ILJA

I would like to share my thoughts on code of conduct of Uber. I wanted to find interesting code of ethics, ethics policy or code of conduct and, sincerely, I struggled for a bit. As these papers are usually official and are legal documents, most of them seemed a little bit boring for me. They also felt very similar to each other even among IT companies. The most interesting which I could find was Ubers' Business conduct guide from November 2019. Its online version can be found here: https://s23.q4cdn.com/407969754/files/doc_governance/2019/Uber-COBC-2019-English.pdf There are several points which I noticed right away in this document: Visual design - this documents clearly had quite some time spent on it by designers. I also feel that quite a lot of resources were spent on it from both legal and design departments. Separation on small parts - pages have more pictures and less text in them than in most other documents that I found. Each page is not overflowed with text, so it feels ...

Today I would like to give my opinion about a wiki article written by my fellow students about no-code and low-code programming. The article can be found under this link: https://wiki.itcollege.ee/index.php/Low-code_ja_no-code_programmeerimine To start, I would like to briefly tell why I chose this article to give my assessment. Although I have been working in IT for some time, I have never heard about these concepts and their use. I even mistakenly thought that low-code programming had something to do with low level programming. So it was very interesting and educative for me to read about these topics. What I liked in a introduction part, is the fact that in this article probable Estonian names for these concepts were given. In my opinion it is a nice habit for native speakers to have local naming for words as an alternative to English terms, this is why it could actually be a good idea to actually post this article on Wikipedia, so that these terms could be populated before these co...

I would like to share about one supporting solution in Microsoft Windows, which I started to use recently. The solution itself is pretty simple and many know about it. On the other hand it turned out that actually there are also so many people who do not know about it and discovering it could greatly help them. It is called a copy clipboard. The idea is very simple - when one wants needs to copy a data (text, pictures) from one place to another they usually select the data which you want to copy then paste it. And the process is repeated several times until all data is copied. Taking use of clipboard solves this problem - you can select any amount data you want to copy and then paste it accordingly. This could be especially needed when you have only one monitor or use a laptop as in this case switching between apps might be too much and separating a screen vertically might not be very convenient. But this supporting solution also has one negative point - it stores everything and user h...

This time I would like to provide an example of one IT project and how choosing wrong project management type can make everything overcomplicated. The example which I am going to provide took place in production factory where I was responsible for logistics. The story was simple - factory had its own applications developed by its software developers long time ago for their needs. However, there were several problems - the application was written using outdated technologies and there was only one software developer left who could maintain those programs. Overall company decided they should not have their own software and switch to some standard ERP solution. As a factory had its project managers and widely followed waterfall approach, they decided to continue using that approach on this project as well. There was no need to make a lot of development per se, as the company decided to use one of standard ERP solutions, mostly some modifications which seemed simple enough. The idea was t...

After reading an article "How to become a hacker" [1], I had some thinking and want to share some thoughts about it and bring up some points I totally or partly agree and disagree (please note that hacker here is not the same as security hacker). Generally I really liked an article to widen an understanding of software development culture. On the other hand I would not advice to look at this article as some sort of dogma or laws, which have to followed by every software developer. Here are some points I found interesting to discuss after reading an article: In "Learn how to program" it was a surprise for me that discussion about specific programming languages was so huge. Eventually this discussion led to a good conclusion, that a hacker should have a variety of programming languages in his disposal, which I totally agree. On the other hand I do not think this has to be some predefined set of languages - this could be specific for everyone. Also although the article...

Today I will write about managers in IT industry and I would like to provide two examples. I thought that I could write about some famous real manager, but it would require to investigate a lot of time in it and still I will be speculating, as I will make my suggestions based on others opinion (which is not always fair). I also felt that my knowledge about famous managers is too week to provide any good information. So when I was thinking how to provide an example of problems in management in IT and two different management styles, I came to an idea that I can provide a good example actually based on a movie. This way I will not mislead about a real person and anyone can actually see a movie and see the problems in IT management. The movie I will be talkin about is called "The intern". Two types of managers[1] So in this movie we have two managers: Jules Ostin - a young and successful start-up owner. She is a  leader as a manager and tries to develop a company and bring every...

There are a lot of things which designate a professional in software development and IT in general. But there is one quality which in my humble opinion is very significant and by my personal observation is very common among professionals (and not only in IT) and beginners/amateurs often lack this quality and it is a systematic approach.  Systematic approach in different fields: Bug-fixing - craftsman tries to fix the bug itself and they are usually limited in their approach and in the ways they solves the problem. Professional fixes the issue. They have more knowledge about the reasons why bug can appear. Tools - craftsman tries to use the tools he is good with. When talking about IT, they usually do not like using new languages or technologies. Professional on the other hand often does not have such limit. They are capable of switching tools, because they understand the importance of using the correct tool for a correct situation. Writing code - craftsman writes code for a task an...

When talking about copyleft, many people are misleading to its main principle. In my humble opinion English language is partly responsible for that - each time you have to explain a person about a free license, you have to specify that you are talking about free as in freedom, but not free as having no charge. To make things even worse the term copyleft was made. It might seem that compared to "copyright" a person who choses this type of license loses some of his rights as an author, but this is not true at all. So two disclaimers - when talking about copyleft the word free software should be read as free of limitations not free of charge and copyleft license remains all the major rights for the author, despite having word "left" instead of "right" in its name. World's biggest lie[1] So what was copyleft designed for? The main reason for creating it was to protect authors who wanted their software to be used and widened by the community from corporatio...

This time I will share my opinion on what I think about a copyright advised changes proposed in a book The Case for Copyright Reform [1]. There are two thing I will bring up - first is my general opinion about software reform and second is what in my opinion has changed since the article release. My opinion To make things short - I am a total supporter for a copyright reform. I am 90-100% agree with every word authors wrote. Copyrighting might indeed be an obstacle for a personal privacy and one of fundamental rights - freedom of speech. Here is an example of how absurd copyright laws can be. On the 15th of February 2013, a meteorite fell in Chelyabinsk. Most of video footages were taken by dashcams. People started sharing those videos and to much surprise videos were blocked in Germany because of the copyrights [2]. Since most of drivers were listening to a radio, there was some song playing, but German rights did not allow using it without authors permission. On the other hand the mu...

 This is my personal example of my observation of Virginia Shea's 10 rules in action. I am going to talk about examples in gaming/streaming industry. Currently I am not a gamer anymore, but several years ago I was actively playing videogames as well as watching streams. The games I was playing included League of Legends, Hearthstone, Call of Duty, CS and some more and I watched gamers streaming them. Watching game streams led me to a conclusion, that there are basically two main behaviors of streamers - either they are polite and respectful or totally unbearable from a social perspective. It was hard to find somebody somewhere in the middle. When I found about Virginia Shea's 10 rules for netiquette, I noticed that first ones generally follow all the 10 rules, whereas second  often break all of them - they swear, ignore other players privacy and bring negative to game. But I will focus on one rule and try to explain how those who follow the netiquette and those who don't ...

Today's blog is going to be about new media and its influence on a traditional media. The supreme goal would have been to find the most positive and the most negative influence of new social media on a traditional one, but I sincerely think this is a bit too hard. I think many people involved in marketing and students studying it, wrote hundreds of pages trying to answer this question. So to make life easier for myself, I am just going to simply provide two examples - one with negative and one with positive influence. As a simple remainder here are some examples of traditional media - television advertisements, radio advertising, print advertising, direct mail advertisements, billboards and off-site signs, cold calling, door-to-door sales, banner ads and so on. As for new media, it includes Search engine optimization, pay-per-click advertising, content marketing, social media, email marketing and some others [1]. Is traditional media a rudiment? [2] Positive influence New media is ...

Today I will talk about two technologies. One of them became significantly overtaken by the internet and the other gaining advantage from it.  Fax- technology widely replaced by the internet I think it is really impossible to find a technology, which became totally vanished by an internet. But you can find technologies, which suffered the most from it. Their whole existence was significant at some point, but in case of several technologies, there was a chance, that internet could easily replace them. One of those is fax - technology which could be totally replaced by the internet. Surely, fax is still widely used, but its popularity is falling, especially compared to the e-mailing system. Fax meme [1] Interestingly enough, seeming quite modern, fax main principle comes from the 19th century. Invented back in 1843 by Alexander Bain, the "Electric Printing Telegraph" was the world's first faxing device [2]. But if we consider what we nowadays call a fax - it is a actually u...

This blog will be about three IT technologies of different eras and with different level of success. First, being a total disaster from the mid 1990's, second a total success from the 2000's and the last technology that is a new technology from the late 2010's and is not yet either a failure or a success, but I personally am very exited about it and would love to see it becoming something big. 1990's From this era, I would like to mention a technology, which was a big failure. It is called Microsoft Bob released in 1995. Microsoft BOB is a Windows 3.1 graphical shell intended for novice users[1]. Bob was an example of “social interface” concepts. Basically, instead of typical desktop interface, a user would have a house with different rooms, where all the desktop applications are stored and visualized - a calendar on a table would show current date and a clock on a wall would show current time. It also had a helper, who gave advice and walked through the steps of runnin...