Category: All

All posts across the whole website belong to this category. They might also belong to some other categories as well, but this one holds all of them. Hence the descriptive name – All.

Dgraph – fast, transactional, distributed graph database

Dgraph is a fast, transactional distributed graph database, written in Go. It’s Open Source too.

If you need a quick introduction to graph databases or if you are wondering whether you need to use one, here’s a good video to get you started.

For even more insight, read “Why Google Needed a Graph Serving System“. There are some interesting examples of problems, solutions, and data discovery. For example:

Cerebro would often reveal very interesting facts that one didn’t originally search for. When you’d run a query like [us presidents], Cerebro would understand that presidents are humans, and humans have height. Therefore, it would allow you to sort presidents by height and show that Abraham Lincoln is the tallest US president. It would also let people be filtered by nationality. In this case, it showed America and Britain in the list, because US had one British president, namely George Washington. (Disclaimer: Results based on the state of KG at the time; can’t vouch for the correctness of these results.)

Learn Enough Docker to be Useful

“Learn Enough Docker to be Useful” is a series of articles (so far 6) that explains different parts of Docker in a very simple and straightforward way. Here are the parts so far:

Blockchain : The Freeland Passport

Blockchain technology has been in the news a lot lately. Most of the attention however was on the cryptocurrencies and ICOs. But that’s a very tiny part of what the blockchain is all about.

There are many different applications of the blockchain technology – some we already know and some are yet to be discovered. But there’s this one particular milestone, which I consider of ultimate importance.

Freeland, which is a set of social, technological, and business experiments has recently announced the Freeland passport. Watch the above YouTube video (in English, or this one in Russian), which showcases the passport.

Now, with the quick “yes” answer to your question of “Is this real?”, let me ask you a question in return: is your mind blown yet? Mine is.

I think this is a very important milestone in major social, cultural, legal, technological, and financial transformations that are already changing the world. This passport is a beautiful bridge between the two very complex, yet very different worlds we now live in – the physical and the digital.

This is not the beginning, and this is not the end. But this is one of those moments in history, which a lot of people today won’t recognize as such, yet the generations to come will definitely point out and understand.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are living in the very exciting times!

Intro to basic web application security

“Intro to basic web application security” is an excellent overview of the most common mistakes web developers make when it comes to security. The article provides practical examples (including code snippets and screenshots), which illustrate the problems and ways to solve them. The list includes:

  • SQL injection (of course! no such guide would be complete without it)
  • Cross-site scripting (XSS)
  • Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF)
  • Local file inclusion (LFI)
  • Insufficient password hashing
  • Man in the middle (MITM)
  • Command injection
  • XML external entity (XXE)
  • Sensitive data exposure (including error messages and exceptions)
  • Login rate limits
  • and a variety of other, small, but potentially dangerous issues.

Mobile Jazz Company Handbook

I’ve seen plenty of company handbooks. Some of those were in the companies that I worked for. Others – shared documents from companies I’ve only heard about. Mos of these handbooks were rather boring HR documents, explaining boring HR rules and polices to mostly new employees – working hours, company structure, dress code, and the like.

Today I came across a different kind of the company handbook. It comes from the Mobile Jazz, which is a mobile and web development company.

Have a look at this PDF. It’s a thing of beauty!

Before I even finished reading through it, I wanted to work for or with the company. It’s cool. It’s fun. It’s awesome!

And it doesn’t matter from which perspective you are looking at it. The design of the document is great. The content is great. The purpose is great. And it radiates the company culture, and what a culture it is!

I just can’t get enough of it. It’s exactly the kind of place most techies want to work for. It’s open. It’s transparent. It has great values. It’s immediately trustworthy.

This is an excellent example for so many companies to follow! Raising the bar, one company handbook at a time…