Yesterday I gave a talk that went through all the aspects of using messages queues. I’ve previously written that “you probably don’t need a message queue” – now the conclusion is a bit more nuanced, but I still stand by the simplicity argument. The talk goes through the various benefits and use cases of using […]
Most system have some sort of event logs – i.e. what has happened in the system and who did it. And sometimes it has a dual existence – once as an “audit log”, and once as event log, which is used to replay what has happened. These are actually two separate concepts: the audit log […]
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, terminology is ambiguous – the card and the chip are interchangeably called “smart card”). There are smaller USB-pluggable hardware readers that only hold the chip […]
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 cell work, cosmologist may see relationships between people as attraction between planets. And as with languages different professional experiences give you a useful way of conceptualizing […]
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 bizarre career move, given that at the time I was a well positioned and well paid contractor (software engineer), working with modern technologies (Scala, Riak, AWS) […]
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’t even cover French letters, not to mention Cyrillic or Devanagari (the Hindi script). That’s why ASCII was replaced by ISO-8859-1, which kind of covers most […]
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 setters and getters are, how bad (Java) annotations are, and how horrible and anti-object-oriented the anemic data model is (when functionality-only services act upon data-only objects) […]
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 explicit clause in their contracts which states that all intellectual property created by a developer is owned by the employer. This is needed, because the default […]
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 what we’ve achieved. It is not that much and there are no visible results, which is a bit disappointing, but we (a small motivated team) believe […]
Yesterday Dyn, a DNS-provider, went down after a massive DDoS. That led to many popular websites being inaccessible, including twitter, LinkedIn, eBay and others. The internet seemed to be “crawling on its knees”. We’ll probably read an interesting post-mortem from Dyn, but why did that happen? First, DDoS capacity is increasing, using insecure and infected […]
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