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 […]
I’ll begin this post with a rant about the state of scientific publishing, then review the technology “disruption” landscape and offer a partial improvement that I developed (source). Scientific publishing is quite important – all of science is based on previously confirmed “science”, so knowing what the rest of the scientific community has done or […]
“The decline of Stackoverflow” is now trending on reddit, and I started this post as a comment in the thread, but it got too long. I’m in the 0.01% (which means rank #34) but I haven’t contributed almost anything in the past 4 years. Why I stopped is maybe part of the explanation why “the […]
When we are building web applications these days, it is considered a best practice to expose all our functionality as a RESTful API and then consume it ourselves. This usually goes with a rich front-end using heavy javascript, e.g. Angular/Ember/Backbone/React. But a heavy front-end doesn’t seem like a good default – applications that require the […]
You’ve probably heard about “the right to be forgotten” according to which Google has to delete search results about you, if you ask them to. According to a new General Data Protection Regulation of the EU, the right to be forgotten means that a data subject (user) can request the deletion of his data from […]
I don’t like Scala. And I think it has some bad and very ugly aspects that make it a poor choice for mainstream development. But recently I still introduced it in our project. Not only that, but the team has no experience with Scala. And I’ll try to explain why that is not a bad […]
Biometric identification is getting more common – borders, phones, doors. But I argue that it is not by itself a good approach. I tried to explain this in a short talk, and here are the slides Biometric features can’t be changed, can’t be revoked – they are there forever. If someone gets hold of them […]
In the past year I’ve taken the position of an adviser in the cabinet of a deputy prime minister and as a result of that I had the option to draft legislation. I’ve been doing that with a colleague, both with strong technical background, and it turned out we are not bad at it. Most […]
There are many ways to work with git. The workflows vary depending on the size of the team, organization, and on the way of working – is it distributed, is it sprint-based, is it a company, or an open-source project, where a maintainer approves pull requests. You can use vanilla-git, you can use GitHub, BitBucket, […]
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