All posts filed under: Posts

A breach by another name? There is probably more coming. We need to prepare.

March 19, 2018
by Can Duruk
Posts

Imagine a data scientist working at Facebook. Let’s call her Alice. As part of her assignment, Alice collects a couple hundred thousand Facebook users’ profile, stores on her laptop. The data contains not just what users entered into Facebook, but what Facebook gathered and inferred about them. Alice is excited. Users whose data is being used largely trust Facebook to be good custodians of this data. But Alice’s boyfriend, Bob, has another idea. He knows […]

Reading things on Twitter hasn’t changed for years. It is time for some new ideas.

February 2, 2018
by Can Duruk
Posts

I have been using Twitter for a better part of a decade. I have taken somewhat public breaks from it, but for better or worse, it’s become a big part of my life. I’ve met people through it, found jobs and clients through it (though suspiciously never paid for either of it). It’s where I go to ramble, and where I go for cheap laughs, depressing news, and dank memes. What’s really remarkable about Twitter […]

Developing Shared Code with Principles

January 12, 2018
by Can Duruk
Personal / Posts

One of the most high-leverage work in a technical organization is building shared libraries or frameworks. A common library, a piece of code that can be used as is, or a framework, a system that codifies certain decisions and allows further work to be built on top, has the opportunity to benefit many people at once. Not only that, they also institutionalize shared knowledge, put knowledge that’s in people’s head in code for future employees. […]

Planning for Agile

January 8, 2018
by Can Duruk
Personal / Posts

One of the main tenets of agile methodology is working software trumps extensive documentation. You get something to work, and then iterate based on the quick feedback. It sounds great in theory, and in my experience, works reasonably well in practice. All software estimates are wrong, so agile is also wrong, but it produces software and does it without inflicting too much damage on those who build it. But how do you square this way […]

Goodbye, Twitter.

November 30, 2017
by Can Duruk
Posts

I am done with Twitter, for a while at least, if not forever. I will still read tweets, and might even occasionally tweet, if anything to keep my account alive or for major announcements, but I decided to cut it out my life. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you know that I use it a lot. It is the only social network I use. I have met people through it, made professional connections, […]

Re-engineering News with Technology

October 29, 2017
by Can Duruk
Posts

Years ago, in college, I went to a presentation by a big internet company, as part of a recruitment event. At the time, I was working at the college newspaper, and the talk was about their “front page”. They said it was the biggest news site at the time, so I was excited. The bulk of the talk was technical. But the presenter mentioned that one of the biggest challenges was keeping abreast of what […]

Digg was all about news and nothing else. It didn’t work out.

October 23, 2017
by Can Duruk
Posts

Couple days ago, I was having lunch with a friend who used to work at Twitter. Eventually, the issue of Fake News came up. I told him, as more of a joke, that Facebook could just solve the Fake News problem by taking the News out of News Feed, and turning it to essentially just a bunch of social update. He retorted, saying that product already existed and it was called Instagram. We both sighed […]