Ollivander
Password requirements: myths and madness
Password requirements are weird. It seems impossible to set a new password in many websites. Why?
Ollivander
Ollivander - a wand is not enough - is my committed tech blog, where I write about software development, technologies, methodologies, people, or where I just shed some good rants.
Ollivander
Ransomware-resistant backups with duplicity and AWS S3
Why you should care about ransomware attacks even for irrelevant internet-connected systems, and how to use duplicity with AWS S3 to create ransomware-resistant backups.
Ollivander
The curse of the downvote
I don't have strong opinions on Facebook - I'm not even a user anymore - but I think that the "like/dislike" mania is going a bit too far. I've read yesterday that an engineer was fired from Facebook for having a
Ollivander
Machine Learning: a sound primer
How to start with machine learning? Some serious, yet practical, suggestions.
Ollivander
Application authors: please don't force users into your language or packaging details
This story has been boiling in my head since long; today I chose to (finally) publish it. Long story short: in order to use a certain application, I should not need to understand how to use the language or its packaging ecosystem. Delivery and distribution is a relevant part of
Ollivander
Productivity, the office, and the open floor plan
UPDATE: this article was written at a time when remote work wasn't so widespread. After having worked remotely myself, I don't think that the office is so critical anymore, even though I believe it's still useful to have a nice office somewhere where you
Ollivander
Command line data crunching with Python
Every time I'm doing some data crunching on the command line, I find myself juggling between sed, awk, sort, uniq, etc. While I like the UNIX way of having one tool doing one thing well, I sometimes find it slightly boring to put all the tools together, sometimes
Ollivander
Shell scripting: short or long format options?
This is something I get asked quite a lot, so I wanted to write a piece about it. This is an extract from the manpage from GNU grep: NAME grep, egrep, fgrep, rgrep - print lines matching a pattern SYNOPSIS grep [OPTIONS] PATTERN [FILE...] grep [OPTIONS] [-e PATTERN]... [-f FILE]
Ollivander
Stopping The Internet Of Noise - A Useful Internet Back Again
The internet is getting noisy. Too noisy. Having grown up in the nineties, with 56k dial-up, I sometimes struggle to understand how little I'm accomplishing today with all the bandwidth I can leverage. There were some key factors that made the old internet so productive, by the way,
Ollivander
Students that don't "get" computer science - bimodality as a teaching failure
There seems to be a common belief about computer science: people either get it, or don't get it. A recent paper by the University of Toronto, Evidence That Computer Science Grades Are Not Bimodal, dispels such myth. The paper even suggests some explanations for this myth: teaching failure.
Ollivander
Primitive types are not your friends
Really. Stop (ab)using just strings and integers! Yes, they're the building blocks of whatever you do. But if you abuse them, you're not taking full advantage of your Object Oriented programming language. Let me explain with some concrete example. For the sake of conciseness, I&
Ollivander
Enabling Process vs Bureaucratic Process
The Process, today, is king. There're a lot of people focusing just on process, and a lot of them hold it as The True Solution to all the world's problems. Then, there're those who don't believe in process. They say, we mostly