Michael Koltsov's den

Everything is syntactic sugar. Toilet paper is syntactic sugar, and I still want it.

– Barry Hawkins

This track perfectly represents the kind of mood we have in Moscow these days

This book is a great collection of recipes to cook your web services. Unfortunately it’s a bit outdated, but from my perspective most of its parts are still relevant. It’s sort of a book that’s easy to read and easy to comprehend, i would recommend it to anyone who strives to build robust and scalable web apps.

My score 4/5

cover

It was quiet easy to review this book, because i try to re-read it every year and it had became a necessity for me. Some parts of it are not easy to comprehend but at the end of the day this book can teach you what no other book could.

This time i’ve created a repository that contains most of the examples. In my experience writing code helps me much more than reading code.

My score 5/5

Spock is spinning around

This guide is the most succinct albeit fully fledged tutorial i’ve seen!

It’s a long read but worth every minute you’ve spent.

wild party

I’m going to participate in the 5th hackathon during this year. There gonna be some Redis, Docker, Arduino, WebRTC, Scala, Groovy, Node.JS, AngularJS, Android & Intel Gallileo.

Oh boy, it’s gonna be hot!

HAVE A GOOD WEEKEND!

Internet in Izhevsk is staggering

I don’t need a visa to see Belarus&Moldova and i possess Romanian visa, but i still need Schengen visa to visit most of the countries from my list.

If anyone’s interested to see some places in the Eastern Europe feel free to send me a message.

Plaid was one of the most prominent bands during my childhood and it’s still is.

book cover

My major was information security, but since I’ve graduated a lot of things have changed in a field of security. New crypto algorithms have emerged, some of perimeter security patterns have changed. I try to brush up me IS skills from time to time, because I still find security as the most exciting(but not so valued by the managers) thing in IT for me.

This book is not an exception. I’ve been using an open source library which abstracts usage of OAUTH 2.0 and I was curios about the specs that this library is based on.

This book is the perfect destination if you’ve come for specs. It covers oauth’12 draft verbosely. Though there are some code snippets written in PHP in Python (which was OK in 2012, but it’s not in 2014 when JS is the most widespread language), they are so brief and out of scope of today’s implementation that I’ll suggest not use them at all.

Albeit the author is a Google employee the book covers some other (mostly Facebook’s) implementations also.

My score is 3/5.

Use this book as a reference, don’t spend much time trying to understand everything from it.

I had an annoying bug while migrating some code from Spring Boot to a legacy Spring application.

Every time i’ve been changing some front end code my Grunt build failed because it couldn’t change the corresponding file(i use a highly sophisticated pipeline to compile assets). At first i was thinking that my VCS was the cause of a problem, but that was not the case. Then i find that build fails after the app server runs.

After a couple of wasted hours some serious googling has helped me to find that jetty was in charge!

The jetty:run command locks the files that you web server is serving to the clients. In case of legacy apps(jsp\jsf) it’s not a problem because static resources got generated on the server. If you’re writing a single-page app(Angular, React all the things) you should be aware of this annoying problem.

The problem can be fixed, but from now on i prefer tomcat in my SBT/MAVEN/GRADLE projects!

p.s. Spring Boot & Grails use Tomcat since the beginning

Some serious magic have been happening at Microsoft.  Windows 10 promises to add a package manager into the previously opensource-hostile OS.

One could install Opera like we do it on our Linux boxes for years. They’ve added apt-get & aptitude!

May be someday i would have an ability to do something like on my mac… officially.

cover

First I should say that this book is not a step by step manual for acquiring a job at Google. It’s more an updated version of the author’s previous book “How to move mount Fuji”. This book is full of mind-blowing puzzles and quizzes that the top notch tech companies use to ask during their interviews. At the same time it’s not an encyclopedia, it gives you an exciting insight of the interview process at Google. The author had spent a lot of time interviewing recruiters/interviewers/interviewees to get to a point where he can explain why the interviews have become what they are.

The book is really interesting from scientific point of view, you can get there answers to many rhetoric questions that were asked centuries ago. My favorite question was asked by Newton :”Where a man can swim faster: through water or syrup?”. It had taken few hundred years to get an answer for this question. This book is full of amazing puzzles like this that would definitely help you to develop your analytical thinking.

The only flaw of this book is a fact that it’s not very practical, you would forget most  what you’d read in a couple of days =)

My score 4/5

I’ve been at Kazan for quite a few times, but never as a conference speaker. I was surprised by the technologies these guys use. I’ve been thinking that Kazan is not so well developed in terms of tech(and startups) amplification as Moscow and Saint Petersburg. I was completely wrong. Most of the attendees were working at a startup or were building their own tech startup. Most often used technologies were Ruby on Rails and Coffeescript. There were only one guy who had confessed that he uses .NET. I was the only person there who had been programming on Lisp. IT community in Kazan is very young definitely =)