If You Are Still Calling AI Artificial Intelligence, You Are Wrong

Have you ever asked yourselves what the A in AI really stands for? Or, whether the I refers to machine intelligence? The answer may surprise you. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

My Reply To: The Case Against OOP is Wildly Overstated

Knowing when to stick to a certain principle, but discarding it where it does not apply, is what distinguishes experienced developers from the rest. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

In Search of a New Laptop

Am I in dire need of a new laptop? No, not really. My 2015 15" MacBook Pro is still perfectly fine and beats many of its 2020 PC contenders. But just like DHH a few months ago, I also began searching for alternatives, after getting at odds with some of | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Scribble Is the Future. Just Not Quite Yet

Scribble is among the features in iPad OS 14 that one would most likely wave off as a gimmick. It's a game changer in disguise, but not ready for its prime time yet. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Beware of the Silent Majority

To change a society, one needs to understand what they're fighting against. Sadly, the real "enemies" are not the ones in charge, but those that silently put them there. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Fixing That Nasty "SSL module is not available" Bug on macOS

Messing up with Xcode is a recipe for disaster. I knew this when I installed an Xcode Beta alongside an existing version of Xcode. Suddenly, one of my Python apps stopped working with the following error: Could not fetch URL xyz ... (Caused by SSLError("Can't connect to HTTPS URL … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

The 1% Journal

Major improvements are not Big Bang events. Rather, they are the results of hundreds of small, but consistent adjustments. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Why Is Roam Research Becoming So Popular?

Even if note-taking is not your cup of tea, you have probably heard about Roam Research and wanted to know what the hype is all about. Well, to be frank, that's what I wanted to do as well. Let's figure it out together. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Moving Fast Might Lead You Somewhere Else

Moving at a fast pace can be crucial for the success of every early-stage venture. Yet, it requires an ultimate pause to check where you're going. Otherwise, you might simply end up somewhere else. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Getting Your Bear Notes Productivity to the Next Level Using Alfred

Combining the superpowers of Bear and Alfred will let your productivity skyrocket. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Solving Online Events

Fostering multiple random one-on-one encounters is the key. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Musings on Go and Generics ...

I feel like I am the only person in the Go programming community these days, who hasn't expressed an opinion about the latest generics proposal. I wish, I could say that the reason was just a lack of time. Yet, what I really wanted was for the hype to die | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Go Tip: Copy a Reader Into a Writer

Something so simple, and yet, so easy to forget right when you need it. How does one exhaustively read from a Reader and write to a Writer at the same time? One way is to set up a []byte buffer, use to read a chunk from the Reader, write the | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

On-Demand Request Logging in Flask

Not logging enough is as equally bad, as logging too much. What developers need is a turn-key way to log requests on demand. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

A Simple Way to Keep a Go App Up and Running

Poor man’s Kubernetes | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

On Notion Going the Growth Path. Not Sure I Like It

Diluting the market proposition might push loyal customers away. Though, who cares about paying customers anyway? | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Auth0 Struggles: Access A Signed-Up User's App Metadata

For quite some time, I have been fighting with Auth0 to get the app metadata I am storing for each user. It wasn't easy, which is why I decided to document my steps. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

You Are Pitching Your Ideas the Wrong Way

Stop pitching and start asking the right questions instead. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Planks and Reading

Strengthen your body, while broadening your mind | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

This Week in Social Distancing

This post is a sort of a time capsule. An attempt to journal my thoughts at this particular point in time. Despite the seemingly rough first part, I want it to have a hopeful message. I think that now is the time to re-align our principles, and set new trajectories. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 4 years ago

A Step Outside the Comfort Zone

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@preslav.me | 4 years ago

Use the Git History to Identify Pain Points in Any Project

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@preslav.me | 4 years ago

A Crystal in Go’s World

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@preslav.me | 4 years ago

My Reasons to Consider Go Coming from Java

I hate listicles, and I am highly hoping that this doesn’t become one of them. Yet, I somehow felt the need to write down the reasons why I am giving Go a second (or maybe, third 🤔) chance. To the Java developers out there, searching for a new weapon of choice, I am hopin … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Developer Tool Tip: DevDocs

Here is a handy developer tool tip for today: DevDocs As developers, we spend a large portion of our time, searching for the "name of the function abc that did thing xyz". Not surprisingly, sites like StackOverflow have become so popular. Yet, SO answers are often full … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Give Me Back My Monolith

Give Me Back My Monolith by Craig Kerstiens is something I have been ranting about for quite some time. It is thus good to see other people standing on the same side of the bridge:As we ventured into micro-services onboarding time skyrocketed. Yes, we have docker and orchestratio … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Using Ephemeral Docker Containers as CLI Applications

Docker containers have proven themselves extremely useful in allowing developers to sandbox environments and ease the deployment of services. Have a complicated service setup? No worries. Simply, describe the steps in a Dockerfile and you should be able to replicate the process o … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

A Few Notes on PWAs

Progressive Web apps (PWAs) have been an open topic for a few years now, but not until recently, have they become so interesting. Nowadays, every second app you run on our mobile/desktop devices is essentially a Web app sitting inside a Web view. It seems like the logical next | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Introducing DevNotes

With a few short micro-post exceptions, my blog has been relatively quiet over the past month. The reason for this is simple. I have devoted much of my writing resources of the past weeks into a new site. A wiki called DevNotes.That is right, I have started a separate | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

First 21K for 2019

Today, I finished my first 21K run for 2019. This move was partially inspired by the fact that I haven't really run a distance much longer than 10-15K for the last 6 months. The other part though, was that I got into a challenge with my colleagues, using a clever | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

My Baby Steps with Go

Last week, I made my first tentative foray into Go programming. My company uses Go in a couple of projects, but although I have heard many positive things about the language, so far I have tried to stay away from it. The mere thought that Go is a 21st Century | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Re: Talk, Then Code

My response to Talk, then code by Dave Cheney:I cannot emphasize how important communication is in today's IT industry. In fact, if they paid me a penny for every time I have hurt someone's ego over code, I would be a millionaire. It is not pleasant. I know, I | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Blogroll intro

I have started disrupting the "Medium effect" by building a "blogroll" the good old way - simply linking to blogs of friends that I follow. The first ones to get on board are George Ho, Nikita Tonsky, and John Sundell. I will be adding more and more as time goes | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Kotlin ❤️ Data Science? (Part 1)

A few days ago, I was invited to give a talk at the Munich Kotlin Users Group meetup (check out my slides here) For quite some time, I have had an idea to promote Kotlin as the missing link between software engineering and Data Science. During KotlinConf 2018, I had | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Medium Has Become All About Publications

If you are writing your first Medium post, eagerly hoping that you would earn an overnight readership you the thousands, you can simply forget it. This is most certainly not what is going to happen. That is, unless you are willing to submit your post to a publication. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Don't Build Your Products Around Technologies. Build Technologies Around Your Products

A great technology is one that helps you solve a particular problem without becoming the centerpiece of your product. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

My Running Achievements of 2018

I am a big fan of Strava and use it not only to keep a record of my running activities, but also, to get a glimpse of what I have achieved at the end of each year. The following video was made by the folks from Strava, and is a | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 5 years ago

Comments on the Blog Are Now Powered by GitHub

I have wanted to move away from using Disqus for quite some time. Nothing personal against its service. Disqus is very popular among bloggers and works well, but it also adds a bunch of tracking scrips to every page it gets installed on. This seems too much to my taste, | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Use Dotenv Files When Developing Your Python Apps

Hard-coding configuration is bad. This is one of the things that newbie programmers learn quickly after they realize that have committed sensitive information to a public GitHub repository. And it happens so easily. Often, you are in the spur of the moment, wanting to test someth … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Use Dotenv Files When Developing Your Python Apps

Hard-coding configuration is bad. This is one of the things that newbie programmers learn quickly after they realize that have committed sensitive information to a public GitHub repository. And it happens so easily. Often, you are in the spur of the moment, wanting to test someth … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

A New Year, a New Idea: The F-Word Detector

Remember Not Hotdog from HBOs Silicon Valley? I want to build a speech detector which distinguishes between normal speech, and one containing F-words. An F-word detector of sorts. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Dark Mode for the Web Using Dark Reader

Switch to using a dark UI everywhere, even when browsing your favorite Web pages. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

What I learned in 2018

It's that time of the year again. The time when you make yourself a cup of coffee, and go through the events of the past years, searching for a sign that it has been worth it. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Connecting to a MongoDB Instance Using KMongo

Often, the seemingly simple things can make you spend hours chasing around tail. Like trying to connect to a MongoDB instance using KMongo.Basically, if you have checked out the KMongo quick start, setting up a client and fetching some data should be extremely easy:val client = K … | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

How Much of "The Kotlin Way" Is the Right Way?

Is Kotlin chasing the footsteps of Scala? Does being Kotlin-first mean abandoning the foundations laid out by Java, and how much "idiomatic Kotlin" is too much? You decide. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Deutschland 83 / Able Archer 83'

And the closest nuclear war encounter, few people really know about. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

Dependency Injection in Python: The Java Guy's Perspective

In this post, I will lay out my arguments why you might want to think about dependency injection for your next Python project. I am not trying to preach a certain style of "best-practice" programming, but simply, to share my perspective from the eyes of a seasoned Java developer. | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago

[Review] Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century

Never judge a book by its cover, they say. To this, I can only add: never judge a book by the number of its pages, and often, by the reviews it gets. My verdict: 5/5 | Continue reading


@preslav.me | 6 years ago