunch of talented people; years later, we’re still in touch with many of them. Working with students is interesting, but not easy. Very often it happened that students simply disappeared the moment the semester ended and the term paper had been submitted.

— But what about turning the term paper into a cool startup, implementing it, selling it?
— Well, some other time.

As a researcher, I wrote papers and a dissertation. Science is one of the most exciting kinds of work, because you are constantly learning, and there’s no end in sight. You can’t research something completely. But it takes a lot of time. Especially since our field is technical — it takes ten times more time than theoretical sciences. Because of the shortage in my time budget, my scientific result turned out proportionally modest.

As a teacher, I was the first at our university (and in Ukraine, too) to develop and teach courses on parallel programming on multicore processors, designing systems-on-chip using the SystemC language, mobile platform programming, and cloud service programming. Not all students appreciated my work as much as it deserved. I remember that day very well. It was Friday, April 22, 2016. I had prepared for the last lecture in the mobile platform programming course. It was supposed to be a cool lecture about mobile analytics. But out of two groups, only one person came to class. A week later I held the last lab, mechanically entered the students’ grades. After the lab I stopped by the department head’s office and said that I was leaving.

A question arises. If not money, then what motivated me to work at the university? In business school we were taught that, as it turns out, salary is not a motivating factor. In the modern theory of motivation (Herzberg), motivating factors are success, career growth, recognition and approval of work results, creative growth, and a high degree of responsibility.

No success at the university — no motivation to work there.

Now the time I used to spend at the university on lectures, I spend on lectures in my own organization. This has a very big effect, and with it success. There is success — there is motivation to give them.

At the university I was the town lunatic, and outside it — an expert in software product development.

To be fair, I want to note several major successes. First, participating in the project to develop the Sigetest fault simulation system — above all, a great deal of work by Sergey Zaichenko. Second, participating in the work of the organizing committee of the East-West Design & Test Symposium — the great and persistent work of Prof. Khakhanov, Chumachenko, Litvinova, and all the volunteers. And the cherry on top — running the "Python at APVT" club. Everyone there is great; it’s hard to single anyone out. :)

Why Doesn’t the University Teach You to Be Successful?

2016-11-02T21:24:00+02:00

A year ago I wrote a note called "The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful" (The University Doesn’t Teach You to Be Successful). This thesis had been rattling around in my head for several years, but I was missing a few pieces to formulate it clearly.

A year and a half has passed, and I’m ready to formulate for myself an answer to the following question: "So why doesn’t the university teach you to be successful?".

The relationship between student and teacher is very important for a quality education. Does the student believe the teacher’s words? Does he trust the teacher himself? How the student absorbs knowledge depends on this. Students come to a university with certain expectations of getting knowledge that will help them establish themselves in life after university. A first-year student is ready to believe any teacher who happens to come along. But the credit of trust has to be paid back regularly. With a simple check, the knowledge from lectures turns out to be useless on the local labor market, because this lecture knowledge was taken from a book, not gained in the process of the teacher achieving success. The student stops trusting the teacher.

Another thing that undermines trust in the teacher is his low social status, determined by the government’s budget policy and then by the culture of society. How would you describe a grown man who earns only 30 dollars a month by giving lectures? A loser? A failure? Thanks for the compliment! Is that who you should learn success from? A student will not believe a person who has not achieved success in life himself.

I’ll leave the question "Should a teacher who took money from a student for a grade on an exam be considered successful" unanswered. How to answer it is everyone’s personal choice.

The university doesn’t teach you to be successful because there are no people there who know what it is.

Business School × 2

2016-11-01T00:05:00+02:00

This year, on the recommendation of colleagues from the club of IT company directors, I went to the ABIS business school. It came at just the right time: after all, I’m an expert in IT technologies, because I spent five years studying at KhIRE, and then another three years in graduate school there. But the specifics and culture of our university were such that making money was sort of not the done thing there. Like in the joke: the wife thinks money comes from the nightstand, and a KhIRE scientist thinks it comes from the Ministry of Education’s cash office. So, leaving the university, I didn’t know how to earn even 100 UAH on the free market. It was easier for me to work for free than to force myself, blushing, to tell a potential client the cost of my services.

And at ABIS they have a philosophy of business, a management block, a marketing and sales block, and building a strong personal philosophy. I liked it so much, everything was so timely, that afterward I went to every course they offered: the advanced course “management of transformations and changes,” the master class “management by objectives,” financial training.

And in the fall I went around for a second lap.

— Vova, how are things?
— Well, I went to business school.
— A different one?
— The same one.
— A different course?
— The same one.
— Did the program change?
— No, the same program.
— ???

Nobody understood why I did it. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t understand 100% of what I’m told. I don’t remember everything I was able to understand. I can put into practice nowhere near everything I was able to remember. And I can’t apply correctly everything that I do apply. So the second time was very important for me, to polish up the knowledge I already had.

Also, the courses have very pleasant company, and I found new friends. (Guys, hello to you!)

Today at another lecture we were discussing that the motivation for change can be two things: crisis and inspiration. And I realized something for myself: the first time I was taking the course while going through a crisis, and the second time I was taking the course while going through inspiration. So I saw and heard completely different things.

Self-education is a great thing. I have a feeling I’ll go a third time, too.

Dual Education

2016-10-28T07:58:00+03:00

Our university is currently discussing dual education. In dual education, a student gets part of their knowledge at the university and part at a company. For example, Germany has had a system for 40 years where the student gets 50% of their knowledge at a company and 50% at uni. Without a contract with an employer, you can’t enroll in a higher education institution. The company pays the student a small, but still a salary.

In Germany, they split the semester into two-week blocks: one block the student works, and the other they study. That’s more convenient, because the company may be in one city and the uni in another.

At the end of the semester, a committee meets: a university instructor, a company employee, and they assess the quality of the student’s knowledge. In other words, they hold an exam. It’s noted that requirements at companies are usually higher than at uni, so the student’s knowledge is much better too.

In this way, the Germans solved several problems at once:

— the gap between theoretical science and practical science;
— 90% of bachelor’s graduates are employed and work well at their companies;
— students have money to live on.

The dual form of education is not new. Henry Ford writes about the same kind of system in his autobiographical book. He organized a school for 700 boys, who studied in the classroom for one week and worked on the shop floor for three weeks.

In Kharkiv, a great many students work while also studying at the university. We have the very same problems as the Germans and Ford did: the gap between the university and real life, issues of employment and earning money.

Students have been working in my organization since 2006. How could we gradually start legalizing this situation?

The university publishes curricula and requirements for the quality of knowledge in the disciplines.
The company and the student choose which disciplines they could close out. For example: programming, databases, OOP, data structures and algorithms, internet technologies can very easily be learned at the company in the course of developing a mobile application or a website.
The head of the company sends a letter addressed to the rector of the university.
The university automatically arranges free attendance for the student in the selected disciplines.
At the company, the student puts the syllabus and the discipline requirements on the desk next to them and works from it every day.
At the end of the semester, a committee meets: an instructor, a company representative, who assess the quality of the student’s knowledge.

I want to emphasize that this is not some form of “mutual credit,” like, if you work as a programmer, then I’ll give you credit for programming. The student still has to pass the exam, because the requirements for everyone’s knowledge have to be the same. For example, students with 1.5 years of work experience have come to my exam who didn’t know unit testing, and unit testing is a required topic in my course.

We could start with at least one discipline per semester.

The Germans did this in 40 years. Maybe we’ll manage to do it in at least 20. Then, who knows, maybe 50/50 will work out.

Read 54 Books. One Year Later

2016-10-16T21:14:00+03:00

On October 12, 2015, I decided to read 54 books in a year (more details: Reading 54 Books in a Year). One year later, I’m sharing my impressions. The main takeaways are these.

Over the past year, from 10/12/2015 to 10/15/2016, I started reading 34 books. Of those:

31 I read all the way through;
1 I dropped at 25% — turned out to be puke-inducing shit;
1 I started reading twice — Napoleon Hill’s "Think and Grow Rich";
2 I didn’t finish because they’re big and basically desk references: Moscon’s management and Keller’s marketing;
1 fiction — 1984.
8 books in English.

Why didn’t I manage to read 54 books in a year? Let’s look at how the starts of books are distributed across the year:

Back on February 4, 2016, I wrote that I was one week ahead of my reading schedule. But then, from February 17 to April 21, I attended a business school that changed a lot of things in my life, including how and what I read. The school hadn’t even ended yet, and I’d already started implementing some things into the workflow, and I had to work more. My lifestyle changed; there was less time for books.

Nevertheless, I think reading even 60 books in a year is perfectly realistic, because I can see the opportunities for it.

What does that take?

Have a reading plan. Several books should already be written down for the next month.
Have a device for reading e-books.
Download books to the device in advance.
Don’t waste time on fiction — it’s useless for personal growth.
Don’t waste time on puke-inducing crap. At the first signs of it — drop it and start a new one.
If, in a good book, some paragraphs or chapters aren’t working for you — skip them and keep reading.
Read books that are interesting. For example, ones that answer questions you care about.
Look for book recommendations from authoritative sources in advance.
The most important thing is to force yourself to read and follow the plan.

Where can you find time to read books? In the morning after waking up, at night before going to bed, on public transportation, in lines, at work, on weekends.

Some people would reproach me:

— Vova, at that pace you don’t remember anything. I like reading books slowly and thoughtfully; that kind of plan doesn’t work for me.
— And how many books did you read slowly and thoughtfully over the past year?
— Zero.

Guys, come on! Yes, I don’t remember 90–95% of the information, but the most important questions — I find them and remember them, use them in life, implement them at work. So there’s no need to hide laziness and aimless existence behind "slow and thoughtful reading"; that doesn’t work for me.

Anyway, overall it was an awesome book year. And it’s going to be even more awesome!

You can read my opinion and reviews of books under the "books" tag: http://obrizan.livejournal.com/tag/книги

All right, do what you want, but I’m off to read Henry Ford’s autobiography.

There Will Be No Elections at KhNURE in October

2016-10-15T09:16:00+03:00

The committee for organizing and holding the election of the rector of KhNURE stated that it was impossible to carry out the work of preparing and holding the election of the rector of KhNURE.

Source: Витяг-з-протоколу-11-від-13.10.16.pdf.

For the fourth time in a row, the university is unable to elect a rector.

A Joke for Project Managers

2016-10-07T00:18:00+03:00

Let me tell you a joke. Five programmers are sitting at work late on a Sunday evening, December 31, wondering: how the fuck did they end up there. "What did we do wrong? Where did we screw up? What didn’t we do?" Looking for someone to blame and all that bullshit. And suddenly one says:

— Wait... When we were planning the project, we were just sitting around telling fucking jokes.

On Levels of Stupidity

2016-09-30T00:29:00+03:00

Sorry for such a deeply philosophical post this late at night, but I was promised lunch for it.

The beginner level of stupidity is when you, like, know everything. Well, that is, in reality you know absolutely nothing, but for some reason you think you know everything. For any question from the person you’re talking to, your brain automatically produces an answer. And you’re 100% sure you’re right. And you’re so stupid you can’t even begin to doubt that you’re right.

The next level of stupidity is knowing that you’re wrong somewhere, having doubts. But you’re so stupid that you don’t feel the need or desire to go and learn something, to shed light on your own ignorance.

The level of stupidity grows. You can already feel a need for knowledge, but you remain stupid enough to be too lazy to go and get that knowledge. You always find some excuses, just as stupid as you are: no money (actually there is), no time (actually there is, but you spent it on some crap).

And now your stupidity evolves along with you: you went to courses or a seminar, but you’re so stupid that it goes in one ear and out the other, you don’t take notes on what they’re telling you from the lectern. Your stupidity prevents you from letting new knowledge pass through you. You’re so stupid that you can’t even, for example, tear yourself away from a chat on your mobile phone.

And now, once again, you’ve gotten even stupider. You paid for the courses, listened to everything, took notes on everything, and sort of kind of understood it all (actually no). You came to work (or wherever it is you came), and you’re so stupid that you don’t even see how to apply this new knowledge. You lack the abstract thinking to extend the knowledge you received to your everyday tasks.

It would seem that at this point I could end the post, but I’ll continue.

You can take an even higher step, reach for the stars, become a Master of Stupidity, if at your job in some specific situation you see that the new knowledge can be applied, but because of laziness and your own stupidity you don’t want to apply it.

And here, at the final line, having traveled this long path full of stupidity, you could take the last step. But you’re so stupid you don’t know what it is, and I won’t tell you. I want you to find and take that step yourself, without my help.

Lyosha, you wanted my post? Here, catch!

KhNURE’s Achievements on the Market

2016-09-25T18:27:00+03:00

Recently I came across a recording of a roundtable on the strategy for Kharkiv’s development, in particular IT technologies. During the discussion, KhNURE employees disclose financial figures. See the excerpt from 30:00.

Transcript:

Eduard Samson:
— Look at the volume of industry-funded research topics or contracts. Do you know the figure for your university?
Stanislav Ignatiev:
— Yes, of course.
— And how much is it?
— Last year it was 12 million. Those are state-budget-funded topics.
— No, no, no, industry-funded! State-budget-funded is what I said.
— This year, less than half a million.
— Less than half a million? Well, let’s divide that by 25. Twenty thousand. A cheap car. And this huge university earned 20,000 dollars on the market!

What is this about? University employees get their salaries from the state budget for education and science. They get, of course, a humiliatingly small amount. For example, a full-time senior lecturer takes home around 2,800 hryvnias. But the university can carry out independent commercial activity. In the dialogue, that is “industry-funded research topics.” The law does not forbid a university from going to the market, selling its services or goods there at market prices, and paying university employees market salaries. But in 25 years of independence and a market economy, the university still hasn’t managed to restructure itself.

Shitty Kharkiv

2016-09-23T07:35:00+03:00

There’s this public page called “Shitty Kharkiv.” The main content of the page is how everything in our city is bad: “And you just keep thinking Shitty isn’t really that shitty.”

This brain cancer started infecting others too. A public page called “SHITTY KhNURE” appeared. I never stop being amazed that people still join these groups full of second-rate shit.

People create a negative surrounding reality for themselves and live in it. They convince themselves of it and try to convince others. It’s not Kharkiv or KhNURE that’s shitty. These people’s lives are shitty: their mom is shitty, their dad is shitty, their friends are shitty, their job is shitty, their university is shitty, their city is shitty. Everyone has an acquaintance like that who constantly whines about how bad everything is. You want to get rid of him as quickly as possible, say goodbye and leave before he starts retelling his shitty life for the umpteenth time.

Guys, you stepped in shit and you stink.

Students Ask™ 8: What Year Should You Start Working?

2016-09-16T07:38:00+03:00

Students ask:

Volodymyr Ihorovych, I got into KhNURE, specifically KIU. How do I get into some company as quickly as possible? What year should I start working?

As quickly as possible means, from day one, make a list of companies, write a résumé, and start sending it down the list, asking to carry shells for programmers.

You need to start working in your first year.

Any engineering discipline always leads to a practical result. At the university, practical classes are sharply limited in time. For example, in my course "Programming for Mobile Platforms," the labs were limited to 16 hours. 4 labs at 4 hours each. For comparison: at work, the estimate for a not-very-complicated mobile project starts at a hundred developer-hours. And that estimate is made on the basis that an experienced developer will be doing it, not a student. Every instructor dreams that students will spend more time on the subject than the curriculum allots. Without practical application of knowledge, any theoretical knowledge evaporates from your head very quickly. Try right now to solve a system of logarithmic equations. You can’t? How come, you learned this in school, didn’t you?

At work, they’ll hold you to real standards for the quality of your knowledge, not the kindergarten stuff they’ll ask of you at the university. And the higher the standards, the more motivation you have to reach them, the cooler a specialist you’ll be.

If someone starts telling you, like, if you start working, there won’t be time left for PE, philosophy, or, God help us, Ukrainian history. Yes, there won’t be. All academic disciplines can’t have the same priority. If the first priority is software engineering, then all the other disciplines naturally get much less attention. And that’s normal; ask any successful person about priorities and they’ll confirm that priorities have to exist, and for success you have to follow them.

Well, and to finish you off, I’ll tell you a little story.

One 13-year-old schoolboy was interested in electronics. For something he was building, he was missing some parts. He found the biggest company in town in the phone book, called its director, and asked for the missing parts. The director gave the schoolboy those parts and invited him to come tighten screws at the factory over the summer. Working at the factory made such an impression on the schoolboy that he later founded his own company, which changed the computer market forever.

Let’s plug in the unknowns. The factory belonged to Hewlett-Packard, the director’s name was Bill Hewlett, the schoolboy was Steve Jobs, and his company — everyone reading these lines knows what that company is called and how it changed the market.

Imagine if, when you were a schoolkid, Elon Musk had invited you to tighten screws at Tesla. How would that have affected you?

There are very many companies in Kharkiv and very many talented programmers and managers.

Not a single student has later told me: "Vova, I regret that I went to work while I was a student."

In previous installments:

— Students ask why write term papers.
— Students ask about the reality of expulsion.
— Schoolkids ask whether belles-lettres is needed.
— Students ask about choosing a major.
— Students ask about completing a course after the deadline.
— Students ask about choosing a programming language.
— Students ask about turning in a diploma thesis.

Interested in my opinion on any issue of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. You can also ask questions through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

Jim Rohn’s Book “Five Pieces to the Life Puzzle”

2016-09-15T23:33:00+03:00

Someone has probably told you some abstruse motivational quote, or you’ve come across them in public pages. For example:

or:

With a probability of 0.99976556% × 10², these quotes were from Jim Rohn’s book “Five Pieces to the Life Puzzle.” Jim Rohn (Jim Rohn) is one of the best business trainers in the world.

You can subscribe to a bunch of public pages and get these quotes in portions, a drop a day. Or you can read Jim Rohn’s book and learn them all at once in a couple of hours. Besides the quotes themselves, the book gives a detailed explanation of why it’s this way and not otherwise.

For example, “Wherever You Are, Be There” (Wherever You Are, Be There). Rohn writes that one of the main reasons we are unhappy is that mentally we are not where we physically are. At home we think about problems at work. At work we think about conflicts at home. When we’re talking to one person, we think about another. We think too much about yesterday or the future, and we don’t feel ourselves in the current moment at all. Stop! Pay attention to the current moment: where are you? who are you with? what are you thinking about? what are the people around you telling you?

“Success and Happiness Are Easy to Achieve” (Success and Happiness Are Easy to Achieve). Rohn writes that we live life in small steps that lead us to success, and each of these steps is easy to take. But it is just as easy not to take that step. Being successful and being unsuccessful are equally easy. Being a bum under a pole at “Naukova” and being Bill Gates are equally easy; they both put in the same effort to achieve their success and lack of success.

A bum = Bill Gates? That is very hard to believe. But I offer you a simple experiment. There is Jim Rohn’s book. You have a choice: buy and read it, or don’t buy it and don’t read it. Both decisions are made very easily. Whoever makes the right choice will take a step toward success. It will be equally easy for everyone to make this decision. But the consequences will be different.

I strictly recommend Jim Rohn’s book for reading to people who are looking for genuine knowledge about building a strong life philosophy.

The Internet Makes Kids Dumber

2016-09-14T23:25:00+03:00

It’s funny to watch how, in the chase for instant results, people degrade into complete morons. Here’s a popular public page teaching kids to sight-read:

By the way, not everyone will be able to perform it correctly anyway: the note durations aren’t indicated here, and that matters. If Beethoven had written down his works like this, they would have reached our day in an unrecognizable form.

Because it’s obviously easier to poke at little numbers with your finger like a moron than to spend a year studying at music school so you can read this:

And while we’re at it, here’s one about combining the pleasant with the useful: “How to get smarter lying on the couch?”

By the way, which one? :)

Telephone Marketing

2016-09-11T19:11:00+03:00

Telephone marketing is when someone calls you from an unknown number and starts pushing some useless crap on you. It’s easier to swat away an annoying fly than an unwanted offer over the phone.

A couple of years ago, a woman called my work phone, introduced herself as a parishioner of the Jehovah’s Witnesses church, and suggested that we study the Bible together over the phone. Usually I got rid of uninvited guests on the phone quickly, but I couldn’t answer a religious woman sharply. We had roughly this dialogue:

— And why did you call me specifically?
— We’re calling everyone in the area to help people in need who want to study the Bible.
— But I don’t need to study the Bible.
— Maybe we should still try?
— We can certainly try, but I’m worried that somewhere out there there’s a person who really is in need, waiting for your call, and you’ll spend your time on me, and I’m not in need.
— Yes, you’re right. All the best, goodbye!

Since then I never brush off telephone marketers; instead, I try as hard as I can to help them make me an offer I can’t refuse.

But for some reason the marketers themselves don’t want to help me.

They call from a bank and offer to issue a new card with special terms from the bank’s partners. And I say that yes, I’m interested, but I already have five cards and ask them to apply the special terms to an existing one. The bank says it can’t. Says it will check with the central branch and call back. And doesn’t call back.

They call from another bank and offer magical service terms. I ask them to forward me the terms by email so I can look them over. They didn’t forward anything.

They call from a marketing agency and offer to promote my offline business (which I don’t have). I ask them to promote my mobile apps in the App Store. The agency can’t; they don’t have that kind of experience.

They call from an internet provider and offer their services. I’m interested, but I’m in a meeting, busy, and ask them to call back after 6:00 p.m. Mu-ha-ha, what kind of idiot would work after 6:00 p.m. The internet provider didn’t call back.

Every time someone calls me, I ask them either to call back or write me an email or give me some substantial discount. For some reason, they all disappear very quickly after that.

And here, for dessert, is an interesting compilation of salespeople brushing off customers:

Personal Efficiency: Calendar

2016-09-10T10:52:00+03:00

Citizens often ask how I personally organize my work. I use a lot of tools for personal efficiency. Today we’ll talk about the calendar.

Last time we talked about the task list: Personal Effectiveness: a Task List Most often, tasks in a task list are not tied to a specific time and place. So a task list won’t help plan your time for a day or a week. That’s what a calendar is for. You can write the task “Buy tickets to Kyiv” or “Pack a suitcase for the trip” in a task list, but the train’s departure time is better put in the calendar.

I have two calendars: personal and work. Though with experience I realized that just one is enough, so both of these calendars sync into each other.

For software, I use Google Calendar:

The calendar’s job is to show that there are only 24 hours in a day and thereby bring me back down to earth. It won’t work to meet people and hold a dozen meetings in one day. If I manage to do 5-6, that’s already a very good result. But usually it’s only 3-4 meetings.

With a calendar you can plan meetings not just for the week, but for several weeks, or even months, ahead. I have acquaintances who don’t know what they’ll be doing a week from now. With a calendar, I know what I’ll be doing a month from now, or two or three.

Google Calendar syncs with the iPhone. Ten minutes before an event in the calendar, the iPhone starts vibrating. That means it’s time to get ready and go to the meeting. But what about meetings you can’t get to in ten minutes? First, in Google Calendar I set how far in advance I need to be warned (and sometimes twice). Second, if I need to get to the meeting place, I put the travel time into the calendar as a separate event, called exactly that: “On the Road.”

Every day at five in the morning Google sends me an email with the meetings waiting for me that day. Another useful thing: Google can parse email and insert events into the calendar automatically. For example, when electronic plane tickets arrive, Google adds all the flights to the calendar automatically.

How people live without a calendar, I don’t know. I strictly recommend getting one.

Students Are Curious™ 7: why write term papers?

2016-08-28T14:06:00+03:00

Students are curious:

Volodymyr Ihorovych, why do we need to write these hateful term papers?

A bit of background. A commission at KhNURE found plagiarism in the reports for term projects by a number of students. The meaning of the word "plagiarism" is the deliberate appropriation of authorship of someone else’s work of science or art, or of an invention [Wiktionary].

Five years ago I already wrote about plagiarism: "Plagiarism at a university". In the civilized world, when plagiarism is found, an instructor has the right to: make the student redo the work, give an F for the work, give an F for the course. In the case of plagiarism in a term project, the recommendation is to give an F for the course. For repeated plagiarism in the civilized world, the student gets a jumping kick in the ass, and with a running start, too.

But the question is something else. Students understand that stealing is bad. They don’t understand why, for a term project, it’s not enough just to write a computer program and defend it. Why do you also have to write an explanatory report?

The motivation "because the explanatory report teaches the student to formulate their thoughts" obviously doesn’t motivate anyone anymore. Here you have to explain what the benefit is of being able to formulate your thoughts. Let’s consider a graph model of a small organization, where the vertices are employees and the edges are communications between them (assigning tasks and reporting on completion):

In other words, at the bottom level are rank-and-file employees, a bit higher up are supervisors and middle managers, and at the top is the director. In such an organization, the role of communication increases from the bottom up. A rank-and-file employee has a very small area of responsibility and practically no freedom to make decisions. Everything he needs to do has already been decided and planned by his supervisor. At the very top level, though, is the director, who bears full responsibility for the entire organization. Any manager spends 70% or more of his time communicating with people lower and higher in the hierarchy.

Formulating and conveying your thoughts competently is an important function of any manager.

Can’t competently document a system architecture? You’ll never become a lead programmer, and no one will trust you with subordinates. After all, you’re not capable of assigning a task and explaining it to another person.

Can’t competently draw up work plans and report to higher-ups? No one will ever trust you to run a project.

Can’t competently put together a business plan and convince investors your startup will succeed? No one will ever trust you with even a hundred bucks.

Can’t formulate and convey your thoughts? Stay a simple doer at the bottom of the organization’s hierarchy, with the corresponding level of responsibility and a proportional level of pay.

In previous installments:

— Students are curious about the reality of expulsion.
— Schoolchildren are curious about whether fiction is needed.
— Students are curious about choosing a major.
— Students are curious about completing a course after the deadline.
— Students are curious about choosing a programming language.
— Students are curious about submitting a diploma project.

Interested in my opinion on any question of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. Questions can also be asked through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

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!

The Poverty of Domestic Design

2016-06-30T22:26:00+03:00

Oschadbank has installed self-service terminals. And I love automation: it lets you save money, make services cheaper, because an hour of a person’s work costs much more than an hour of a machine’s work. Well, more precisely, in Ukraine that’s still not the case, but throughout the civilized world it’s long been that way.

But Ukraine has another problem besides low wages. No one here understands what design is, how to do it, or how good design differs from bad design.

The terminal at Oschadbank is designed (the word design means “planning”) in such a way that only a handful of people can use it to make the payments they need.

When I first saw the cashier get up from her workstation, come out from behind the counter, and help retirees pay their utility bills, I thought these were just elderly people who were on formal terms with technology. But when my turn came, I became that retiree. Because I couldn’t pay for Ukrtelecom’s services on my own. And I don’t seem to be all that old yet, and I’m pretty well versed in IT.

And this is not a joke. Right there on the wall is a printed instruction sheet saying you have to perform 18 (eighteen) actions to pay for electricity.

If, when paying for the phone, you enter the number without a 0 at the beginning, the machine won’t work.

The bill acceptor is positioned at such a height that you have to bend down to slip the bill in.

As long as every machine needs a doorman, IT will never arrive in Ukraine.

Programmer ≠ Businessman

2016-06-24T11:10:00+03:00

Here’s the very first program I ever wrote in my life:

10 PRINT "Vova"

The second program already asked what my name was, then asked for my year of birth, and then printed on the screen:

Privet, Vova! Tebe 8 let.

I retyped both of these programs from a children’s textbook.

Once the principle became clear — that you can write absolutely anything on a computer — the third program was no longer from a book. It was from my head. Ever since then, different app ideas have constantly been coming into my head. Some ideas died in my head, some died in a special little notebook, and some ideas drag out their miserable existence as apps published in the App Store.

I don’t know a single programmer who doesn’t understand the boundlessness of their capabilities, and who hasn’t had some app ideas come into their head. Some even find the time and patience to write an app and put it in the App Store.

But then why don’t we see tens of thousands of successful programmers around us who have built a business on this? Because programmer ≠ businessman. One of the differences can be illustrated with the following dialogue:

— Vova, look, I made a cool app.
— Mm, cool, yeah, useful. But this bit here is done awkwardly; it needs to be like this and this.
— Nah, you don’t get it! It’s a feature! That’s how it’s supposed to be!
— Well, I don’t know, I didn’t understand how it worked on the first try, and I’m constantly suffering when I tap the wrong place on the screen...
— That’s how it’s supposed to be; in the UITableViewDelegate delegate method, when the argument value is nonzero...
— Hey, what difference do the parameters make? It’s still inconvenient to use...
— GO FUCK YOURSELF YOU ASSHOLE YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING ABOUT PROGRAMMING!!!1

For programmers, showing off their programming knowledge is like rich kids bragging about a new expensive phone or expensive boutique clothes. I.e., what I meant to say is that it’s the only way to stand out in some way, to hide their inferiority complex.

When programmers shove their ego deeper down and start listening carefully to their users, that’s when entrepreneurial happiness will come to them.

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’m Quitting the University

2016-06-11T18:50:00+03:00

I’m resigning from KhNURE of my own accord. This is where there should have been a long post about why I made this decision and what events led up to it. Or maybe some lyrical post with a bunch of historical photographs, ending with the words, "I would have kept teaching a while longer, but you can’t get the years back."

I’ll definitely dump some pink snot into your feed, but later. For today, there are two more important issues.

First — the department needs someone to replace me. I taught the two coolest courses ever offered at our university: "Programming Mobile Platforms" (iPhones, Androids) and "Cloud Computing" (Amazon, Google). We had it like in the best bakeries or the best newspapers: late at night in San Francisco, Steve Jobs would release a new operating system, and the next morning at 7:45 I was already at the board talking about what was new. Many people still don’t know what "cloud" is (for them it’s that little gray cloud on network diagrams), while my students were programming and testing automatic scaling using AWS EC2, ELB, CloudWatch.

If you’re ready to maintain such a high bar, or maybe even raise it higher, write to me at volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com

Second — I’m opening my own IT school. I analyzed the market for commercial courses and wrote a unique concept. I’m not the first person who will teach iPhone programming in Kharkiv, but I can offer a product that will differ substantially in quality.

Besides that, I’m asking all my students to write me a recommendation in whatever way is convenient for you: by email at volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com or in private messages on Facebook. What was good about my courses? What was bad? How did getting to know me in the courses affect your life? Did someone find a better job? Get a pay raise? Move abroad? Drink yourself into oblivion and become a downshifter? Be prepared for me to publish these reviews on the school’s website under your name. Thanks!

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.

A Second Away From

2016-03-19T00:02:00+02:00

The first time it happened was in seventh grade, in shop class. What I liked most was working on the engine lathe (Isaak Naumovich, hi!). I remember it like it was yesterday: I clamped the workpiece in the spindle, secured the tool holder, adjusted the tailstock coupling, tightened the screw fixing the carriage to the bed, and then tightened... although never mind, you don’t know what an engine lathe is anyway. The point was that I made a mistake and set the cutter clearance not to 0.1 mm, but to 1.1 mm, i.e., ten times more than required. I turned on the lathe, and the workpiece began to rotate. I fed the cutter. Because of the unacceptable clearance, the cutter started hammering hard against the workpiece, then the workpiece snapped in two at the spindle and whistled past my temple. If it had happened a second earlier, the workpiece would have ended up in my head. I never worked on the engine lathe again.

The next time it happened was a year later. My friend and I (Vitya, hi!) were riding on top of the freight elevator in our building, and like any teenager I decided to show off in front of my friend. When the elevator was on the second floor, I stepped from the elevator car onto the door rail of the third floor. The elevator passengers went down to the first floor, and I stayed on the third, inside the shaft. So the layout in the elevator shaft ended up like this: the freight elevator on the first floor, my friend on the elevator, and me on the third floor on the door rail. But then the elevator started going up. When it was already approaching the second floor, I jumped from the door rail onto the roof of the elevator. But I lost my balance; one leg slipped and got between the elevator car and the shaft wall. Luckily, my foot hit some elevator part, and it stopped abruptly. There was half a meter left to the third-floor door rail. One second later, my right leg could have been at the bottom of the elevator shaft, while I myself would still have been on the roof of the elevator. I’d have gone for another ride, but you can’t get those years back.

The most recent time it happened was on December 3, 2015. I was walking down Rymarska Street when a big chunk of ice from a roof glanced off my back. A second earlier, it would have hit me square on the head.

Have you often been in a situation one second away from death?

An Incident in the Verkhovna Rada

2016-02-27T09:05:00+02:00

Speaker:

— Honorable people's deputies! The question being put to a vote is to give each deputy a salary of one million dollars, present them with a big house on the ocean shore, and give them a personal motor pool of ten cars. Please vote. Voting! 450 in favor, 0 against, 0 abstained. See, and they say we have a political crisis, that our coalition is falling apart, that we have no parliamentary majority. We can vote unanimously after all!

Phone Scammers

2016-02-24T11:51:00+02:00

This morning a young man called me from +380 95 746-21-82. The young man introduced himself as an employee of the National Bank of Ukraine. He even gave me his first and last name, his position, and some reference number. Then he said:

— For your identification, we need to know your credit card number. Which bank do you associate your credit card with?
— Excuse me?
— Which bank do you associate your credit card with?
— Young man, is Russian definitely your native language? What does it mean to “associate a credit card”?
— Well, which bank associated your credit card: Oschadbank, FUIB, Prominvestbank?
— What the hell are you talking about? Prominvestbank closed ages ago.

After that the young man took offense and hung up. The cold call didn’t work.

Don’t tell anyone any details of your credit cards over the phone. In some cases, just the 16 digits and the card’s expiration date are enough to steal money. If some call like this worries you, that there might be some trouble with your card, then just call back using the phone number printed on the back of the card.

And yes, I know Prominvestbank hasn’t closed. You need to say any old nonsense to a fraudster to break the pattern of their script.

Stay a dumb moron

2016-02-23T14:32:00+02:00

The author of the best math textbook got shortchanged at the market. Don’t learn math. Stay a dumb moron.

KhNURE Photos

2016-02-22T23:20:00+02:00

Figure out the year of the shot and the place in KhNURE shown in this photo:

Why am I bringing this up? I found a little archive here:

Many of the photos are more than 10 years old. It’s interesting to look at how it was back then and compare it with how it is now.

Another interesting photo. Who can say how it differs from today’s view?

The Meaning of the Film "Groundhog Day"

2016-02-20T00:33:00+02:00

Today at business school we discussed the film "Groundhog Day."

The plot of the film is that a journalist ends up in a prison of time and is forced to live the same day over and over again.

The film is very interesting. But what conclusion can we draw from it? Some people live a similar life — every day for them is like Groundhog Day. Every day is like the one before. What does the main character of the film do? He started living that day differently. And what do people do? They live every day the same way.

If you recognized yourself and you’re living in Groundhog Day, then try living it somehow differently. And what do you have to lose if tomorrow morning you wake up at the same time, in the same bed, with the same gloomy mood? If you’re unemployed, then go do something. If you’re already working, but at a job you don’t like, go and quit. Nothing terrible will happen — after all, tomorrow you’ll still wake up at the very same time and in the very same bed. See a beautiful person in the subway? Go up and introduce yourself. Why be shy or afraid of rejection, when tomorrow morning you’ll again wake up at the same time and in the same bed, as usual, and again ride the same subway, like yesterday, and the same people who were there yesterday will be there. Go take a French course. It doesn’t obligate you to anything, because tomorrow morning you’ll again wake up at the very same time in the very same bed. Tired of your degenerate friends? Then tell them to get lost. Don’t be afraid, they’re not going anywhere, because tomorrow you’ll again wake up at the very same time in the morning and they’ll remain in your life. Acted like a piece of shit toward someone yourself? Live the next day as if you were that person’s best friend. Don’t worry, your stunt won’t be remembered, because tomorrow morning you’ll wake up at the same time and in the same bed, as usual. You’re in Groundhog Day, after all; the cards are in your hands.

Try something new every day. Add some variety. And believe me, there will be a happy ending, like the film’s hero has, when in the end you find yourself in a better reality than the one you’re living in now.

Sounds to Remember

2016-02-13T00:14:00+02:00

Most often, people bring back kilotons of photos from various trips. Rarely does anyone record video. And I like recording the vivid sounds of the places I visit. After all, photos, videos, and sounds bring memories to life in different ways, and complement one another very well.

The purring of my kitty (outside the competition program):

Jet engines at the air show in Korotych:

And this sound is very familiar to everyone from childhood:

And here are some sounds for you to dive back into childhood yourselves:

This is the kind of thing that happens on the Svaliava–Lviv commuter train:

Do you have recordings of unusual sounds? Next time, be sure to record some. Every smartphone has a voice recorder. It will enrich your memories of the trip even many years later.

Two Eternal How-To Guides

2016-02-11T22:54:00+02:00

Year after year, you have to explain the same thing to newcomers: “Nothing worked out for me,” “Nothing works for me,” “I can’t do it” — that is not a description of a problem. It is just whining. And whining is emotion, not the substance of the problem. Emotions won’t help the matter. What will help is a good method for describing and solving the problem.

Time to blow the dust off the old how-to guides on this topic.

The first is “How to Report Bugs Effectively.”

The second is “How to Ask Questions the Smart Way.” This guide has a section for those on the other side: “How to Answer Questions Properly and Competently.”

A training course for students should be built on the basis of these guides.

Junior specialists — required reading.

George Orwell’s Book “1984”

2016-02-10T23:30:00+02:00

I recently read George Orwell’s book “1984.”

They say this book is on the school curriculum. I don’t remember anything like it being on the school curriculum. People are constantly referring to this book, so I decided to read what this thing actually is.

When I started reading, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The book describes the fate of one person in a totalitarian society. And the society is pure Ukrainian television: there’s the party’s point of view, you have to stick to it, anyone who disagrees gets executed; love these people, hate those people, hammering away at the theme of a constant war with someone. And so on, you know this better than I do.

Throughout the book, the main character goes against the system, but in the end he commits a betrayal. I was a little surprised that an English author ended his novel that way. In books published in the USSR, everyone was taught that you had to block an embrasure with your chest. Remember how Malchish-Kibalchish was subjected to terrible tortures, but he didn’t give up his friends. And here an author from Great Britain shows how you should betray the people you love. Apparently, that was relevant in Great Britain in the 1940s.

If you’re 16, read it by all means; it has your favorite theme of fighting the system. If you’re much older, but still 16 at heart, then read it by all means too. If you want to find out what everyone is referring to, read it too. In all other cases, the novel will be useless.

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

The Cheapest Item

2016-02-08T21:45:00+02:00

In the Soviet Union, ice cream cost 7 kopecks, a bus ride cost 5 kopecks, and a box of matches cost 1 kopeck. Small change made sense.

I remember in the ’90s, when coupons were still the national currency (coupon is short for “Kuchma stubbornly keeps deceiving the people.” Don’t know who Kuchma is? Finish your homework and I’ll tell you.), kiosks had coupons with denominations up to 100 coupons stuck to their display windows, crossed out with an X. That meant those bills were not accepted.

Over the last 15 years, the hryvnia has depreciated 15-fold. Roughly speaking, everything has become 15 times more expensive. Even if in 2000 you could buy something for a few kopecks, now it has become 15 times more expensive. Add inflation on top of that.

I recently saw a sign hanging at the checkout in one supermarket: “Coins in denominations of 1, 2, and 5 kopecks are not accepted.” I was slightly taken aback, sank into memories of the nineties, and didn’t think to take a photo. The very next day the sign was gone. A supermarket has no right to refuse money that is officially in circulation in our country.

But I started thinking about something else: what is the cheapest item now? Can you buy anything for 1 kopeck? For 10 kop.? For 50? In the photo below, the cheapest item costs 2 UAH 89 kop. — one stick of the most puke-inducing “Jacobs” coffee. I couldn’t find anything cheaper than that in the supermarket.

I haven’t carried change for many years now. I specifically buy wallets that don’t have a coin compartment. It isn’t much use, and it takes up an unjustifiably large amount of space.

What’s the cheapest item you’ve seen? Do you carry change with you?

Personal Effectiveness: a Task List

2016-02-07T23:00:00+02:00

People often ask: how I personally organize my work. I use a lot of tools for personal effectiveness. Today let’s talk about the task list.

A task list is the most important tool for organizing personal effectiveness. Absolutely everything that needs to be done gets offloaded from your head into the task list. The list is divided into “projects,” for example: “Work,” “University,” “Home,” and so on. Tasks are also divided into “Do today,” “Do this week,” and “Do later.”

The most important condition is to offload absolutely everything that’s in your head. From elementary things to complicated ones. You must not give in to the temptation of “nah, I’ll remember this and do it anyway.” In 95% of cases, things like that get forgotten and don’t get done.

For managing tasks, I recommend “Micromiles”: http://micromiles.co/

The task list for the day and for the week needs to be reviewed daily, moving tasks around if necessary. The task list for the week and for later needs to be reviewed once a week and also moved around if needed.

As a result, your head will be completely freed from the need to remember what has to be done, and all your attention will be devoted only to the tasks that need to be done today. With a task list, it’s impossible to forget something. You can consciously not do it, but forget it — impossible.

I remember when I first wrote all the tasks from my head into the program, I felt an unprecedented relief. It turned out that yes, there were a lot of important tasks, but for that particular day there were literally two, and I had already taken care of both of them, so there was no need to worry anymore. It was happiness.

For more detail on the method of getting things to the finish line, you can watch Maxim Dorofeev: http://mnogosdelal.ru/slidecasts/dovedenie-del-do-kontsa/

How people live without a task list, I do not know. I strongly recommend starting one.

Monitor Setup

2016-02-06T21:57:00+02:00

It’s amazing how many people don’t know the main secret to setting up a monitor. The monitor brightness should be set so that it doesn’t contrast with the ambient lighting. That is, if the room is brightly lit, the monitor should be bright too. If the room has dim lighting, the monitor brightness should be lowered as well. You shouldn’t work at a monitor in complete darkness: at least put in a desk lamp, light up the objects behind the monitor.

This has to do with the fact that the eye shouldn’t have to keep readjusting to the brightness of the monitor and the brightness of the surroundings. If this happens very often, your eyes get tired quickly. But if the monitor brightness matches the surroundings, the eye never needs to adjust at all.

Ideally, sit facing a window so you can look into the distance — good conditions for relaxing your eyes.

A Reply 11 Years Later

2016-02-05T22:53:00+02:00

In 1999 I met a girl at the seaside. We struck up a friendship, but it didn’t last long, literally a couple of days: her family was leaving the resort much earlier than mine. She lived in another city, and since neither the internet nor texting had been invented yet (I mean they hadn’t been invented in Ukraine), the only way to communicate was paper mail.

By the way, I have a very good relationship with regular mail; back then it wasn’t hard for me at all to write her letters once a week, or to other friends. I even taught one friend to play guitar by paper mail. And I still send postcards from every city I visit.

And we started writing to each other. A few months later we had a misunderstanding, and I stopped answering her letters. That was the end of the epistolary romance.

Fast-forward to 2010. Mobile phones, some people had two, the internet, HDTV, the hryvnia at eight to the dollar, Yanukovych had just become president. I had acquired social networks and was looking for classmates, university groupmates, and other acquaintances. I also remembered that old correspondence. Finding the girl by first and last name wasn’t difficult. I sat up all night and reread all the letters from that distant ’99. And I wrote her a reply to those unanswered letters 11 years later.

Of course, no friendship came of it anymore. A person at 15 and a person at 26 are two different people. But the deed was done: the correspondence got its logical ending.

But it’s better to answer on time.

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 “Economics: The User’s Guide” by Ha-Joon Chang

2016-02-03T22:43:00+02:00

I recently read the book “Economics: The User’s Guide” by Ha-Joon Chang (116 UAH in electronic form).

I sincerely wanted to start understanding economics better. I read it; I didn’t end up understanding it much better. But there were interesting bits in the book.

About how the imperialists (Britain and accomplices) waged economic wars in Asia for centuries, using all kinds of vile methods and actual wars to push through their interests.

About how in the International Monetary Fund the U.S. has veto power, i.e., you could say they run the IMF. The IMF gives loans in exchange for political control over a country.

International trade is, 80% of the time, transnational corporations moving stuff from one pocket to another. And a corporation can skillfully regulate imports and exports with itself. For example, buy ordinary hammers at 800 dollars apiece. Or buy a Toyota car for 200.

Foreign direct investment, at best, has no effect on a country’s economy, and sometimes makes it worse. Because any politician is ready to dance for an overseas investor and tailor the laws in favor of the investor, not the country.

Free trade is a noose around the neck of developing countries (hello, association with the EU!). For a country, it’s better to buy its own products, lower quality and more expensive, than foreign ones that are better quality and cheaper.

You won’t learn economics from this book, but you can pick up a lot of facts. Recommended as light bedtime reading.

Disrupt of the Week: Swagger

2016-02-02T23:58:00+02:00

Please welcome a new column: "Disrupt of the Week." In this column I talk about the most breakthrough technologies that substantially change the rules of the game in various fields.

This week’s disrupt is Swagger (pronounced "swogger") — a specification for describing web service APIs.

Why is this needed? Since the specification is machine-readable, you can use it as the basis for various useful things:

a) automatically generate documentation for a web service;

b) automatically generate API clients for this service;

c) automatically generate web service templates;

This is very relevant for microservice architectures, where one microservice can be used by other microservices written in different languages.

The specification is described in YAML or JSON. I prefer the first option because it is the most human-readable. This is what a specification looks like:

This is what a fragment of documentation built from this specification looks like:

And now for the most interesting part: there is an API client generator for many languages:

android, async-scala, csharp, dart, flash, python-flask, java, javascript, jaxrs, inflector, jmeter, nodejs, objc, perl, php, python, qt5cpp, ruby, scala, scalatra, silex-PHP, sinatra, slim, spring-mvc, dynamic-html, html, swagger, swagger-yaml, swift, tizen, typescript-angular, typescript-node, akka-scala, CsharpDotNet2, clojure

Here is a small fragment of an API client for the Objective-C language:

The implementation details of data exchange over the HTTP protocol are hidden from the developer. There’s no need to focus on those details. There are already ready-made high-level methods for working with the web service. You can describe the API once and generate two clients at once, for example, for a mobile application and for a website.

This way of describing a server API and generating clients increases a developer’s productivity by at least 10 times.

Ukraine and 4G

2016-02-01T22:39:00+02:00

In 2015, quality internet finally appeared on city streets in the country: 3G. The mobile operators bought licenses to use the frequencies for crazy billions of hryvnias. The equipment, I think, costs no less.

On the one hand, that’s good: for 15 UAH a month I get several megabits of bandwidth on my smartphone. On the other hand — when are we going to get 4G? All the other countries already have 4G. Russia has had it since 2012, Kazakhstan since 2012, Poland since 2011. Even Africa already has 4G. And our mobile operators spent the money on 3G. Now the investments need to be recouped, so nobody is even bringing up installing 4G. Believe me, the technologies for this were invented long ago, and radio waves propagate through Russian, Polish, Kazakh, and Ukrainian air in exactly the same way.

Ukraine made a mistake: it should have skipped the 3G stage and invested straight into 4G. Now we won’t be seeing 4G on smartphone screens anytime soon.

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.

Students Are Curious 6: Will They Really Expel Me?

2016-01-30T22:52:00+02:00

Oh yes, I know: you’ve missed the “Students Are Curious” feature.

So, the students are curious:

Volodymyr Ihorovych, how can this be, will I really be expelled just because of one exam of yours that I didn’t pass?

Yes, you will be expelled. It’s important to understand that expulsion is entirely real. Don’t reassure yourself with the fact that you weren’t expelled for the previous 4.5 years. Or that the guys a year ahead weren’t expelled. Or that the guy from the parallel group wasn’t expelled. This isn’t about them, after all; it’s about you. And you, you will definitely be expelled.

If you think that all you need to do is drag things out a little longer, and that my colleagues and I are just trying to scare you, and that there, at the very last line, we’ll say, “All right, a C,” then you’re mistaken. There will be no C. On February eighth, you will be expelled.

Expulsion is as real as the smartphone you’re reading my blog on. Touch it, feel it, feel its weight, how comfortably it sits in your hand. It is real, just like your expulsion.

In previous installments:

— School students are curious about whether fiction is necessary.
— Students are curious about choosing a major.
— Students are curious about submitting a course after the deadline.
— Students are curious about choosing a programming language.
— Students are curious about submitting a thesis.

Interested in my opinion on any question of university life? Send your questions to volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com. Anonymity is guaranteed. Answers will be published as questions come in. You can also ask questions through the anonymous-questions site http://ask.fm/obrizan

Retraining into IT from Scratch

2016-01-30T21:31:00+02:00

I’ve been running into this question more often: “What courses should I take if I’m learning IT from scratch?” Well, for example, if your first profession is teacher of Ukrainian language and literature, but you want to get a job as a Haskell programmer.

For me this is a very difficult question. First, I’ve never seen, right in front of me, someone with a completely different qualification become an IT person, and which courses they attend in the process. Second, answering “this will take you 4 years” (as it takes our students) is very hard when people expect quick solutions from you.

No courses in Kharkiv — full-time, correspondence, or online — will turn you into an IT person from scratch. An IT person is not about pressing buttons, and not about knowing a language’s syntax. Because no IT courses teach discrete mathematics. For retraining into IT from scratch, discrete mathematics should become the most in-demand course. Graph theory, set theory, Boolean algebra — there’s no doing IT without this.

Discrete mathematics is taught only at universities as part of bachelor’s training. And that lasts exactly four years.

Technical Blogs

2016-01-29T23:59:00+02:00

While you’re over there liking whatever random crap on Facebook (Facebook as a news outlet is just some kind of misunderstanding altogether), the normal guys are reading technical blogs from leading companies.

For example.

The Uber engineers’ blog: https://eng.uber.com/ Don’t know what Uber is? How are things back in the 1990s? Is Valdis Pelsh still speaking with an Estonian accent? For example, there’s an interesting article about how Uber’s engineers ran up against PostgreSQL performance and wrote their own NoSQL database based on MySQL, and the most interesting part — how they migrated a live system without a single minute of downtime.

Amazon’s cloud: https://aws.amazon.com/ru/blogs/aws/ For example, what Amazon did to survive the blizzard in the U.S.: https://aws.amazon.com/ru/blogs/aws/aws-ready-to-weather-the-storm/

Twitter: https://blog.twitter.com/ For example, how Twitter is migrating from the SHA-1 algorithm to SHA-256 in order to be a secure social network: https://blog.twitter.com/2015/sunsetting-sha-1

Facebook engineers on the line: https://code.facebook.com/ For example, how Facebook is advancing its hardware platform for efficient data centers, and even publishing all its inventions as open source: https://code.facebook.com/posts/1650070168592965/telecom-industry-embraces-open-compute-project/

Netflix: http://techblog.netflix.com/ For example, how they run automated fault-tolerance tests: http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/01/automated-failure-testing.html

While someone is holding forth on the advantages of one technology or another, these guys are deploying technologies for billions of users and know about it all firsthand.

I recommend subscribing and reading them cover to cover.

Talk at Kharkiv.py

2016-01-28T21:38:00+02:00

There is a small community of Python programmers in Kharkiv — Kharkiv.py. The community meets rarely, once every six months. The next meeting will be on February 13 (Saturday), where I’ll talk about using Docker in automated tests in Python.

Besides me, the speakers will be:

— Roman Podoliaka – on profiling Python applications
— Igor Kalnitsky
— Denys Matiichuk - UI automation in Python

The meeting will take place on February 13 at 12:00 in the office of the company "Ciklum" (18-D Otakara Yarosha St., 3rd floor, “Dvizhenie” shopping center, Botanichnyi Sad metro station). Admission is free with registration: http://kharkivpy.org.ua/kharkiv-py-12-13-fevralya/

Richard John’s Book “The Big Eight”

2016-01-27T21:54:00+02:00

I recently read Richard John’s book “The Big Eight” (112 UAH in electronic form).

I love books that lay out the formula for success without any beating around the bush. The author interviewed hundreds of successful people, like Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and others, and distilled their successful experience.

To save you 112 UAH and 2.5 hours of reading, I’ll publish the formula for success — the “Big Eight” — right here:

Passion: successful people love what they do.
Hard work: they work very hard.
Focus: they focus on one thing, not everything.
The ability to overcome themselves: they make themselves take action.
Creativity: they generate new ideas.
Self-improvement: they are always improving themselves and their work.
The ability to serve people: they offer high-quality services.
Persistence: they move steadily toward their goal, regardless of the time spent, failures, and twists of fate.

The secret of any formula for success is that there is no secret. Each of you has just read this and thought: “So what, I already know all that.” The difference between a successful person and a loser is that the successful person just gets on with it.

Print out this list, hang it somewhere visible, and take action. And then, maybe in 20 years, they’ll write about you in a book like this too.

I recommend the book to those who are just about to do something great but are short on inspiration.

Students Don’t Understand the Language

2016-01-26T22:13:00+02:00

As part of the student success trainings, I’m studying the reasons why students do poorly in their studies. One such reason, which isn’t obvious and which students don’t talk about, is that students don’t understand the language.

I’m not talking about Russian, which all our university lectures are given in. I’m talking about the specialized terminology used in lectures and lab work.

An example from personal experience. In cloud technologies labs, a lot of actions have to be done in the command line and the Python interpreter. When I ask them to add the path to Python in the environment variables, change the working directory, specify command-line arguments, then in a group of 20 students only one understands what I’m talking about. The others sit there staring at the monitor as if they’re seeing a computer for the first time in their lives.

Another example. Students may show a compilation error, and I can suggest a solution: "Implement such-and-such protocol method in this class."

Students hear it as: "blah blah blah method blah blah blah class," like the cat in the Whiskas commercial:

On the other hand, this turns into students being unable to give normal definitions of basic terms, and in one-on-one conversations and during lab defenses they use little words like: "thingamajig," "crap," "whatchamacallit," "thing," "well, you know, what’s-it-called," and so on. Obviously, without precise definitions at a lab defense, a student cannot expect an "excellent" grade. Some students end up dissatisfied: "But I did do it, I know it, I just couldn’t say it."

As a result, there is no dialogue at all. Students are ashamed to admit that they don’t understand; they don’t ask any follow-up questions, and the lab work doesn’t move forward.

And what happens in a lecture when a student runs into an unknown term? If a student doesn’t understand some term, then that lecture is over for them. They won’t understand anything after that. First, the context of the narrative is lost, and without context, information that isn’t connected to anything doesn’t stick. Second, the brain spends fuel and time trying to understand that term, to remember it; the student gets distracted and also loses the thread of the lecturer’s narrative.

Recommendations for instructors:

At the beginning of each lecture, spend a few minutes on definitions of the most important terms used in the lecture.
Strictly monitor the terminology students use in their speech.

Recommendations for students:

Work through professional terminology in advance.
Keep glossaries of terms; these glossaries should always be at hand so that, even in a lecture when time is short, you can quickly peek at them.
Don’t be shy about asking the instructor or classmates to clarify terms, if time allows. For example, in labs.
At home, independently work through the terms and the parts of the lecture that fell out of the narrative.
In oral and written speech, give precise definitions of concepts; get rid of abstract definitions: "crap," "thingamajig," "thing," and so on.

In 2000, at the first physics lecture, Anatoly Ivanovich Kozar said: "You don’t yet have anything to understand with." What he meant was precisely that before studying physics, you need to learn the terminology so that there is "something to understand with."

Richard Sheridan’s Book “Joy, Inc.”

2016-01-25T22:40:00+02:00

I recently read Richard Sheridan’s book “Joy, Inc.” (93 UAH in electronic form).

In the book, Richard Sheridan talks about the history and day-to-day life of his company, Menlo Innovations", where he works as director and founder.

Hands up, who has their dream job? Yeah, a forest of hands. Well then, read how Sheridan did it.

His company does custom software development. One striking feature: they practice pair programming. And not the way you do it once a year, but every day. That is, this company has exactly half as many computers as employees. What’s more, the pairs change every week. This way, after a month, every person on the project knows every part of the system.

How does this affect employee happiness? Very simply: at the very least, you can go on vacation at any moment; you will never be the one person who knows a key part of the system and without whom it’s impossible to do a release. Secondly, with pair programming, the quality of implementation gets much better. In the end, everyone is happy.

Overall, it was interesting to read about this and a lot more. For company directors and founders — strictly required reading.

Summary of the Twelfth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2016-01-25T16:00:00+02:00

On January 23, 2016, the twelfth meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 from 11:15 to 13:00.

We discussed the basic principles of project management:

Projects should be done in pairs.
Use open repositories.
Do code reviews.
Write tests.

The meeting minutes were recorded on http://python.mass.education/project

The main question: "Where to start?" Answer:

Installing Python 2.7.
Installing a development environment, for example, PyCharm.
Installing the Google App Engine Python SDK: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/downloads?hl=en
Going through the GAE tutorial: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/usingwebapp

This should be enough for the first week.

Among the proposed projects:

A simple blog.
An online store.
A wiki.
Online checking of Python assignments.

At the next meeting, the teams will talk about their progress.

Good luck! :)

Previous meetings:

How to 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.

VKontakte and Facebook groups: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt respectively.

A Q&A site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

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

Sam Newman’s Book "Building Microservices"

2016-01-24T07:00:00+02:00

I recently read Sam Newman’s book "Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems."

After reading this book, phrases kept spinning in my head: "paradigm shift," "disrupt," "the next big thing." Most of you are on the other side of the browser and have little interest in the development of internet technologies. And they are changing a lot. So much that in 10 years the only thing that has stayed the same is the HTTP protocol, while everything else has changed: web servers, databases, web application architectures, testing, integration, and deployment methods.

Microservice architecture is an organization of a system where each subsystem is an autonomous, independent web service responsible for one small task. The complete opposite is monolithic architecture, where there is only one web service that handles all tasks.

In a microservice architecture, each microservice is developed, deployed, and scaled in isolation from other services. This means the chosen technology stack is no longer a life sentence. For example, the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — was popular for ten years. Previously, all these technologies were installed as part of a single web service. And if a new feature needed to be developed, they would look for a specialist who knew these technologies. But in a microservice architecture, one microservice can be implemented in Ruby, another in Go, a third in Java. One can have MongoDB as its database, another GraphDB, and a third a blob store, for example. And that’s normal. Choose the language and database that will solve the specific task most effectively.

Previously, if a web service couldn’t handle the load, you would do horizontal scaling: launch another instance of the LAMP service and set up load balancing. In a microservice architecture, you can analyze the performance of each individual microservice and scale only the microservice that isn’t coping with the load.

Reading the book, I remembered where I, as a user, had encountered microservices. I remember once going to Facebook: the news feed was there, but I couldn’t view private messages. That means Facebook has at least two microservices (in reality, hundreds of them) — the news feed microservice and the private messages microservice. And that day the messages microservice went down. The advantage is that the other microservices kept working, because they operate autonomously. In a monolithic architecture, that is impossible: the failure of one subsystem leads to the failure of the entire system.

I strongly recommend "Building Microservices" to all CTOs and just plain developers.

2016-01-21T13:19:00+02:00

There’s this social network: LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com). It was conceived as a social network for professionals, where you can find business partners, employees, employers. You know, where in all the photos everyone is supposed to be wearing a tie and radiating cheerfulness, to have a better chance of finding a job.

But in the end this social network was struck by the same cancer as any other: idly drifting office plankton.

So there’s this company president and founder sitting there:

— Oh, what a cute little doggie, I think I’ll go show it to all my acquaintances. Where will I do that? On Twitter? Maybe on Facebook? No!!! I’ll do it on LinkedIn, the social network for professionals!

Or there’s this company C-E-O sitting there:

— Hm. What a hard brainteaser! Who should I give it to? Maybe to my little son, who has just moved into seventh grade and started studying algebra? Nooo!!! I’ll give this little problem to other C-E-Os, presidents, and founders!!!

And 157 other C-E-Os rushed to solve a system of equations with three unknowns.

And then at sales meetings they ask the question: "How do you sell through LinkedIn?".

You don’t. :))))) =^_._^= ;))))

The Book “Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation” by Brian Tracy

2016-01-20T22:38:00+02:00

I recently read Brian Tracy’s “Speak to Win: How to Present with Power in Any Situation” (105 UAH in the electronic version).

I remember my first public talk very well. I was a third-year student, and my academic adviser — Prof. Vladimir Ivanovich Khakhanov — sent me to Dnipropetrovsk for a student conference. I had absolutely no idea what that was and was very nervous. A strange city, my first time in Dnipropetrovsk, no support from friends or acquaintances. Out of sheer fright, I rattled off my talk very quickly and loudly, told them everything I knew about the system. When I finished, there was silence, and only after about 10 seconds did someone ask a question: “What language is the program written in?” And that was it. Nobody asked anything else.

It’s been 13 years since my first talk, and I still get nervous when I speak in front of people. For example, lectures at the beginning of the semester are the most nerve-racking, because you’re seeing these people for the first time in your life. You don’t know them, they don’t know you. Or speaking to schoolkids — that’s a whole different level.

In this book, as in any other, the main idea is that you need to prepare well for talks. Work through the outline, polish the wording. One new thing I hadn’t read in other books: the author pays a lot of attention to preparing the equipment in the room: arranging the chairs, setting up the air conditioning, lighting, and sound.

For my part, I can add that the best way to become a good speaker is to always know what you’re talking about, to have something you can tell the audience.

It’s a good book, I recommend it.

Summary of the Eleventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2016-01-20T22:11:00+02:00

On January 9, 2016, the eleventh meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 from 11:15 to 13:00.

1. Volodymyr Obrizan. Automated Testing of Programs in Python

A distinguishing trait of a professional programmer is having skills in automated code testing. We looked at how automated unit tests are created in Python. We used the unittest module.

The example source code is in the archive: unittest-test.zip.

2. Roman Podoliaka. Advanced Collections in Python

Roma continued talking about advanced collections in Python. That time Roma talked about:

— Dictionary with a default value (defaultdict)
— Ordered dictionary (OrderedDict)
— Counter (Counter)
— Double-ended queue (deque)
— Named tuple (NamedTuple)

An iPython Notebook is available in the source files and as a PDF file.

3. Discussion of the Club’s Work

We discussed a new direction for the club’s work: carrying out small projects. For example, creating a simple blog engine. Projects should be carried out using a version control system, with a code review process.

Previous meetings:

No. 8, No. 9, No. 10 12/12/2015, 12/19/2015, 12/26/2015 Summary of the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 7 12/05/2015 Summary of the Seventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 6 11/28/2015 Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 5 11/21/2015 Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 3, No. 4 11/07/2015, 11/14/2015 Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How can 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.

VKontakte and Facebook groups: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt, respectively.

A Q&A site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

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

Exams

2016-01-19T22:14:00+02:00

So, students, how’s exam season going? Successfully?

Unusual Marketing on the Streets of Kharkiv

2016-01-19T21:31:00+02:00

Today on Lenin Avenue I fell victim to... what? you don’t know where that is? Then let’s put it this way: today on Nauky Avenue I fell victim to an interesting kind of marketing. Clearer now? Good. A young man was walking toward me and asked:

— Do you know how to get to “Rost” on Klochkivska?

Of course I know how to get there, so I immediately started pointing:

— You need to cross the street, then go down...

But the young man interrupted me:

— Great, since you know where it is, come to our store, we’re having a perfume sale right now!

That’s when I realized this was yet another pusher of shit.

— Here, take some samples! Here, take two more for your male and female friends!
— Yes, thanks...

But that wasn’t all:

— The samples are 10 hryvnias each...

That is, this wasn’t even an ad campaign, but a straight-up sales pitch on the street, and the product was already in my hands. The only thing missing was the final step of this protocol: for me to hand the seller 30 hryvnias. Naturally, I’d seen his stink-in-bottles in my coffin, so I hurried to return the product. But then he used a third trick: he didn’t take the product back. The awkward situation dragged on for about ten seconds; only when I made it clear with a motion of my hand that I would drop the product on the ground did he take it back, turn around, and go look for a new victim.

How did it happen that some pimply dick from the street got me all the way to the last step of the sale — handing over the money? The answer is that usually we don’t notice and ignore the pushers of shit who shove it at us right away. We simply have a filter for scenarios like that. And this young man acted smarter: he asked me a question to knock me out of autopilot mode and make me think, make me pay attention to him.

Obviously, he himself is an idiot and a loser, since he’s pushing shit on the street, but whoever trained him knew what they were doing.

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.

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

Where Are the Father and Mother?

2015-12-19T07:40:00+02:00

Over ten years of teaching at a university, I’ve noticed one detail. When a student is already in a total disaster with a subject, when finals are already on and it’s too late to study properly, people come to plead on the student’s behalf. Uncles, aunts, Dad’s friend or Mom’s friend (hee-hee ;) show up, and once even a grandfather came. “I served with this blockhead’s father, his dad is a great guy, you’re not going to expel his son, are you?”

And where is the father himself? Where is the mother? Why do the closest people frankly not give a damn about the fate of their son or daughter? If the father and mother don’t care, why should other people then run around fussing?

Why not ask once a week how your son is doing, ask him to tell you what’s going on at the university, read through his notes together?

— If the parents don’t care, then there’s nothing I can do to help.

Oh, and also, for those who left this nightmare behind long ago: it applies in every direction. Call your mom and dad, stop by their place for dinner tonight.

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.

Summary of the Seventh Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-12-10T09:34:00+02:00

Unfortunately, I personally missed this meeting. I asked those who were present to write short reports. Below is a report on behalf of Roman Podolyaka.

On December 5, the seventh meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 13:00.

1. Valentina Pikalova. Sites for Learning Python in Game Form

Valentina talked about a number of sites for learning Python (and other languages).

http://codecombat.com/

A colorful RPG in which you control your character by implementing small programs in Python (or JavaScript). The game’s source code is completely open and available on GitHub (https://github.com/codecombat/codecombat). The target audience is beginning programmers and computer science teachers. One of the features is the ability for many users to participate in the game — learn Python together with your friends!

http://www.codewars.com/

Unlike game sites, CodeWars has a fairly austere interface and is intended for undemanding programmers. As with the best establishments, you don’t just get in here — you’ll have to solve a couple of problems to prove (including to yourself) that you are capable and motivated enough to take part in the "code wars."

Besides Python, you can also practice more exotic programming languages here (for example, Clojure or Haskell). You can compare your solutions with those of other programmers to make sure the problem was solved not just correctly (for which CodeWars provides automatic tests), but also in a way that is idiomatic for the given PL.

http://pythonchallenge.com

A puzzle site that is somewhat similar to the "Cryptomarathon from Kaspersky Lab. Here you’ll have to exercise not only in solving problems with Python, but also in understanding the wording of those very problems at the next stage of the puzzle :)

2. Club members’ stories about their self-study progress

Club members briefly talked about taking the Python course on Coursera.

We also discussed several other courses "for the future":

https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partI
https://www.coursera.org/course/algs4partII

A course by Princeton University professor Robert Sedgewick on algorithms and data structures. The homework is done in the Java programming language, but this should not be a problem for those who have never written in it: it is enough to learn the syntax of constructs you already know (classes, methods, loops, conditional statements, arrays). Subjectively, the easiest-to-understand course for those who want to learn 80% of everything one needs to know about algorithms and data structures and not "drown" in Knuth’s books.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/machine-learning

Stanford’s course on machine learning. A high-quality course for those who want to dispel all the myths about ML for themselves and understand "what it is and what you eat it with."

https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS107 (not available on Coursera)

A course on programming paradigms from Stanford University for seasoned and advanced programmers. Recommended after you already have experience writing programs in some PL (especially good if it is C and/or C++). It lets you systematize your knowledge of CS, computer architecture, and various programming paradigms (structured, object-oriented, functional, parallel programming), for which the course considers several PLs at once: C, C++, Python, Scheme, and Assembler.

3. Vladimir Rustinov. Data science: big data, machine learning, and more using the Python language

In the last 15–20 minutes before the classroom had to be vacated, we managed to talk a little about big data, where these data can be stored (distributed file systems — Hadoop FS, Ceph FS), how these data can be processed (Hadoop), why MapReduce is better than MPI, and what can be used to analyze such data (machine learning).

We agreed that at one of the next meetings Vladimir will show a demonstration of using Hadoop to process big data.

Next is information on behalf of Valentina Pikalova.

Online gaming platforms. In addition to the ones already being used.

Valentina Pikalova, vpikalova@hotmail.com

http://codecombat.com/ — a multiplayer RPG game that teaches programming.

Features:

1) it is really a game, not a set of gamified lessons;
2) there is a freely available set of ready-made levels devoted to different programming topics. Levels open as you progress;
3) implementation for Python and Javascript programming;
4) there is a section for the teacher, a guide to completing levels, the ability to create a class and add students to track their progress;
5) all code is openly available, as is the graphics. Posted on Github.
6) participation in the development of the project is welcome in the role of translator, programmer, level developer, tester, etc.;
7) almost full localization into Russian;
8) the site participates in the Hour of Code (code.org);
9) suitable for learning programming starting from grades 4–5. The approximate target audience is grades 4 through 7;
10) hints and video lessons by level are available;
11) as you complete levels, your hero develops and receives additional capabilities in the form of new Python commands;
12) additional points may be awarded for solving on the first try without errors and for optimal code;
13) the ability to organize team games,

Cons:

1) only the first course is available for free; subsequent courses are by subscription at $9.99 per month. The second option is to deploy the project yourself using the open code from Github;
2) the proposed version of Python is quite specific, since the commands are used only for this particular game.
3) commands are offered from the very beginning in the form self.moveDown(), instead of, for example, moveDown()

http://www.codewars.com/ — an analogue of the site checkio.org with a minimalist design.

Unlike the previous site, it assumes learning the language outside the project. It is excellent for honing problem-solving skills. The main goal is solving individual programming problems. Gamification elements: successfully solving problems raises the player’s rating in the system of Kyu and Dans, by analogy with martial arts. Each problem is a Kata; later, more complex problems — Kumite — become available. Built-in editor, test system, the ability to write and debug your own tests, analysis and comparison of different solutions to the same problem. The ability to switch between different programming languages.

The system is good for homework assignments (high school, lower-year university students), learning an additional programming language, and convenient for implementing the idea of pair programming.

http://www.pythonchallenge.com/ — a quest game. Completing levels involves solving puzzles by means of the Python language. There are 33 levels in the game. The difficulty may lie not only in the puzzle itself, but also in the form in which the answer is submitted. Since May 2005, about 2 million people have completed levels here.

https://opensource.com/education/15/7/codewars-codecombat-review — a very good review of the two platforms Codecombat and Codewars by a school teacher, in English

https://newtonew.com/overview/codecombat-teach-code — an article in Russian about the Codecombat project

Valentina’s presentation: Google Drive.

Previous meetings:

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.

VKontakte and Facebook groups: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt, respectively.

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

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

The Book “Reflections on Personal Development” by Ichak Adizes

2015-12-06T12:22:00+02:00

I recently read the book “Reflections on Personal Development” by Ichak Adizes (325 UAH in paper form).

I had already read Adizes before. It was the book “How to Overcome Management Crises,” and I liked it a lot. My expectations for the next Adizes book were high. It turned out that “Reflections on Personal Development” is a collection of notes from his personal blog. That is, for 355 UAH I got a printout and translation of his notes, which I could have read completely free in the original at http://www.adizes.com/insights/

From the outside it may look like I screwed myself, but that’s not the case. I’ll explain now.

There are a lot of smart people in our world. Some of them openly voice and publish their thoughts. There’s no opportunity to talk personally with each of these smart people. But nothing is stopping you from reading books, blog posts, watching videos of these people’s talks, to get acquainted with them and learn their ideas.

What’s the difference between a book and a blog? A book is a stricter format. For example, in “How to Overcome Management Crises,” Adizes lays out his method, but not his personal attitude toward everything under the sun. A blog, on the other hand, is an informal format. In his blog he writes precisely his personal opinion on various questions: about business, about life, about success, and even about the fate of Jews in the Holocaust. I’ll emphasize it once again: the author’s personality, the author’s method, and the author’s personal attitude are three different things.

Besides, publishing blog posts as a separate book is both a chance to make money (the blog can be read for free, while the book has to be bought) and a chance to hook an audience that doesn’t hang out online.

And also, to write a book, you have to sit down and write it. A blog can be kept from anywhere — from home, from trips; you can write a post in 5 minutes, or you can take 3 hours. And then, lo and behold, 20 years later you can put together a book.

As for the book itself, I was interested in getting acquainted with the author’s personal opinion, although of course I expected something close to a method of personal development (because the method in “How to Overcome Management Crises” is set out in detail).

If you’re going to buy books, read the annotation and introduction on the site: is this, by any chance, a reprint from a blog? It may seem like a rare case, but it isn’t. For example: Artemy Lebedev’s blog has been published as a book: “My Blog, O Lord,” notes from the blog of Dmitry Yuryevich Puchkov (Goblin) have repeatedly been published as books: http://www.ozon.ru/person/270747/?group=div_book#detf

As a summary: there is no method of personal development in the book. But if you’re interested in getting to know Adizes better, you can read the book without hesitation. The translation and design of the book are good, but again, all of it can be read for free at the primary source: http://www.adizes.com/insights/

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.

Summary of the Sixth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-12-02T23:07:00+02:00

On November 28, the sixth meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 13:30.

Below is a brief summary of the meeting.

Empire of Code (Volodymyr Obrizan)

Empire of Code is another game where knowing the Python language gives you an advantage. Website address: http://www.empireofcode.com The game was developed by the same developers as the site http://www.checkio.com The game is a clone of Clash of Clans, but with a theme about asteroids and robots. The twist is that here you can improve your base by solving little Python or JavaScript problems, and you can also write algorithms for defending your base and strategies for attacking other people’s bases.

A Walkthrough of One Tricky Little Problem (Volodymyr Obrizan + everyone)

The problem is this: develop a function that validates a password (returns True or False). The conditions are: the password must be longer than 9 characters, have at least one uppercase letter, at least one lowercase letter, and at least one digit. The function prototype is: def func(password). Try to solve it on your own. But there is one more constraint: the real high-wire act is fitting the implementation of this function into 99 bytes.

I can give two pieces of advice:

Write a test program that will check whether the function checks the password correctly. Because if you keep changing the program, trying to fit it into 99 bytes, at some point it may stop working.
Read the article about functional programming. It will give you hints on how to shorten the code substantially. Link to the article: https://docs.python.org/3/howto/functional.html

Data Science: Big Data, Machine Learning, and More Using the Python Language (Vladimir Rustinov)

Vladimir Alekseevich began giving an introduction to the big data technology stack. We didn’t manage to cover much, but the topic isn’t small either. You can’t cover it in half an hour to an hour.

Here is the link to the presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BwMuwA59_aNuWUFrLXJqcnRXemJXUnhaS0RncTdKUVc3SWJB/view?usp=sharing

The topic of big data is appealing because of the wide range of technologies and knowledge required to successfully solve the corresponding tasks.

Previous meetings:

No. 5 11/21/2015 Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 3, No. 4 11/07/2015, 11/14/2015 Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How can 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.

A Q&A site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

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

A New Profession: Student Success Coach

2015-11-26T23:34:00+02:00

Ladies and gentlemen, you are witnessing a great discovery in education. Yesterday I invented a new profession, became the first practicing professional in this profession, and today found my first client. This profession is student success coach. My last name will be written into pedagogy textbooks on the same page as Makarenko. This happens once every hundred years, and yesterday, November 25, 2015, a new cycle began.

I was a student for five years. I studied in graduate school for three years. I have been teaching for ten years. I have met student geniuses, bright, diamond-like ones. But I have met even more mediocre students and complete, outright zeros. I talked to everyone indiscriminately. I took an interest in their successes and failures, asked questions, reasoned.

About 1.5 thousand students study at the Faculty of Computer Engineering and Management of KhNURE. These are young people who are physically and mentally healthy. In terms of numbers, this could be a very large company of professionals that could move mountains.

But why isn’t this happening? Where are the hundreds of successful graduates inside companies, and not some soured jelly in a pot? None of that exists. Every student will find a reason why he, specifically, did not become an indigo student.

After ten years of reflection, I, Volodymyr Obrizan, assert that all your reasons that kept you from becoming a successful student at university are not worth a damn, and I can pick apart any reason, find a counterexample, and offer you a solution.

Five reasons is good, but you had better make the effort and come up with as many as 10 reasons why you are an unsuccessful student. Then I really will have to make an effort to offer you a plan for getting out of the dead end and paving the road to success.

I am already working with one student. If you think I should work with you as well, write to me at volodymyr.obrizan@gmail.com.

For 10 years I was getting smarter inside myself. The pendulum has swung the other way. It is time to shed light through learning and drive the darkness out of your life.

Barbara Sher’s Book “Refuse to Choose!”

2015-11-22T20:30:00+02:00

I recently finished reading Barbara Sher’s “Refuse to Choose!” (150 UAH, electronic version).

For many years I thought about the fact that people who have lots of ideas and interests in their heads are extremely unhappy people. Let’s argue from the opposite: there’s a person who has no ideas in their head, no interests, wants nothing in life. So they’re happy — they achieved nothing, but then they didn’t want anything either. The goal and the result matched. But a person who wants a lot is unhappy, because you can’t manage to do everything.

And I really didn’t think I would ever come across a book where this problem would be examined in detail.

Barbara Sher came up with a term for people like that, who are constantly trying something new, jumping from one activity to another — “scanners.” And in the book she looks at many different types of scanners and suggests methods for how scanners can live a full life.

For example, she recommends writing down every impulse, every idea in a special scanner’s notebook. To do this, you need to set aside a spread in the notebook, write down the idea, and start writing out some facts. Even this initial documentation of an idea can substantially ease a scanner’s suffering. The ideas are written down, your head is clear, and at any moment you can open the notebook, return to an old idea, and work on it some more.

And what about work that doesn’t give you the chance to do absolutely everything? Here the author recommends choosing a profession that would let you do many things at once. For example, a schoolteacher or lecturer — guaranteed three months of vacation a year. And in three months you can get a lot done. Or find an “umbrella job” — one that brings several interests under it at once. For example, consulting work is helping others, communication, professional development, travel, lectures, trainings, and the prospect of writing a book. Besides that, Barbara writes, like, why not make money from your interests and just open your own business?

The main idea of the book is: if several ideas or interests are “tearing you to pieces” at once, then you’re all right. You just need to learn to live with it and benefit from it.

If this is something you run into, I recommend reading it.

Summary of the Fifth Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-11-22T10:14:00+02:00

On November 21, the fifth meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meeting was held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 13:30.

It was a magical, unusual meeting. If at previous meetings several people took an active part — the speakers, the question-askers, the discussers — then at this one we managed to achieve 100% involvement in the process.

We held a programming competition. We split into 8 teams of 2 people. In my life I’ve run a hundred lab sessions. Experience shows that when there are 2 or more people in a team, only one person works — the one at the keyboard — while the others sit nearby, and thanks if they at least watch and follow along. More often they look out the window or look at their phone. So first I asked people how they were progressing with the Coursera course, what experience they had. Those with less experience we put at the keyboards. The remaining people, those with more experience, we sat next to them. Thus, the solution to the problem went from the expert’s head through the speech apparatus and through vibrations in the air into the head of the person
at the keyboard. Then, through contractions of the arm muscles and keystrokes, and then by electromagnetic oscillations, the solution to the problem finally got into the computer. Everyone was busy, everyone was interested.

Sergey and Tatyana

We had to solve 6 little problems:

Find the sum of a series of numbers.
Determine whether three segments are the sides of a triangle.
Determine whether a number is in the Fibonacci sequence.
Determine whether a number is prime.
Find the most expensive car among the products.
Correct the spelling in a text.

The problems and solution can be downloaded at the link: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-test-1

Valentina and Alexander

Everyone liked it a lot. The volume of problems was calculated for about 1.5 hours, and even when the meeting time had run out, nobody was in a hurry to stop solving the problems. We had to forcibly interrupt the competition.

Alexandra and Roman

It wasn’t without a few snags. There was an error in the automatic test for checking the fifth assignment. Because of it, one team’s result didn’t match. As soon as the tests were fixed, the problem was marked as correctly solved.

Final table with the results:

The most problems — 5 — were solved by the schoolboy Kirill and his dad Oleg (in the photo below). An unexpected excellent result! The next generation is growing up!

Kirill and Oleg

It’s also worth noting Roma Podolyaka (in the photo below), who explained to Alexandra in great detail the course of solving two problems and explained the syntax of the Python language in great detail.

Roma

We wrapped up the meeting by going through the two most difficult problems (the fifth and sixth) on the big screen, with explanations and debugging.

Previous meetings:

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 to 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 email newsletter will be the main channel for information about meetings.

VKontakte and Facebook groups: https://vk.com/python.apvt and https://www.facebook.com/groups/python.apvt respectively.

A question-and-answer site about Python and the club: http://bit.ly/python-apvt-qa

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

Summary of the Third and Fourth Meetings of the "Python at APVT" Club

2015-11-20T12:10:00+02:00

On November 7 and 14, the third and fourth meetings of the "Python at APVT" club took place. The meetings were held in room 318 of the APVT department from 11:15 to 12:50. And here is what we managed to discuss over these two meetings.

Volodymyr Miz. iPython Notebook

At the second meeting we had already discussed iPython Notebook, and this time Volodymyr gave a more complete talk with a demonstration of creating a page in iPython Notebook. Once again, the links:

iPython http://ipython.org/
Canopy https://www.enthought.com/products/canopy/ — a product for information analysis based on iPython.

Collective walkthrough of a problem from checkio.org

Thanks to Artur Ziarmand, who volunteered to solve one problem from http://www.checkio.org Everyone actively joined in and suggested to Artur how to solve the problem algorithmically.

Volodymyr Rustinov on translating Coursera into Russian

To start, you need to register on a special site for Coursera translators: https://www.coursera.org/about/translate Then send your login to Rustinov.

ABBYY already has an initiative for translating Coursera into Russian: http://coursera.abbyy-ls.com/ru

Kyrylo Sorudeikin on innovations in education

Kyrylo talked about a method of teaching students (and not only students) that consists of doing projects. As the project is carried out, the student masters all the necessary skills. This method is the opposite of one where the student simply memorizes various facts in sequence.

Volodymyr Obrizan. An elementary web application on the Google App Engine cloud platform

I talked about Google App Engine — a platform in the cloud where you can host web applications in Python. There is a simple lab assignment through which you can learn how to install libraries, write programs, and upload them to the cloud: https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/introduction

Valentyna Pikalova. Overview of online Python courses (not Coursera)

A very detailed overview of many online courses. It’s hard to retell it here, so here is a link to the document that lists all the courses from the talk: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_3YUo2YXAVyUUwPw1mho_zzAqbOpKxNMbUdwerKWK2k Valentyna’s presentation itself was accompanied by a demonstration of various games written while studying these courses.

Volodymyr Obrizan. codingame.com: solving Python problems in game form

http://www.codingame.com — is another site, similar to http://www.checkio.org, where you can solve problems in game form. The site’s distinguishing feature is that the results are visualized here. Each problem is accompanied by a description of the algorithm for solving it.

Roman Podoliaka. Feedback on PyCon Canada

Roma returned from vacation, during which he attended the PyCon conference in Toronto, Canada. Roma talked about the contents of the conference, whose program can be viewed here: https://2015.pycon.ca/en/

Previous meetings:

No. 2 10/31/2015 Summary of the Second Meeting of the "Python at APVT" Club
No. 1 10/24/2015 The first meeting of the "Python at APVT" club took place. Summary

How to 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 informing people 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

Went to See Jobs

2015-11-16T16:03:00+02:00

Went to see the film "Steve Jobs: Divorcee Strikes Back" (2015).

When I was walking into the theater, I got wary: it was 3/4 women. For the first fifteen minutes I couldn’t understand why Jim Carrey was on the screen, and when they were finally going to show Steve Jobs. The women in the theater explained that Jim Carrey was Steve Jobs.

Brief synopsis of the film. Each time, an hour before three presentations (the Mac, NeXT, and the iMac), five people take turns coming into Jobs’s dressing room and start messing with Jobs’s head.

Jobs’s ex broad, demanding money out of nowhere.
Jobs’s illegitimate daughter, at first just tagging along with mommy, and when she’s older — with moral lectures for her father.
Steve Wozniak, with a request to indulge his sense of self-importance.
Apple’s CEO, whose life fell apart after he initiated Jobs’s firing.
The marketing director, who asks Jobs to smooth things over with the previous four.

I kept waiting for Jobs to pick up an assault rifle toward the end and just start shooting everyone. Why come an hour before the most important presentations of his life and get in the way is unclear. Apparently, they’ll show that plotline in the sequel.

There’s nothing else in the film. There’s nothing about Apple, or the Mac, or inventions. The whole plot is Jobs doing his thing, while everyone barges in from the side with nothing to do and gets in the way.

But the women in the theater really liked it. "What a piece of shit Jobs was!" the women said, clicking their tongues.

One important detail. Imagine that a Hollywood director reads your biography, written by some writer, and makes a film based on it. Imagine what that film would be like? What will your close relatives and friends say when they watch this film? Without a doubt, there will be exactly one thing in common between your personality and what’s happening on screen — your name.

This is worth keeping in mind when watching the film "Steve Jobs".

Lame Student Excuses

2015-11-14T22:43:00+02:00

What surprises me most are lame student excuses. Here’s a real conversation with a student who skipped all the labs. I edited it so you can’t tell from the context who it is. Spelling is the author’s own.

— Good evening. i understand that i attended your course poorly and was far from a diligent student, but there were good reasons for that. I worked a lot and couldn’t devote time to uni. I don’t have credit for the course ***, is it possible to resolve this problem?
— Do the labs, then come defend them.
— if i could do labs, i wouldn’t be working at ***, i’d be doing part-time programming. But since I need money, I work there.
— How many hours a week do you work?
— shifts are 10–11 hours for night ones, day ones are 9, i work 5 days a week
— So you still have time to study?
— more like time to sleep than to study
— There are 168 hours in a week. Of those, 55 hours go to work. 56 to proper sleep. You still have 57 hours to do my labs.

After that the conversation moved into the “yeah, and I don’t have those 57 hours either” territory. The course had 5 lab assignments, 4 academic hours each. That is, at most 20 hours were needed to do them. A “smart guy” can do my labs in two days. And there really were people who did the whole course in three days.

Needless to say, this student did nothing.

Unfortunately, KhNURE has rotted so much that, without having credit for my course, without lifting a finger, he received a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.

Needless to say, employers in Kharkiv don’t look at diplomas at all.

Amazon’s Cloud Business Valued by Analysts at $160 Billion

2015-11-13T11:32:00+02:00

Even seasoned investment analysts were taken aback by the latest financial successes of Amazon’s cloud business. "Business Insider UK" reports that Amazon’s cloud services are estimated to have annual revenue of $16 billion in 2017, and the whole business will be worth $160 billion.

If all of this comes true, Amazon Web Services will become the fastest-growing B2B technology business in history.

Amazon will reach $10 billion in revenue in 10 years. For comparison: Google reached that level in 9 years, Facebook in 10 years, Apple in 20 years, Microsoft in 22 years, Oracle in 23 years.

The Book “Scrum and XP from the Trenches: How We Do Scrum” by Henrik Kniberg

2015-11-12T22:23:00+02:00

A week ago I finished reading “Scrum and XP from the Trenches: How We Do Scrum” by Henrik Kniberg. It turned out to be a good follow-up to “Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time” by Jeff Sutherland, which is more about the philosophy of Scrum, while this one is about the practice of implementing it.

The book has had two editions: in 2007 and in 2015. Usually, in later editions, outdated bits are thrown out or rewritten. Here, though, the author decided to stay honest with the reader, so the second edition includes the original 2007 text, supplemented with comments after seven years of experience. It’s very interesting to read when the author first writes one thing, and then in a comment says: “That was wrong.”

Another interesting thing is that even after years of practicing Scrum, the author still writes in some places something like: there are four ways to do this or that ritual, we tried all four, settled on this one, and you should try them yourself and pick the method you like.

The book devotes little time to user stories and planning. For that you need to read a separate book.

Overall, the book is very lively and good. The author writes that he wrote the book over a weekend. Sat down on Saturday morning, got up on Saturday evening. I’m happy with the read; I’ll use it at work as a guide to action.

The book can be downloaded completely free of charge: http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/scrum-xp-from-the-trenches-2 And paper copies, of course, cost money.

KhNURE from a Bird’s-Eye View

2015-11-08T15:03:00+02:00

A beautiful video, and the weather is perfect for filming. I didn’t know these things could fly that high. Shot on 07.11.2015. Somewhere there among the tiny little people is me, too: I was passing by.

The video authors’ channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdrmwTDk_0E9UgnqUtTf71A There’s lots more interesting stuff there about Kharkiv.

Lab Reports

2015-11-06T23:50:00+02:00

Truants come to me when they’re about to be expelled and ask:

“Vladimir Igorevich, what do we need to do to pass your course?”
“Make up and defend all the lab assignments.”
“Can we do them at home and bring you the reports?”
“Yes, of course you can.”

The students turn around and leave happy. They know they’ll ask their groupmates to give them the reports, change the last name there, and the next day come to me to defend them, and who knows, maybe manage to answer enough for a C.

But the truants don’t know one thing: there are no reports for my labs. In class, I specifically tell students not to waste paper and not to make reports. It’s enough for me to see a working program, the source code right from the computer, and I mark it made up. The job is done — the make-up is recorded.

I’ve been doing this since 2007. Interestingly, the students who promised to show up with reports would leave, and I never saw them again. Apparently, they’re still looking for the reports.

What I require from students who do lab assignments on their own is to prove that they did them on their own. And that’s very easy to check in one minute of simple dialogue. A person who did the lab themselves answers briskly. The one who copied it hums and mumbles.

A Podcast with a Programmer from Uber

2015-11-05T08:26:00+02:00

An interesting podcast with Andrey Yasinetsky — a programmer from Uber (in Russian). Very interesting stuff about the present and future of the service.

In San Francisco, Uber is optimized so that a car arrives on average 2.5 minutes after you order it. In our 16-story building, you have to wait longer for the elevator. That is, you call a taxi, and by the time you’ve left the apartment and come down, the car is already waiting outside the building.

Interesting that in the future everything will be optimized so that several passengers who don’t know each other will ride in the same car, simply because they’re going the same way. And there will also be a few packages in the trunk. That saves more.