DEV Community: Piotr Słupski

Now I'm here - 5 years badge on dev.to. Where were you 5 years ago ? :)

Piotr Słupski — Fri, 27 May 2022 07:59:35 +0000

What were you doing 5 years ago?

I recently got a notification about my 5 years on dev.to. It hit me really hard, as I was not active here once I switched careers from scientist to software engineer.

Back then, dev.to was a startup, I was amidst going from being a Technology Wizard at a high tech perovskite solar cell technology company towards my own startup, which is kinda in zombie state now - we did invent smart functional materials that can be used for a Black Panther suit, amongst other things.

Some year later, I was freelancing and looking for a job. 3 and a half years ago, landed my current job. Now - I'm here.

Whats your story?

Going online in 5 minutes with Netlify

Piotr Słupski — Wed, 31 Oct 2018 10:44:27 +0000

I'm finally online and it took 5 minutes

Yesterday, it turned out that a personal website for my consulting company is a must, in order to apply to various projects in the realm of innovation and actual hard R&D.

What I wanted

Sitting in front of the screen, it dawned upon me - it's 2018, and the web has changed. How do I host my own website with minimal effort? I could land an AWS EC2 instance. I could buy a hosting service somewhere, and upload files. There are all sorts of classical ways of doing things. This time, I wanted to check out the promises of the infrastructure we're all building.

I found Netlify

After looking around, I stumbled upon this reddit thread which pointed me to Netlify.
The deploy your site in seconds portion of the landing sold me. After registering the account, you need to connect to GitHub and choose a repository for a CI deployment. After that, Netlify let's you use the build command you want.

You can allow netlify to access your account or a specific repository. I chose my personal website repository, which is based on a free Vue.js / Material Design template..

I also bought a domain from my local provider, home.pl. After setting the A DNS record in the domain configuration to point to cocky-lichterman, Netlify's deployment, waiting a minute or so, I was up and running with my new personal website, hosted with Netlify.

Out of the box, you get Continous Integration. After pushing the changes to master, Netlify automatically rebuilds the Vue.js app and deploys to production.

Summary

The combination of Vue.js, Netlify and GitHub seems to work for me since yesterday. Netlify is free for personal projects and right now it seems like the best option for me. I hope you found this post informative!

Utopia - keep finishing this story. Dev.to writing a dystopia.

Piotr Słupski — Sun, 14 Oct 2018 12:30:13 +0000

Hi, finish this story:

Some times, when conciousness hits, one feels the overwhelming weight of one's own gravity. It's like suddenly being under Niagara Falls, sans the water. J has slowly opened his eyes, letting the weight crush him into his bed, feeling every moment of waking up. He noticed what has come up overnight - there was a Terminal just above his bed, so the first thing he saw was a list of tasks for the day. After scrolling through the Feed, J quickly assessed that he was already late, even though he just got up as planned by the System.

Instead of springing out of bed and doing the 100 pushups, pullups and situps that he usually did, this morning J decided to forgo the benefits of excercise and make himself a cup of coffee. Waking up is never easy, yet coffee is still a thing in 3099, and humans still enjoy the taste. There are no specialties, though.

There is only One Coffee.

With a little thought, J ordered a fresh brew - his Feeder prepared the chemistry, heated the solution up to a comfortable 90 degrees, and after a couple moments the delicate smell of freshly roasted and just ground beans filled the Lockup. He quickly grabbed the container and walked outside, taking sips while arriving at the Transport Station. His current work was related to technology, and the reason he felt the gravity stronger today was due to his lack of Performance with the project he was working on. With every sip, J was going through strategies that would stop the endeavour from burning down in flames.

"What's your status, J?"

The ringing of the Overseer was uninterruptible in any way. J had his Connector replaced recently, leaving him with a nice scar behind the left ear. Not everyone does this, but J was always a man of principle - when he was offered this job, he went all in.

-"Finishing my coffee at S25. When I arrive at S27 I'll be 4 minutes away from the location"
-"Did you prepare for the mission?"
-"I did. As usual."
-"Did you equip the Disruptor?"
-"Indeed. I still don't understand why we need to evaporate this time"
-"That's precisely why we choose you for these projects. Overseer out."

With the taste of coffee still lingering in his mouth, he grinded his teeth a bit. No one ever told him that part of being a Technology Consultant was evaporation, and he really disgusted himself in the thought of evaporating. This time, however, the case was truly staggering, and several Overseers found it to be of utmost importance. When all the peaceful measures of counteracting adversary technology fail, the one solution that the System overly enjoys is evaporation.

J never understood why someone wants to live outside of the System. What's better than waking up, already knowing what to do? How easy can life get, when you just get orders directly into your cortex? How enjoyable life is, when you just enjoy the submission? He also never got around to understanding why humans still resist the System. The system was beautiful in it's design, pristine in the concepts.

The Unison required J to [...]

Continue in the comments below and let's see if we can crowdsource a dystopian technological thriller ;P

Three Appalling Cases of bad development

Piotr Słupski — Mon, 26 Feb 2018 11:22:25 +0000

A base64 in base64 in base64

Recently I've been doing some more web development, which turned to be a lot of fun with modern develoments like Progressive Web Apps, Single Page Applications, Vue.js as the latest fad, as well as the tools that enabled me into the modern world of development like npm and composer.

How to leave a ticking time bomb

So I was challenged by a friend to debug an application. I can't share the code due to NDA, but I will try to describe it best as I can.

The website had to do with dealership searches. When the buddy who brought this to the table noticed that PHP was as old as 2004, he contacted me to clear stuff up.

It turned out, that not only was the server software older than archlinux's Time Machine, but the search bar was shooting direct requests at mysql_* functions. In order to get to the gist of the issues, a specific pattern of base64_encode and decode were used to

Decode part of hidden instructions
Encode some other part, while decoding another
Encode yet antoher part, while decoding the result of the previous computation
Upon contacting the developer, he said that because we don't have mcrypt installed or running on our PHP7 install, we must've badly installed PHP5.

I gave up after an hour of going endlessly in base64 encoding/decoding, and decided to write better code for future generations. Acting like a little bitch makes you a little bitch - the code was as delicious as a donut filled with nails.

How to badly manage your developers

The most interesting thing I came across were managers who "didn't give a fuck about technology".

This leads to:

Increased time of development ( not taking the necessary duration of development into account before, say, a demo )
No possibility to delegate ( not understanding tech means not being able to delegate tasks properly, as well as not being able to determine the skills of your coworkers or employees )
No safety net - technical responsibility will fall only on the tech people, while the manager can proudly say "you were JUST supposed to add LinkedIn integration".
Lack of trust in the cooperation as a whole.

Hire technical managers. It's easier for technical people to learn fast.

Your lack of mathematical and logical prowess is not an excuse while doing technological projects. Tech Culture is lacking - work on it.

Never ending starts

The last most inconvienient issue I have is the constant feeling of "building anew". Most devs and business persons expect that their groundbreaking idea is just around the corner, you just have to take this and that and voila, then you just add this and that, and boom, we're already on Ibiza, whilst in fact its raining outside and your life is still shit.

Development and research require TIME. Especially, development requires time. As with any human activity, we find the first possible pattern to deal with, measure the outcomes and optimize the operational pattern.

In order to become good at something (for instance, developing applications), one must develop applications. In order to build a product, you need people who no longer need to prove themselves in development - they get shit done without losing precious time.

Instead, most people just talk, without putting in the singe-daily-step-forward (SDSF) needed to achieve the goal. It's persistency that delivers apps, not inspiration. Inspiration is needed to map that first pattern, then reiterating over your model kicks in.

This is my first dev.to, I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for reading!