Sergey's old blog

In today's world software is deeply integrated into our lives. It's not avoidable, it's everywhere. It's not just apps, that you run on your smartphone, but all essential services on your smartphone are nothing more than software functions. We use software managed cellular networks. It's in our appliance, even in our car regardless how old it is (unless of course you are roaming in car from 50th). Those systems called embedded and usually well hidden from a regular people. Additionally recent advances in computing powers allowed developers to embed even more complex software systems into ever smaller devices. That in turn brought more AI powered systems into every day use. Many of our devices today has various AI system, that we didn't even notice. For example virtual assistants, which helps to automate routine tasks and let us concentrate on more cognitive tasks. In fact various AI systems heavily embedded into our lives. Facebook's AI algorithm decides wha...

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...

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...