Sergey's old blog

Today I'd like to touch on the subject of agile software development. I've been working in the software development industry for almost two decades and as I moved through my career agile software development was gaining popularity, up to the point where it became just a buzzword for many companies. Let's start with little bit of a history. In the early part my professional career, back in 2001, a world away from my development roots in Belarus, a few developers got together at a resort in Utah and published the  Manifesto for AgileSoftware Development . Concepts contained in that paper were considered a revolutionary ideas and initially mostly rejected by those who in those dark ages followed the "waterfall" process as the most popular approach to software development. The waterfall approach began with extensive research from which specifications were created. Only then was it permitted that the work of writing code could begin based on those specification

Working on the front line of IonTec Software LLC is a lot of fun. Some time ago I was helping one of our customers to navigate through industry buzzwords and see if they could improve their business processes by implementing some of the new technologies. One of the technologies in question was a block chain. They were wondering if and how they could implement it to improve their business. All of those conversations reminded me of the Bitcoin and inspired me to write this post, where I'd like to take a look at the Bitcoin(BTC) from consumer's perspective. Let me set some boundaries: I am not going to talk about investing in BTC, because I am not a professional investor and it looks to me like a giant speculation. So you potentially may score a something on short-term deals, if you have a sizable amount of assets to risk with, because, most likely, price will go up as it becomes more and more popular and it will. However at the end of the day, BTC is just a cryptocurrency, so I

In today’s world, we use a lot of software, whether that's small apps on our smartphone or an enterprise level applications we work with on a daily basis. Upon every usage, a person will find negative and positive sides of that software product. Using that many applications on a daily basis give users an ability to compare those, and that way person would build a perception of how good that product is. As a user I feel like there is really hard to find quality in any technology products today, whether it’s software or hardware, or maybe not even technology product. Hardware products at least guarded by some warranty, so that’s sort of confirmation from a manufacturer that they will replace the product for users free of charge during that period. However software vendors does not give their users any warranty, in other words, they can’t guaranty that their product will work at all. With the complexity of software growing every day and becoming an essential piece of self-driving cars

It's all started few days ago when I overheard a conversation of two guys where one was complaining about how expensive to send and receive SMS messages on his ages old unlimited plan from one of the leading cellular providers and how would it make his life easier if people would use chat app to reach out to him. At that point I thought to my self, he is right, it's all different, we are all different! Why can't I set a preference for each contact in my miles long contact list and when I hit chat it will bring chat app preferred by that person, whether it's SMS or WhatsApp or any other app, and when I hit call once again it will call that person on his/her preferred phone app, whether it's VOIP apps like Viber or just a regular phone app. Those two simple actions could simplify user experience as different users could have a different preferences for communication. Something like this: All of that led to a creation of PreferredWay open source application for ph

I've been using Ubuntu for a long time, and there were good days and there were of course bad days. However in most of the cases Canonical had a lot of great ideas. Today I would like to focus on one awesome idea, at least it looked awesome on the paper. It's web applications. It's been several years since I started using those and I've had enough data to establish opinion on what would fit my needs. Idea is pretty simple you should be able to interact with web application in a similar manner to what is available for real desktop apps and then OS would guarantee seamless experience for web app. I was so happy to see that idea coming alive with 14.04. My expectation especially around Google services was that you should be able simply create an Online Account and system will keep me logged in for as long as I want. Enough with expectations, let's try it, I was thinking to myself. First try disappointed me a lot, Online Accounts was not working seamlessly, web appl

Lately I've started to get irritation from what is going on with Android ecosystem. Don't get me wrong, I love Android OS and ecosystem around it and it's openness in fact I see it as main target for my new business venture IonTraker , however just as user there are a lot of things which I can not stand, like phone makers who don't really bother to update OS for example. When it all started Google needed to get hardware vendors on board, so they gave a lot of lea way to them and that actually what I think is killing ecosystem today. Think about it, on a daily basis I see new phones coming out from a different hardware vendors, for them it is a race for money. They are supported by big carriers to whom it a business sell us new devices and sooner you update your phone the more money they will make on it. All of them burning a lot of advertisement dollars trying to prove that 13 MP camera is 20 times better than 12.5 MP or that 1.5Ghz processor in their new phone 100 tim