ILJA

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 However, there were several problems - the application was written using outdated technologies and there was only one software developer left who could maintain those programs.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 ...