alexey prohorenko's words

Great journey with Atomkeep

2012-08-14T00:00:00-07:00

My journey with Atomkeep started (as it seems now -- long time ago) back in 2008. My brother and I moved ahead with this idea, pretty much totally bootstraping it, in 2008, right on the edge of financial crisis and no funding rounds. We coded it, designed, grew. We got our fair chunk of crap, but also we got some great posts about it. And now we are done with it . We had a bunch obstacles, and this exit is not something I wanted, neither expected... But it was a nice journey and we both will be going for something new soon..

Performance Management and Optimi... Behhh!..

2012-05-23T00:00:00-07:00

I told myself at least 1,000 times last year that I am not buying more books with buzzwords like "performance", "optimization", etc. and still manage to get myself into it. Now my rant is about Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization. While I can't really say that it's a total dissapointment, but it's very close to it. I am sad, unfortunately, this book cost big $ and doesn't give me much. Nice overview, nothing stupid in it, don't get me wrong.. But if you want details and hard-core bad-ass value -- it's not there.

Birdemia with RubyMotion

2012-05-17T00:00:00-07:00

As most people following the mobile space development mentioned, RubyMotion made some good PR for itself couple weeks ago. I couldn't stand but try it! And in about 2-3 hours I got my app out of the door. It is crappy and it is simple, but that's the best part of it. Available on GitHub and on App Store. If you saw shi^M^M^M Birdemic you will understand why my app is awesome. :-)

Engineering management, my take on it

2012-05-07T00:00:00-07:00

For the past few years I've been pretty much solely employed in engineering management roles, and I did have quite few interviews with variety of companies looking for EM's. That experience allowed me to see what actually companies (in general) are thinking about this position, those responsibilities and duties. You know, it's pretty random. Different companies, different varieties, different needs and requirements. Generally they all sound same, but in reality they are different.
And I think I developed pretty solid "issue" with the whole concept of engineering management. Why engineers are not called that? Don't they manage their projects? Don't they manage their time? their needs, and daily routine? Don't they help and "manage" their peers, more junior dudes? But it is what called management, right? At least some part of it. But aren't those the same skills which we think good engineer should have in his (or her) possesion?
I think EM is a useless term. I think the whole "management" thing is stupid and very old school. I think every engineer has to code in the first place, has to architect and has to make sure he is trying his best for better results. Period.
We do need to have different types of engineers, though. Well, "type" might not be the best word, but bear with me here. I think we have somebody to be subject matter expert, team lead and tech lead. Can be same person. Can be few different people. Can be anything, whatever works.
So, what I would expect from any good engineering manager is actually the same what I expect from tech lead or tech oversighter. Think about it as a position which just leans more in R&D than anything else. This person has to spend more time thinking about what and how. He has to evalute future tech, buzzwords and question current tech. Worry about things on the higher level, and probably implement them himself! He is the one who can make an educated guess about the direction, about the future of the tech in his team. Educate others, discuss, criticize and be criticized a lot. But!... He needs to code, architect and prototype on the daily basis. Forget "management". Screw "management". He needs to be as hands-on as everybody else. He is just not on the critical path, but he is programmer, mother fucker!
Do you think I am wrong? right? Tweet to me @alexeypro or just email me. Looking forward it. Bring it on.

I like vert.x

2012-05-06T00:00:00-07:00

Pretty excited to see vert.x. Though, code on their homepage is not something you run and see result -- so I've created my own "Hello World" in Java.

Using Dropwizard for API dev

2012-05-04T00:00:00-07:00

Quickly created Maven's archetype for Coda Hale's cool Dropwizard. That was extremely easy and smooth. Whenever Node.js is not an option, I know what is my framework of choice for services.

Why Android sucks so much

2012-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

Still guessing why Android sucks so much? Here is the answer. Actually, this one. Few millions of different Android screen sizes. How awesome is that?!

Two best books on JavaScript

2012-05-02T00:00:00-07:00

While I never liked JavaScript too much, I always felt it's because I don't get it quite well. The best solution for this problem is to attack it from all possible angles. I've been trying myself with it for a while, successfully and sometimes not, but it did help me to understand the language better. Nevertheless, I should say it's not easy to wrap your "object oriented"-trained mind into the whole "prototype"-based world of JavaScript. But fear not. Two books is what you have to have to make this happen: Object-Oriented JavaScript by Stoyan Stefanov and JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford. They are the best in their kind. The gaps in each of them are well compensated by mixing those books together. Learn them by heart and JavaScript will be your best friend. Trust me. And with all the rise of Node.js you better pay some attention to JavaScript...

If You Like Physics Games

2012-04-30T00:00:00-07:00

..and if you own an iOS device, then I can't recommend you strong enough this new upcoming physics game for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad called Jailbird. And besides having a great time playing it, you can actually can help the ostrich to escape from the jail.

Again, confusing book from Silicon Valley

2012-04-24T00:00:00-07:00

What is with all these titles? Leading and Managing in Silicon Valley by Thomas Hempel, Jacob Taylor, etc. is by far the *most* confusing book for me I have ever read. Like a dump load of content, probably related together, but doesn't make much sense if all in one place. You get more if you just Google for the same topic. Sucks. :-(

Rant about the Art of Scalability

2012-04-23T00:00:00-07:00

Well, I wanted to have some impressive and interesting title, that's why I went ahead with this one. Actually, it's not a rant, but just my review. Sorry guys. Don't leave though.
So, I've finished reading this book: The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise by Michael Fisher and Martin Abbott. Sad to say, but it's miles (kmeters, etc.) below my expectations. And I didn't expect that much. Though, it might be just me.
Frankly speaking the book is well written, has good thoughts and ideas, generally correct and blah-blah-blah. But it's not what somebody would *love* to have. And I am speaking just for myself for now, so, read "somebody" as "Alexey Prohorenko" (duh!). It's too general. Way too general. It doesn't talk much about technical aspects of scalability, but more about the organizational ones, processes. And even this part is not too into details, but pretty high-level.
I guess, this is also a very sensitive topic. Unless you have been in a *very good small startup*, and a *very good big company*, and have been in touch with their pains, and issues, and succeess stories, as well as stories of pain -- you definitely will not be able to get answers to your questions from this book. Strangely enough, it says all the right things, but they just don't come together the same way as you get from the practical experience. And scalability is one of those things which in 75% comes with the practice and 25% from the theory. I saw tons of highly skilled engineers and managers, who knew their field incredible well, but just getting themselves together when shit goes up, when they need, or will have to scale... Just doesn't work. So they failed.

I always was saying -- "Before you lead, you have to follow". Same applies here. So, sorry guys, no silver bullet here. If given a choice, I'd pass on buying this book. Me, personally, didn't get nothing new or important from it. You - ? Have no idea. You can give it a try, at least the book is *not* P.O.S., but I can't recommend it for the usefulness.

Speak the language

2012-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

If you ever wanted to get into iOS development, make sure you speak the language. Which is, Objective-C. Take your time and get to know that beast. Please, make world a favor, don't use all those fast-learning-guides, like "How to create blah in N days". Useless. Don't create new army of engineers who know "Rails" but don't know "Ruby". That's a pattern to retardeness and stupidity. The pattern to produce low quality low value software.
If you think within the same lines, I can't recommend enough this book - Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan. Incredbible helpful, and an awesome starting point for you into the world of Objective-C applications. Money well spent.
You'll thank me later.

Lessons from Silicon Valley, my review

2012-04-22T00:00:00-07:00

I just finished reading Becoming a Great Leader: Lessons from Silicon Valley book by Gustavo Rabin, and now I feel the urge to share my thoughts. Originally, I had a lot of expectations from it -- and why not??? -- interesting and intriguing title, published basically only one month ago, author seems to be pretty knowledgable Ph.D. from Silicon Valley.. Heck, yeah, one should be expecting a lot!
Unfortunately, my expectations did not work out. While I certainly enjoyed the book, and found quite few interesting moments there (and I hope using them I can improve myself!), still, it's not what I expected. For some reason most of the use cases in the book deal with big-ass Silicon Valley's companies, which nowadays, are the minority. Among all those startups, young and mid-aged, the giants described in the book are not exactly what Silicon Vallye *is*. Therefore, it's pretty narrow-visioned, and the challenges mentioned in the book are not what the regular NorCal's company would experience. Sad, but true.

crud-bones on Hacker News

2012-04-21T00:00:00-07:00

Kicked out my boilerplate project crud-bones to hackernews -- if you like it, feel free to vote for it, or better - just use it. To quote myself from crud-bones:

What the heck is that?
No, it's not an another framework. Chill. All this code is basically the template which I use to jump-start with new project. It has simplistic Model and DAO (MySQL and Mongo - which are interchangable), and all the usual set of Node.JS modules I like to use (I gathered them from across many forums, as the most stable and reliable). So, it saves me a ton of time. I clone it, and go from there. You can get simple CRUD right away, just change the model (yeah, it's very "opionated"). And if you feel like you need something more sophisticated just change the code!

Enjoy.

Boilerplate for pet projects

2012-04-20T00:00:00-07:00

Decided to create simple CRUD boilerplate/template called crud-bones for my "pet" Node.JS/MySQL/Mongo/... projects. Helps a lot to not re-invent the wheel every single time. Stay tuned.

RocketPack is out!

2012-04-19T00:00:00-07:00

As of today, RocketPack is officially on the App Store, so you can be a hero too. And don't forget to LIKE us and leave an amazing reviews :-) (thanks in advance)

Pack your rockets!

2012-04-07T00:00:00-07:00

Submitted to App Store tonight. So, pack your rockets, or if you don't have any, prepare yourself for some challenge. RocketPack will be available on your iOS screens once Apple approves. ;-)

Some testing of Node.js and Java/Play

2012-04-03T00:00:00-07:00

Actually, a little bit more than that. I've decided to give it a quick try and see how fast is it to kick out some simple app which will talk to Mongo, insert, find some records. And that's it. As a platform I chose Node.js, Express, Mongoose and on the other side I had Play Framework 2.0, Spring and Morphia. And then I tried to httperf it a little bit. I don't think that there was any point in testing that stuff, I guess it was just a mental excercise to create few similar apps from scratch and run them free. From this standpoint I succeeded and result is available as testildo project on my GitHub. I also did go ahead and run httperf on EC2s, using MongoLab as a testing database. It was interesting to try few different approaches on Play Framework 2.0 with Akka -- asynchronous, plain straightforward and using actors. And I didn't use Scala, but plain Java. That made some of the Actors code look very weird, but it did work fine for my needs. Probably I took few obvious shortcuts here and there, but generally it was pretty an interesting attempt to dig into this stuff. I managed to get some graphs from it, but frankly, they barely make any difference -- I ran eveything on small EC2 instances, and kept only single instance of Node.js (and it is single threaded, so it's not fair already). Java showed up as expected cruel and pretty hungry for CPU and RAM, but it's nothing new. It did perform decently, so I can't say I was much surprised with that.

Anyhow, I think I am just going to keep this testildo project public for now, as it can be a good starting reference/point to boot your own app in any of the above mentioned stacks. Needless to say, I kinda tried to make Java's part prettier, and Node.js is bare-bones ;-)

My 3 books

2012-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Right now, I just mentioned that there are 3 books that perfectly describe all my current interests. Coincidentially (or I guess not? ;-) I am reading them right now. They are Pro Java EE 5 Performance Management and Optimization , Refactoring to Patterns and (while it's not technically a "book", but still) Advanced Memory Management Programming Guide. While only one of them is absolutely new for me, I am trying to read every book like for the first time, absorbing everything from scratch.
But those three books perfectly describe my interests in scalability, software architecture and mobile development. I am not sure if I can recommend above mentioned books yet, but give me some time and you'll know. :-)

It's running now!

2012-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

Well, it was not too straightforward, but I did it. The goal was to run "the blog", which would be very minimalistic and simple, neither will require me to think much. As I keep my notes in plain text, basically in Dropbox (which gives me quite a good feel of my notes been everywhere), I thought it'd be a good idea to do the same with the blog. None of the existing solutions, like Blogger, or Tumblr, or even recently acquired by Twitter Posterous - they are simple and nice, but I do not feel them "minimalistic". They used to be (or may be tried to pretend to be), but definitely not anymore.

So I tried something else. Decision was simple - GitHub Pages. You can have it free. It uses Jekyll behind the scene to actually generate all the static content. You create everything as simple as you want. And here we go - the source of my blog is right here https://github.com/alexeypro/alexeypro.github.com - I keep it open, and will do my best to keep it as minimalistic as possible, so don't hesitate to take a look and steal pieces of it. And design is kept dumb and simple by intention. I like it.

First post

2012-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

This is my first attempt of minimalistic "blog" posts with GitHub pages. I like the concept a lot. We'll see how good does it work in practice :-)