When I started reading "Soft Skills" by John Sonmez, I didn't know what to expect from it. On the one hand, as software engineers, we think that writing beauty code is much more important than knowledge of how to promote and market ourselves. And it is true. Although, It is extremely hard to find an interesting project without marketing and self-promotion. I doubted that someone could explain this thing to developers. I can't say that John does it ideally, but he does it quite well.

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There are a lot of massive open online courses (MOOCs) today. Some of them are free, other paid. Such courses were all hype couple years ago. Now when we all come down to earth, there are some questions about that courses: how to add them to my education plan and how to choose the best one.

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If you want to know how modern operating systems work, you should read Modern Operating Systems written by Tanenbaum and Bos. It is a well-written book full of actual information about its topic.

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Enums are less used feature in Python. We as programmers prefer to use weird dicts or lists where enum should be used. Why? Because it is rather new feature and you have to install back port library if you use Python 2.7. However, it's better to use them in many cases.

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A week ago I tried to migrate the blog to Wordpress again. I decided to give it another chance because I had plans to add more images to posts. It's quite difficult to do it using Pelican. Wordpress has a great tool for image managing. I thought that its WYSIWYG editor was good too. I installed it and I even converted a couple of posts to it. But then I decided to stop. It took me 20 minutes to format properly that posts.

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If you ask what Java book you must read, everyone says Effective Java. This book is in all lists of recommended Java books except the lists witch author sells own books. There are several reasons why this quite old book is so popular.

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Google is using HTTPS as a ranking signal since August 2016. Amazon lets their users free certificates. This two factors forces me to find out how to set up HTTPS for my S3 blogs. The solution is to place an S3 bucket behind CloudFront.

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Sometimes using None makes a mess of a code. For example, if you want to separate some "empty" value and "no data" value for integer input where 0 isn't "empty" value, it's very hard to do with None only. Possible solution is to use something like Optional in Java.

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As you know there is no tail recursion optimization in Python. Moreover it has a very low recursion limit. It can be a problem if you are trying to solve the problem using the backtracking algorithm. Recursion limit is big enough to solve sudoku, but an exception will raise if the problem has more possible solutions.

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This fall I finished "Functional Programming Principles in Scala" Coursera course. This course is a part of specialization "Functional Programming in Scala." It's 6 weeks long introduction to Scala and functional programming.

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