“Infinity” is a Bad Default Timeout
Many libraries wrap some external communication. Be it a REST-like API, a message queue, a database, a mail server or something else. And therefore you have to have some timeoutContinue reading
Protecting Sensitive Data
If you are building a service that stores sensitive data, your number one concern should be how to protect it. What IS sensitive data? There are some obvious examples, likeContinue reading
A Case For Native Smart Card Support in Browsers
A smart card is a device that holds a private key securely without letting it out of its storage. The chip on your credit card is a “smart card” (yup,Continue reading
Computer Science Concepts That Non-Technical People Should Know
Sometimes it happens that people speak different languages. Even when speaking the same language. People have their own professional specifics. Biologist may see the world as the way a cellContinue reading
Why I Chose to Be a Government Advisor
A year and a half ago I agreed to become advisor in the cabinet of the deputy primer minister of my country (Bulgaria). It might have looked like a bizarreContinue reading
Forget ISO-8859-1
UTF-8 was first presented in 1993. One would assume that 24 years is enough to time for it to become ubiquitous, especially given that the Internet is global. ASCII doesn’tContinue reading
Anemic Objects Are OK
I thought for a while that object-oriented purism has died off. But it hasn’t – every now and then there’s an article that tries to tell us how evil settersContinue reading
Amend Your Contract To Allow For Side Projects
The other day Joel Spolsky blogged a wonderful overview of the copyright issues with software companies in terms of its employees. The bottom line is: most companies have an explicitContinue reading
Progress in Electronic Governance [talk]
I’ve been an advisor to the depury prime minister of Bulgaria for the past year and a half. And on this year’s OpenFest conference I tried to report on whatContinue reading
Domain Fallback Mechanism In Apps
As a consequence of the Dyn attack many major websites were down, including twitter – the browsers could not resolve an IP address of the servers because the authoritative nameContinue reading