František Řezáč on software engineering - blog, projects and more

Blog

1. Public and private space in digital world

   Oct 1, 2022

   Is privacy really as lost in the digital world as it seems lately? Indeed, the indiscriminate coercion of almost everyone who operates in the digital world seems disproportionate to our personal and collective capacity to defend our privacy. But maybe we just don’t know how to delimit a private digital space yet and that’s why we don’t know what expectations to apply where. Or how would Spinoza put it: privacy lies in the recognition of necessity.

2. Make computers tools again

   May 9, 2020

   Do you trust the hammer? How a simple question led me to a deep philosophy about the dual nature of software, the invention of which spills over into all economic products today.

3. Products and tools

   Jul 7, 2019

   When a painter wants to create a picture (product), he takes a brush (tool) and paints it. Clear as a day. But what does a painter actually do when he takes a pencil and paints a sketch first?

4. On software engineering

   Aug 15, 2017

   I have found it! I have finally found a tagline for my blog! I’ve been desperately looking for it since I created my homepage on Geocities a long time ago. Others have used funny jokes, clever puns or motivating quotes, but I’ve felt it has to be more profound. That place in the header deserves more, ideally personal mission statement and the meaning of life at once. But finding a tagline with such attributes in current world is as impossible as finding an original t-shirt in China export. Although my social network profiles begged for a tagline, they remained empty. Until now. This is it: Abstractions, contracts, dependencies.

5. The hidden allure of a standup meeting

   Aug 26, 2016

   Or how to pick up girl and what does it have in common with leading a stand up meeting.

6. Method level caching

   Jul 1, 2016

   There is a funny word in my native Czech language which I like a lot - “kurvítko” (kur-veet-ko; loose translation: “screwed-up component”). Although colloquial and a bit vulgar, to me it has the same meaning as what would otherwise take me a long time to explain. It is a component that is rather insignificant within the greater whole but that can, at the same time, actually mess up such a greater whole in a major way. The world is not black and white and so when talking about components, it is better to use the term “kurvítko index”, which expresses the ratio between the mentioned properties. I have assigned my own internal “kurvítko index” to various development practices and this index influences my architectonic decisions to a great extent. Do you know what to me has the biggest “kurvítko index”? Without any doubt, it is Caching and High Availability.

7. Web moved to Jekyll

   Dec 27, 2015

   I moved my web to Jekyll static web generator. It will take a long time until it will be worth the change so please see the previous version until then.