Old on Adam Koszek - Personal Website

Solution to an ugly cookie law

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 04 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

European Union has a law that addressed privacy issues of the Internet users. The law regulates a technology called HTTP Cookies, which is a clunky but necessary way of storing state on user’s computer. There’s quite a bit of a background in here, and I don’t want to diverge the discussion to technical topics too much. To make it short: license plate on your car can be used for both identifying you in front of the protected gate, making sure your car is operational and registered. Each time you come back to the gate, and either a camera or a security guest sees your license plate, you’re permitted to go in. But it can also be used to follow you on a highway and learn where you live. HTTP cookie is that same for the Internet.

Don't Kid Yourself About Software Bootcamps

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Don’t kid yourself about bootcamps. These intensive trainings last couple of weeks and promise marvels. It’s not a good way to become a software developer. It’s worthwhile experience and a good investment if you want to start, but assuming you can become a “software engineer” or even “software developer” during software bootcamp may end up in a surprise. I write this because I met enough people discouraged by software bootcamps, since they often end up disappointed and drop software work whatsoever. This is bad, so below you have some suggestions about bootcamps.

To actually ship software, add constraints

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When you build your software, you don’t have the usual constraints which you have at work: you don’t have a deadline, you don’t have specs, you don’t have customers asking for features, no agile plan with stories, sprints, points and tasks. You’re your own boss. You can do whatever you want. For example: you can write your project in a niche programming language maybe 500 people in the world use. And this is why programming is great.

Hackers and Cooks: how building software really feels like

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 26 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

After a busy day of debugging you went grocery shopping. After starying for eight hours straighs into the iTerm, being in the avocado section felt like a breeze. And then you enter home.

Cooks

You enter the kitchen and it’s a mess. You’re scared of putting your bags full of fresh, organic produce. Germs are everywhere, after all, and you know it. The tabletop is sticky. Hard to be surprised–you can’t really recall when it was last cleaned. Or who did it. For sure it wasn’t you. Not since you started living here.

Great Movies About Design

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Design is an overloaded word, but we all get it when we see or experience it. For software design and achieving usability the basics of design are indespensible. Understanding why things are placed the certain way and have certain color is important.

Reading about it is great, and I highly encourage you to buy Non-Designers Design Book, but if you prefer to watch something in the moments of relative downtime, below is the list of movies about design.

Which Open Source Projects Should You Contribute To

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t remember which audiobook I heard it from, but the author stated we all seek and are directed by four things: status, power, money, and popularity. Working on software is no different: people don’t spend their private time in front of the computer hacking code without a reason.

You must like to get critique from people who read your code, since it improves your skills. After you bring changes and the people like them, it brings all of your “ratios” higher too. Another example is when your projects reach certain level on maturity and you get recognized by other hackers (through GitHub stars) when they like the program you wrote or the tool you’ve hacked. Personally I get a spike of motivation that way. It’s one of the things that keeps me going with my Open Source.

15 Tips on Staying Productive Offline as a Software Engineer

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 22 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Software engineer offline you can be more productive. I argue that being offline actually helps a lot, especially with focus. You may in theory waste your time becuase you’ll reimplement a function, or done things suboptimally, but it’s not that much of a deal. Below I tell you how to give it a try, and I walk you through the tools I use. Why staying offline may help?

No distractions

When you flip ‘Wi-Fi’ off, Hangouts, Slack, HipChat, e-mail notifications, push notifications, iMessage and your other enemies stop to work. Do it regularly and you’ll see its benefits.

What it's like to write software in the hardware industry

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 13 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Joel Spolsky stated that as a software engineer one can have a great workspace experience in the software company. When I first read it, I worked for the hardware company, in fact, and it took me a while to understand what he meant. Let’s say he was 50% right.

What I share with you here is my experience is backed by one year of internship at Xilinx in 2011, followed by three year full-time 2012–2015. I worked for a hardware/software team writing low-level drivers to the OS used for stress-testing of silicon. Such an OS runs on a silicon prototype, and tries to beat your CPU and I/O subsystem to death. This all is done in hope silicon issues will get exposed before the chip hits the fab, which means huge money savings.

Treat Continuous Integration as your virtual user

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 07 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Ninety five percent of professional software engineers use Jenkins as a Continuous Integration. The rest are consumers of Travis-Ci, Circle CI and many other hosted CI platforms. None of these platforms are opinionated. They are just a little smarter replacements of cron, allowing you to simply throw many commands into the flow to build your software. We use these tools in a dump way, I argue, and it wastes the time of customers of our software.

Single Command Principle

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 29 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You should follow the Single Command Principle of software deployment. A customer takes your software from the repository, looks at the README file and sees a single command. A main entrance to the whole “software”. Stuff is built and starts to just work in five minutes. This saves time and effort.

This command should either run your software with safe defaults, most common configuration or something that shows that the run is successful.

SSH VPN on OSX with SSHuttle in 3 minutes

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 09 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

You will learn how to setup SSH VPN with sshuttle quickly here. SSH VPN people say is “poor man’s” VPN, but I view it as a great tool, since you can’t always spin OpenVPN easily. If you have the SSH keys installed on the server, there’s no need for any other configuration. No certificates, no drama. I’m using OSX for the purposes of this article.

(Photo by Rishabh Varshney via Unsplash)

How software engineer should invest in career growth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 31 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post is for people who look for ways to spend money on personal growth, as a software engineer. Previously I covered how much one should spend to growth. Here let’s talk about the best resources you can invest in.

You should seek for ways of saving your money and after-tax earnings.
Before you apply any of the suggestions, remember to ask your school or employer about them. They have a way to bring resources to you, because funds for training and growth are specially allocated in big institutions. Let’s start from the cheapest to the most expensive.

Are you a good Open Source contributor?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Most likely you aren’t a good Open Source contributor. Most people aren’t. Let’s look at it a bit closer. Below you’ll find a scale which will give you the sense of how the community of Open Source is structured. Where do you fall in it?

By community you can understand several things, but to simplify things: think of GitHub. Don’t worry too much GitHub is an actual company. In your head Git and GitHub are synonyms of the Open Source already, because they have the biggest number of software repositories, the biggest number of users, and they provide everything that a modern software project needs. Their community is the most vibrant, and they host the most important OSS projects.

Movies every software engineer should watch

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This is a live list of movies I enjoyed. They assist me till now. I often think of scenes from some of these titles. They spark my imagination, and bring some smile.

Triumph of the Nerds

Very interesting documentary on Silicon Valley history.

Something Ventured

Silicon Valley is made out of a mix of investors and engineers, and this movie shows this real tight collaboration between the two. It has some computer legends, and I can’t speak highly enough about it.

How to use Ansible Vault with LastPass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 05 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

There are several competitors for password managers. I use LastPass, because it has an Open Source command line client. This is an officially supported tool, maintained by the LastPass itself. I haven’t audited the code; I have just looked at several .c files, and it seamed decent. Code has been around since 2014, so in the last three years I suspect both good and bad guys had a chance to find issues.

What's the most expensive stage of software engineering?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

(Photo by Yatesndu Agus Wismoyo via Unsplash)

Imagine we’re starting a software project together this year. It will run in production, and serve a large amount of live customer traffic. Its lifespan may look like this:

If this cycle of maintenance is long enough, it can overweight the cost of all previous stages. I do have projects which are considered “finished”: all the features are there, and as much as you can’t make a hammer any better, neither can I any of these projects. But for the most part, the software story is a little different: it’ll always be a recipe, but the kitchen, ingredients, pans or people will change over time. These adjustments cost money.

Making pull requests that merge

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 18 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The role of the software architect is to reject bad code, push back on unnecessary features and prevent the project from accumulating cruft. I use the term “software architect” here to match the professional environment, but it can apply to any independent software developer, including Open Source software engineers writing projects they love and talk about. When you make a change to the software source code, you will need to pass a judgement of a software architect. To bring your code into the project upstream, there are two angles you’ll be evaluated from: technical and social.

Learn programming: self study guide

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The advice you will get here is a true and honest take on how I believe you should start programming computers, and how you can self-educate yourself in a programming craft. I know how to do it because I went through this process by myself and I know exactly where the pain points are. I don’t talk about any specific books, as other people have done it already. I only talk about methodology and mental side of studying.

How much software engineer should invest in career growth

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 06 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Software engineers can start generating income pretty early on. You don’t need permission from anyone, no certificates, no paperwork, no examination. If you have your debts paid off, this is the moment when you should think of yourself as a single-person company. Why? It’s not because I want you to go and become a freelancer and be on your own, but becuase it’s easier to understand how to make decent financial decisions that way. Let’s talk about this. For the purposes of our discussion let’s assume that if your name is David Roberts, the name of your company is “David Roberts LLC”. Write it down, if it helps you: “David Roberts, CEO of David Roberts LLC”. You’re in a company mindset now. We can understand what it really means now.

Why you should start programming on UNIX

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

It’s simpler than anything else around.

I know. It’s counterintuitive. All the nice tools and integrated environments for writing code looks slick. You may even see other people using them in the train to work.

You look over their shoulder and it doesn’t look that hard.

But it is.

So stay with me hear and listen. The idea might be counterintuitive, but if you go with it, I think you’ll learn programming faster and you’ll be a better engineer at the end, since you’ll do more things by yourself.

The best OSX file manager

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 18 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Even if you don’t like Windows, some tools there are great. One of them is WinAmp, probably the best audio player around. (do you know a replacement for OSX? Let me know!)

Another is Total Commander–the 2 pane file commander. Total Commander can do anything you can think of for file management. Its UI was like Norton Commander’s: the “blue background” file manager for DOS.

You miss a lot if you don’t use these tools, since they’re huge time savers. There isn’t a similar functionality built in the OSX, so you’ll have to do your homework. You can use Finder, of course, and I do like Finder and its preview feature. Also the the embedded image editor is very useful. However for shuffling files Finder is terrible. To move one file from one directory to another, you must open two windows. Or you must open tabs. Selecting files is terrible. I can’t count how many times I’ve selected 20 images and they all were accidently opened. Or you select many files and want to move them to the directory on the very bottom of the current screen. Good luck with that. For file-system management, Finder sucks. You must admit it.

Reading 101 for software engineers

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I would argue that without reading, you’re wasting a lot of time. “Good people borrow, and great steal”. I know few software engineers, who don’t read and yet still write amazing software. But there are very few of them. I bet you’re not one of them, actually. And most of their time, they do waste some time too. Very few of us solve unique problems. You’re probably not the lucky guy either.

That's why you haven't accomplished enough in 2016

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

When you make a plan to accomplish goals, most of the time you don’t do it very well. Maybe it’s the book you wanted to read, the podcasts you wanted to listen, or maybe finally wrapping up the pet project of yours.

First of all typically you have too many goals. Another problem is that they’re not very precise. Not very measurable. You don’t know how to even start. You never start and thus you fail. Maybe even you’re slightly depressed or upset, since not finishing what you’ve plan kind of sucks.

Building an Open Source iOS app: lessons learned

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Below you can find an abstract and materials for the talk I gave at the Silicon Valley Mobile Developers and Designers Meetup at Hacker Dojo, Santa Clara, Dec 12th, 2016.

Slides

Slideshare slides.

Building an Open Source iOS app: lessons learned from Wojciech Koszek

For easy download, go to GitHub link below.

Abstract

In this talk I’m going to talk about lessons learned from building Sensorama https://www.sensorama.org, an Open Source sensor platform for data science. The main theme of the talk will be Open Source: what is great about it, what is bad and how you must become a part of the Open Source community to really move quickly and benefit from it. For this project, I did both the code and the design, so you’ll have a chance to see how solo-developer deals with time/feature constraints, which tools I’ve used and what my approach towards development in this mode is. In other words: I’ll tell you what I did to stay sane. If the iOS development were a walk in a dark city park, this talk may turn out to be your flashlight. If you like it, star it at GitHub: https://github.com/wkoszek/sensorama-ios

Failure of my one post per week goal

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I started to appreciate bloggers and YouTubers this year. We’ve got many, many people pushing great content into the Internet for free, and let me tell you: I’m not one of them.

After understanding that writing on a regular basis is important, I’ve tried to do one blog a week.

One blog a week. Really. This isn’t that much if you think about it. I believed that it’d be around 30 minutes of writing and maybe several more on proofreading and publishing, but it’s official – I’ve failed.

Dealing with large jobs on Travis-CI

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

I’m releasing all my projects through continuous integration, so I end up working with Travis-CI a lot. Travis provides a corresponding diagnostic page for each project I have linked to it from GitHub. For example one of my GitHub projects is here and its Travis-CI subpage would be here. If you look at the link format, you’ll understand what I mean. In there you can see what the output of your job was. Most of the jobs are fairly simple and finish within short period of time. For these jobs debugging the build steps is easy: just look at the console output and see what’s wrong. It’s what I do 95% of time. Below I give hints on how to handle 5% of other cases.

What I learned from connecting 60 projects to CI system

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Several months ago I started to wonder what makes me check out software sitting at GitHub and try it out. Some projects I was more willing to work with, and some I simply skipped without thinking about it much. It seemed like a habit which I’ve developed over the years. But why do I have this feeling of carelessly ignoring some projects over another?

The characteristics of projects I’m drawn into are pretty simple: good, clear documentation, good top-level directory structure, presence of some “dotfiles” and … green badge, signalizing Continuous Integration (CI) system is actually verifying this software is at least building fine.

What Docker really is

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

It felt strange when Docker first came out, since I couldn’t really understand what it is. It is an interesting feeling when people market and brand a new technology in a way which makes it obscure and hard to understand. So below you have my explanation of Docker, the way I would like to see it couple of months ago.

Docker in one paragraph

Docker is a manager for isolated buckets of software called containers. I gives you a way to say: “My software is based on Ubuntu; it must have these 4 packages installed, and these 5 commands must be executed to make it run continually”. These steps will be done at “build” time, during which your ~1GB image will be created. From this image containers with your software can be started on many OSes.

Use as few tools as possible

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Choosing a technology stack is an essential part of building and engineering your software product. This is the matter you’ll be stuck in forever. Unless you build a 2-line program it’s important to make good decisions at this stage.

I see a lot of “technical fashion” in the computer world. People come up with new and different solutions to the same problems, depending on things like programming language or a method itself. And then they start encompassing their new creations into new products. Thus we see new wave of computer languages, tools and transpilers which essentially do the same, but in a different way.

How to ask questions on Stack Overflow?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This year I want to contribute to Stack Overflow. I’ve been using this site for years, but have never answered any questions, rated answers or posted replies. I want to change this.

I went ahead and made myself several tags with topics I’m good at. And as a break from work, I try to answer questions. There is a lot of good questions, but most of them are bad. People make it hard to help themselves. They either give a lot of data, but don’t formulate the problem, or state the problem, but give no information about their setup, environment and conditions. Stack Overflow is no different than any other technical forum. Mailing lists and GitHub Issues are another examples. But you must communicate clearly to really benefit from them.

Don't document. Automate!

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 11 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When I go to an article or a GitHub page it sometimes amazes me how good stuff people produce. I’m building an sensor platform recently, and a lot of problems I solve by using software others wrote and made it free. This is great. But there’s one pattern which I need to criticize: people write way to much.

What do I mean by that?

The normal flow of getting software to work is typing a series of steps. For example it may require typing 10 commands in the command line. And these commands for ninety five percent of people will likely be the same. For the rest 10% they’ll be slightly customized, but not much. Nothing that couldn’t be achieved with 10-line shell script consuming 1-2 parameters.

Dropbox on iOS is disappointing

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Dropbox popularized the idea of cloud storage. They were the first widely used product which normal people like my mother could understand. On OSX Dropbox is integrated very well with the OS. In fact, you can see Dropbox as a folder and basically forget that the files which you save locally will be transmitted on the server in the background.

On a daily basis I use Google Drive, but when I got an iPad, I thought it’d be good to keep Dropbox as my iPad backing store, so that I don’t get distracted with my normal stuff. I intended to keep PDFs, books and other documents in Dropbox so that I could use my iPad for productive work.

I've got an iPad Pro yesterday

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When iPad Pro came out, I got really excited. The price was fairly high, but this model seemed to include all features I always wanted from a tablet.

My priorities when making a tablet purchase:

big, high resolution screen. Should mean no more eyeballing of A4/American Letter size documents on small screen with scaled down fonts; also more trees saved on printing down things I’d only read once.
decent pencil for drawing
a lot of memory for podcasts, trainings and audiobooks

I got iPad Pro. It is my first tablet ever. Up until this point I felt like buying a tablet would be a total waste of money, since the features from the list are pretty essential for my usual workflow.

How to store SSH passphrases in LastPass

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 07 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Passwords are a terrible authentication mechanism. Even though this mechanism exists in computer systems for years, frankly there aren’t too many solutions to address the password problem. If you’ve dealt with more than three different APIs I bet you must have committed confidential data to GitHub at least once. SSH with its keys isn’t any better, and is used in more critical places.

Below I attempt to address the SSH passphrase problem. My setup is based on LastPass. LastPass stores a binary bundle with all your passwords in the cloud. Bundle is fetched on your machine, and you decrypt it with a master password. During decrypting phone-based 2-factor authentication is used for increased security. If your master password is weak, you’re baked. Upon decryption you have an access to all your passwords, including SSH passphrases. The script automates the management of ssh-agent and key adding.

How I use transparency during development

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 02 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The 13” MacBook Air isn’t a perfect development environment, yet I still need to do some work done outside of the house. I’ve been experimenting around and that’s what I’ve came up with:

In the background you have a Web browser with middleman-livereload. Each time I make a small source code change in Vim and save a file, the live-reload updates the site in the background. We could call it “real-time”. The advantage of this method is that you can use it without any special configuration: default Terminal in MacOSX or Xterm client being able to display transparency will work. And you must have some environment for web development where Livereload works. Transparency I have isn’t shown percentage-wise, but it’s set to around ⅓:

Quiz: portability of “find” command

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 29 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

On MacOSX:

wk:/w/repos/dockerfiles&> find wkoszek -type d -depth 1
wkoszek/base
wkoszek/nginx

On Linux you get:

find: warning: you have specified the -depth option after a non-option
argument -type, but options are not positional (-depth affects tests
specified before it as well as those specified after it). Please specify
options before other arguments.

Hint: compare manual pages of both commands.

Quiz: do you know offhand what’s the correct fix?

My GitHub Wishlist: Consolidate Request

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

If you develop any sort of software nowadays sooner or later you’ll end up on GitHub. On one side a business, on the other: great part of the Open Source world. I’d claim that GitHub was an integral part of the distributed software development revolution. For me, GitHub is the first source of contact if I want to see who already wrote software bits I need for my next project.

Git and GitHub dominate today, since they’re basically so much better than anything else. When I started to work on software, most of the projects used CVS or Subversion, and while they had some pros (an ability to fetch only some project’s directories) the cons were many. Nowadays everybody is migrating to Git or Mercurial, and old services such as SourceForge or Google Code are becoming more of a ghost sites (Google de-featured Google Code already).

Computer History from Giants Themselves

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I was an idol driven kid and I’ve always had somebody I admired when growing up. From the earliest recollections I could trace back in my memory the very first person was probably my grandfather, the master tailor. And through him I got to know MacGyver. I was allowed to watch MacGyver, since my grandfather believed it would teach me creativity and also because I loved pocket knifes. Till this day each time you say something bad about MacGyver, you’ll have an enemy in me, since it was such an integral part of my growing up and becoming creative. Same applies to John Hannibal Smith and probably Dr Emmet Brown. The older I got, the more my idols shifted from the fictional characters to real-world people, and this stayed with me till my adult life.

How to use nginx on Travis (or other) CI system

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 01 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Travis Ci is one of the most essential tools for my projects, since it takes a burden of maintaining Jenkins away of me. I try to use Travis automation for every boring activity, and having it run after each source code change to do some basic tests saves me a lot of time.

Making things work in Travis is typically straightforward, but there are cases where a special configuration needs to be applied, since the new Travis is based on the container-based architecture. This poses some requirements: no root access and no sudo functionality for your setup scripts. Some software doesn’t like that.

Subtle difference between FreeBSD, MacOSX and Linux printf

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I’m working on polishing my mini_printf implementation and making a final, verified and documented code release, and the thing I made work in the past and something that stopped working when I moved to MacOSX was a randomized stress-test.

https://github.com/wkoszek/mini_printf

It’s pretty neat: it uses its own PRNG generator to achieve repeatability and uses its numbers to construct randomized format strings which are then played against OSes printf() and my mini_printf() API. Both versions are later compared. I exposed a lot of bugs in mini_printf that way, of which all have been fixed.

Top 3 bugs I make in shell scripts

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 12 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Most people involved in software rarely talk about bugs. Perhaps it’s because a lot of software designers are striving for perfection, and aren’t willing to talk about the times when the machine conquered them. We all create software bugs, so let’s break the silence. Below are my top three bugs which occur while writing shell scripts.

Order of redirection

Let’s take an example script which generates “STDOUT” on standard output and “STDERR” on standard error.

Pastebin adds DOS new-line separators at the end snippets

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 05 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Over the weekend I was finally starting to get my head wrapped around automated backups on my Synology DS214. This was supposed to be a ten minute project which of course extended due to some trivial problems along the way. For example: I needed a Python script for fetching data from the Internet over HTTPS so I made this for myself:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import urllib2, sys
urlstr = sys.argv[1]
fname = urlstr.split('/')[-1]
response = urllib2.urlopen(urlstr)
f = open(fname, "w")
f.write(response.read())
f.close()
print "written " + fname

And I pasted it to PasteBin:

wget in 9 lines of Python For Hostile Environments

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 04 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

HTTPS seems to be everywhere these days, including GitHub. It’s great to see the security of the Web improved, but sometimes this comes at a cost. Recently I wanted to actually fetch and test my own repository for bootstrapping my storage box from Synology:

https://github.com/wkoszek/synology

The DS214play model which I have comes with the wget program without HTTPS, so doing a command line bootstrapping is difficult. This is one of this weird chicken-and-egg problems we sometimes experience, and to test my software releases published on GitHub, I wrote this simple thing, which lets me fetch the release and do further bootstrapping and testing:

Do You Have a Favorite Shell Trick?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 28 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The very first scripting programming language I learned was Perl. It was circa 2000; Python wasn’t that popular back then, and my choice leaned towards Perl since I could get a decent books about it in Polish. I remember squeezing $20 and getting something that seemed like the thickest book ever.

Several years later I came back to Perl because Xilinx was using it too, and since then I’ve had the chance to come back and polish some of my Perl chops. We had a very nice build system written in Perl which let you check out files selectively. You would check out a file to a clean directory, hit “build”, and it’d build a project for you from vanilla sources. Then you’d check out a file you wanted to modify and keep hacking on it. Next you’d hit “build” again, but this time the system would use the modified file instead of the plain file from the repository. All the junk files from C and Verilog compiler would be put in the obj/ directory for you, so you never had to see them. I liked it, since my workspace was really neat and tidy (two to three source code files plus some log files).

Why it's not about self-driving

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 23 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In “How to be Rich” Jean Paul Getty expressed his excitement about enormous advances in science and technology at the beginning of the 20th century. The 21st century seemed to start in an equally exciting way, for example the self-driving car is attracting a great deal of attention lately. When I was about 14 years old a friend of mine told me that if KITT had existed, she’d have bought one. I wasn’t surprised - every kid in my neighborhood wanted KITT and everybody wanted to be Hasselhoff. Moving to the US meant dealing with everything supersized; the smallest car at the airport car rental was bigger than anything I’d ever driven. I really wanted a CarOS: a software featuring a button which would get me from A to B with no hassle. I promised myself that when a self-driving vehicle like this becomes available, I would become an early adopter as soon as my wallet would let me.

Facebook Paper and Copyright screens

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In the process of working on Sensorama I wanted to get inspired by a well designed modern mobile app. Figuring out the libraries and technologies people use in well designed products is often a good way to go. Even Apple uses existing products as a base for their next products. But how to find out more about software internals?

Legal pages are those boring documents that none of us ever usually reads. But they are also a great source of engineering information. As makers of software, due to legal and copyright issues, we need to give credits to authors of the libraries we use, as well as inform users about potential risks. And no - you can’t just use the copy & paste function, obfuscate it with your own variable names, reformat tabs to spaces and shift a few lines here and there. Technically you’re supposed to credit people for their work. Basically: help people who have written free code to put their names out there in the wild so that now and then they might land some consulting gigs in exchange for free (as in “free beer”) tools.

(Probably) the single biggest collection of Ruby scripts

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Quickstart

https://github.com/wkoszek/book-programming-ruby

Explanation

To evaluate the feasibility of different Ruby interpreters I wanted to investigate how any of Ruby 1.8, 1.9, 2.x and Rubinius will deal with subsets of scripts fed to them. I did it because I’ve noticed regressions with Rubinius in the past, and I wanted to understand whether this situation is similar for a larger code base and basically how serious these issues are.

On the separate now, for learning Ruby I used couple of books, and one of them was:

How do you evaluate new technologies?

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

“How do I get started with X” is probably one of the most frequently asked questions on technical forums. With 2.8 billion results from Google, somehow technical “AWS” manages to top the search results page:

As a software crowd, we all start to use new technologies at some point. While many technologies are fairly self-explanatory (having no “democratize” or “disruptive” in their name), many of them aren’t, or simply have no feature that distinguishes them from other available options. How do you select new components for your newest product?

I wish Ruby and Python stopped changing so much

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 17 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

In my article on Go, I expressed my frustration on trying to make gdrive work in no time. Unfortunately, I failed to do so in a predicted time back then. Many users commented on wrong title and problems with the content. While I still believe tools that just don’t work are likely to drive users away, I must say that one of the reader’s comments on my article expressed a point of view, which I can identify with:

Non-continuous innovation = dangerous or “Amazon Ad Platform Cleanups”

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 10 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

I received an email from Amazon two months ago, but I didn’t really pay attention to it,letting it stew in my mailbox for a while, until I visited the reading section of my website in the hope of referring to the book I read a while ago, and all I saw instead of a nice picture was this:

The cause is good, but the place is bad. So I went back and I dug up the email:

Command Line Interface to GoDaddy.com

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 03 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

For quite some time now I’ve been a user of GoDaddy. I remember my frustration with the Polish registrar holding some of my .pl domains: their user interface was terrible, since after logging to your account all you could see was an advertisement:

The website with an ad always loaded very quickly. Then you had to switch to “Control Panel”, which was always very slow. I could complain more about the amount of time I have spent trying to do basic things there, but I’ll leave it as a topic for my usability website.

Optimize for the Developer’s Time, Not the Machine’s

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 28 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

It is sometimes easy to forget how computer engineers in the early days struggled just to make things work. In ’70s and ’80s, computing resources like memory were scarce; CPUs were slow, and disk space was limited. There was little or no networking, and communication with the computer was primitive. Heck, even Norton Commander on a 12” was suboptimal. Right now, I could probably achieve this:

And do it in a single Terminal window, which would make ’70s engineers’ eyeballs go red with jealousy. Have you ever wondered what the world was like without Vim or Emacs? Yet these are fairly recent accomplishments. To summarize: It’s easy to forget all these things and keep asking questions such as why are Microsoft Office file formats so complicated, unless you understand the heritage of certain decisions and computers in general.

Why the Go Language Won't Be Successful

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Since I wrote this post two years ago, I changed my mind: Go is OK.

The other day I stumbled upon a Google Drive command line client. It’s a software project written in the Go language. It lets you access Google Drive from the command line. I felt it was a great project, and I wanted to give it a shot, so I started reading. Unfortunately, the program is distributed in binary form, and given several problems that GitHub has had over the past 2 years or so, I’d rather not run binaries from GitHub on my machine. Makes sense, right?

Source Code from "Programmer Guide to NCurses" by Dan Gookin

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Even though I’ve never read Gookin’s book, I’ve noticed that his website tarball with C sources is quite useful, as it contains small self-contained programs. To the sources I’ve added a makefile to make build automated and I’ve fixed programs which weren’t compiling.

Dependencies

For MacOSX I didn’t need anything. For Ubuntu you’ll probably have to type:

apt-get install libncurses5-dev libncurses5

How to build?

Fetch the source, enter its folder and type make:

How the best companies do Continuous Integration

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 29 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Nothing but the successful result of compilation delivers this unique feeling of accomplishment. There are multiple stages of project’s success, yet each feedback on a positive program build is exciting, since it is just one step from actual program execution–the ultimate goal.

Yet when done too frequently, building becomes a problem. Especially when projects grow, you become dependent on many other libraries. Maybe even whole projects. Building simple application nowadays requires inclusion of many 3rd party modules, and this process is not always easy. And this is how building becomes problematic, since it starts to be slow and boring. Feedback loop, which usually is really tight for small programs becomes really long and slow; in the process you start getting distracted, and cheat yourself that you can multitask, but you really can’t.

Fixing Middleman-spellcheck

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 20 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes when you make a change to the software, it is interesting to predict how long will such change take. Fixing Middleman-spellcheck was initially only about letting myself to select words which I would consider correct and do it from within the front-matter of each Middleman’s article files. It ended up taking more than I anticipated, and below is short description on what went wrong.

Middleman plugin infrastructure lets one to run a filter on several stages of the build process, and Middleman-spellcheck runs at the end, once all files are converted from .md to .html files.

Random notes on "Barely usable"

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Hall in my new apartment is narrow enough to make it impossible to bring ANY form of the furniture in. Wanna desk? NEEEEEEEEEEE. Cupboard? NEEEEEEEEEEEEE. Just impossible. Last 8 months I tried to live without a desk, but I must admit — just like the Internet access, I really do need a desk. I guess better chair is yet another investment I need to make. Anyway: hall = too narrow.

Almost usable — Sharp MFP printer menu

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000

I decided to give Sharp MFP printer a try. I’m pretty conservative (lets say I’m radical: if something works nicely for me, I don’t wanna change). But printers which we had here in the company never really worked for me, since on the floor of hundreds of people printers are the things that nearly never work. Either lack of toner or lack of skilled human being to figure out, what’s wrong with the darn machine, which claims it’s jammed, but it’s not.

Figuring out confusing assembly instructions — Koszek trick #2

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Today’s post will be very simple, maybe trivial. One of the hacks that I came up with, when I encountered confusing arcane of ANSI C, or when I played with assembly for fun and profit.

Problem: isolate ANSI C construct or in-line assembly block, so that upon a translation to intermediate assembly, block will be exposed more easily in a visual manner.

So imagine you want to isolate memory reference within ANSI C and figure out what the corresponding assembly line is. Assume given portion of the code:

Cross-compile GNU assembler for MIPS

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 10 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short note, not to have to walk through the Web each time I want to get some strange opcodes generated.

Today “strange” means “MIPS”. “Nobody uses MIPS”, you say? Well – I still believe MIPS is the cleanest RISC architecture available today. So yes, I want to have something translate:

_start:
	addi	$2, $2, 123
	addi	$3, $3, 321
	add	$4, $2, $3

	addi	$5, $5, 1
	addi	$6, $6, 2
	or	$7, $5, $6

	addi	$8, $8, 0xf
	addi	$9, $9, 0x3
	and	$10, $8, $9

To:

fpurge() hack — Koszek trick #1

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

A friend of mine asked me once:

How to recover text formatted by printf(), but do not spit it output to the console?

Right now I don’t exactly remember why fprintf() couldn’t be used, but I remember this was in the environment where fprintf() (or all?) changes couldn’t be applied.

This is a technique I was came up with. Please note: this is HUGE hack and it is not proven to work on your system. It is based on the fact data from printf function family is first written to the buffer buf, and until it’s internally flushed, it won’t be printed. Lack of flush is implicitly expected due to the large buffer size, and buffering set by setbuf. Once we generate enough data in the buf buffer through fprintf calls, we copy the data to text buffer, and discard buf buffer. Discarding happens via fprune and its associated file descriptor, for which buffer has been used for.

01001011, or on the art of snare drum patterns

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Below is my short experiment on finding an analogy between two of things I like: computers and music. Sometimes when I think about snare drum technique, I really feel it’s the most awkward activity which human being came up with.

Really. Think about it for a moment.

Adult man takes a pair of wooden sticks, plastic head stretched on the wooden, round frame, which resonates and makes stretched head’s surface pretty damn loud and starts hitting this surface. On purpose. For a long time, with high level concentration, heading towards perfection in the evenness of strokes and sounds.

Funny mistakes and The Toyota Way

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

This article has a strange mix of UNIX and methodology and mental problems of post’s author, related with inspirations from the The Toyota Way. I read The Toyota Way, since I tried to find something related to couple of things I’m interested in: (1) how companies work (2) Japanese culture (3) computers. (3) I involved myself. The way I think about stuff in “The Toyota Way” is that I’ll not only get to know how Toyota solves problems, but I’ll bring experiences from the book to my problem solving, mental toolset and I’ll transmute them to my daily job with UNIX systems.

Unfriendly IT, or how to get Perforce diffs e-mailed to you

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Work for a big corporation can be very challenging sometimes. This touches me especially when I have to request something, and IT department doesn’t agree for providing me this functionality. Sometimes things are very simple, sometimes are more complex.

In this particular case, I tried to provide myself a way to review Perforce commits other person working with me was doing. Solution, which we all know to be pretty darn good, is to have diffs e-mailed to you, just like we do on:

How to write a good Google Summer of Code Proposals

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Let me keep it short. As short and concrete as your proposal should be. I document my examples with this years proposals, but the fact you see title of your project here means nothing. These are just examples.

Project title

Nothing more here. Keep it short and precise. NTFS for FreeBSD is so much different than Proposal for FreeBSD. Positively different.

Short description

I always try to think that lesser is more. Please keep it short. Very short. Lets make it 2-sentence short. So short description can contain 1 sentence answer for each of the questions:

Google Summer of Code — how proposals are evaluated

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

In the previous post I explained the motivation behind GSoC and the state of things with regards to how it helps FreeBSD.

I guess I must explain a bit more on how GSOC proposal evaluations are done, since it can be not entirely clear to outsiders.

Introduction

Below you’ll find an insight on how the evaluation of Google Summer of Code took place for the FreeBSD project, but please not that people and projects vary in how they treat their students and participants. Having said that, over the years of GSoC participation I’ve had a chance to interact with other teams, and their experiences and the approach are similar to FreeBSD’s in how the communicate, help and judge students.

Google Summer of Code — my take

adam@koszek.com (Adam Koszek) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

So it has been a week since I reviewed 32 Google Summer of Code proposals for FreeBSD. If you don’t know anything about it, try to see Google’s Google Summer of Code website. In short it’s a sponsored action that lets students spend their summer (8 weeks) hacking Open Source projects, learning new stuff, helping the community, growing as programmers and engineers and additionally – earning some additional money.

Organization gets $500 for accepted project. Students gets $5000 for accepted project. In the middle of the deadline (midterm) students receive 50% of their expected compensation: $2500. The rest comes at the end.