This time I wish to share a recommendation. For two years I've been developing in JavaScript in Angular, using various in-house habits and techniques of my respective employers. I have tried vanilla JS and CoffeeScript, Grunt and Gulp, Jasmine and Mocha, various deployment models. I have been learning various tools on my own, but I always seemed to lack the understanding of what is their specific place and strength in a project.

I never really got what's so good in React and Webpack, even though I've completed the tutorials before. I got myself to understand ES6 and BabelJS, but never intuitively realized the potential of const and modules, even though my taxBrackets project uses a lot of their functions.

There are lots of great tutorials and showcases of various tools, showing how each of them can simplify and speed up the development. Still - nothing can replace seeing an experienced professional make most of his toolbox and guide you through their work process.

Recently I've seen such a guide, creating a simple yet representative app in …

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Hah, my first technical post on the blog, even if very lame :)

During the last year's elections in Poland a truly leftist party surfaced for the first time in decades, proposing to raise the taxes with a progressive tax system. It turned out that a lot of Poles didn't know how such a system works and became terrified by the thought of a 75% tax for the richest.

That convinced me to create some kind of visualization of various tax systems - be in flat or progressive. This is an early stage effect of my works: TaxBrackets 0.1, available at my Github.

I've been meaning to sit down and work it out for months, and starting wasn't easy - the most important factor was a clear and simple design. It had to present an average person how the tax brackets are distributed in their gross salary. Iterating between versions with varying level of details I finally settled on relative simple one, which shouldn't feel crowded.

I wanted to create two view modes: 'general', showcasing the sum …

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EDIT: Dla ciekawych zagadnienia ten artykuł może być dobrą kontynuacją. Nie zgadzam się ze wszystkimi jego tezami (security through obscurity nie istnieje), jest natomiast naprawdę wyczerpujący.

Artykuł ten został napisany na prośbę działu Technologii Finansowych Wprost.pl i objęty jest licencją CC-BY-SA 4.0 pozwalającą również na użycie komercyjne. Byłbym wdzięczny za poinformowanie mnie, jeżeli zostałby wykorzystany poza tym blogiem i wprost.pl.

Przeciętny użytkownik komputera nie poświęca wiele uwagi licencjom oprogramowania, jakiego używa. Jest dla niego zupełnie naturalne, że pewne - jak system Windows czy pakiet antywirusowy - powinien zakupić, inne zaś może legalnie ściągnąć z Sieci. Część z nich będzie wyświetlała reklamy, inne przy instalacji podrzucą też do systemu dodatkowy toolbar czy aplikację partnera. Jest jednak i oprogramowanie, które mimo że bezpłatne - nie posunie się do żadnej z tych rzeczy. Należy do niego większość przeglądarek internetowych - być może najważniejszych dla zwykłego użytkownika aplikacji.

Przeglądarki te - jak Mozilla Firefox czy Chromium (znana większości pod marką Google Chrome) objęte są licencjami z rodziny open source. Ich kod źródłowy jest dostępny dla każdego - co oznacza, że są one …

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Gated Communities

Just after Christmas, between 27 and 30 of December a city of Hamburg, Germany hosted a 32nd edition of Chaos Communication Congress, an annual meeting of hackers, security researchers, freedom activists and tech-savvy artists. This year's theme was "Gated Communities" - from social network walled gardens, vendor locking and filter bubbles to increasingly fragmented societies through Europe and the world.

Even with its usual uncontrollable energy of over nine thousand people buzzing around a variety of stalls, workshops, talks and gatherings - this year's Congress seemed dimmed and bleak. Once mad prophets of state surveillance are now proven right by the Snowden revelations and they are not happy about that. Facebook, Google and other corporations are centralizing the Internet again, and it's becoming even harder to fight their pull. No one believes in simple solutions any longer. Quoting one of the talks:

I love heroes. I love superheroes. I love comics. But unfortunately, this is not realistic in such a situation. We need to work hard.

Katharina Nocun discussing Diaspora*

If you just want to …

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On 25th October 2015 Poland held its 8th free parliamentary elections after regaining independence. With a lot of discussion on the country's situation and the previous ruling party (the Civic Platform) clearly stepping down, I decided to make my voice heard. The following text is a translation from Polish with several sentences expanded for more clarity, created with a great help of Piotr Nowak.

EDIT: A few months before the elections a new political party, called Razem (Together) was brought to life. Their formation is completely grassroots and they made a point of not accepting any of the politicians from other parties, just activists from all over the country. Quoting Wikipedia:

The party advocates labor rights and opposes deregulation and privatisation of public services. Among its main goals are strengthening redistribution, adopting a 35-hour workweek, raising the income tax threshold to 12,000 PLN (ca. $3,200), establishing progressive corporate tax, and creating a healthcare programme funded directly from the state budget. It also wishes to completely remove special economic zones from Poland. The party's …

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