Bozho's tech blog

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, […]

After working for a year on the matter, I did a presentation on a small conference about the options for architecture of e-government solutions. A 40 minute talk could not cover everything, and it is presented in the context of Bulgaria (hence 2 graphs with cyrillic script in the slides), so I hope it’s useful […]

“Identity” is a set of features that allow unique identification of a person and distinguishing them from others. That sounds simple enough, but it turns out to have a lot of implications in the modern, connected, global world. Identity today is government managed. You are nobody if a government hasn’t confirmed that you are indeed […]