David Wolski

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David Wolski

Developer

(The company name is only visible to registered members)

  • 30900 Zichron Ya'acov
  • Israel

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Personal information

Professional experience

Educational background

  •  
    LMU Munich
  • Languages
    German, English, French, Hebrew, עִבְרִית

About me

Remember, Magento is a powerful piece of software. So powerful, it might run yur server into the ground even with just a little traffic and a tiny product catalog. So powerful, its convoluted templating system requires lots and lots of man-hours just to change tiny bits. So powerful, its massive database could turn into a black hole because of its sheer mass any minute. So powerful, you need a full-time developer at hand whenever you want to upgrade, change templates or just want to know what's going on with your shop-system. So powerful, bugs are obviously fixing themselves spontaneously - at least according to the bugtracker. So powerful, it has turned a helpful community into a zoo of raving lunatics.
Do yourself, your business, your customers, your budget and your developers a favor and avoid Magento.
(2012)

Buzzwords come and go. Fortunately at some point they go to where they came from. Which in most cases is not a nice, enlightened place but a rather dull and destitute Powerpoint file. One of the more persistent buzzwords clogging up brain cells of marketing drones all over is the dreaded abbreviation SEO. It appears that when customers talk "SEO", they actually mean full flanged online marketing campaigns and not SEO. Then, SEO could mean anything from responsive web design, copy writing, content compilation, syndication and community-building. Basically everything that an online business needs.

Yet, SEO does mean something completely else. SEO means optimization and implies that you already do have something to be optimized. Even if it's just a couple of murky online shop pages and some half-assed blog lint. Then you can think about SEO. If you don't have that, you don't need SEO, you need content.

“No, we just need some good SEO and then we'll profit”

This doesn't just sound incredibly stupid, inept and naïve - it's also plain wrong. So wrong, that any business based on this assumption will shrivel, wither and die a painful death. It's not a clever idea to assume that any service/products will sell itself on the Internet just because there's a website. Because usually it doesn't. According to Yet that's really the opinion of some online entrepreneurs and marketing duds. SEO alone will fix it all, even the lousy business plan. SEO as a technical solution for a mental problem, overestimation. And the common SEO snake-oil-peddler will target exactly this group of hapless entrepreneurs.

I'm not saying that SEO itself is useless. On the contrary. It's very useful to help spiders crawling your site to get the relevant information. It should be considered from the early start when building a site or when choosing a future shop/cms/blog system for your site. But Keep in mind that SEO doesn't replace a business idea, services, products and web site content. Any site with good content will never need elaborated SEO tactics apart from the basics.

(2011)


Is this the year of the Linux-Desktop, this time for real? I couldn't care less. I wish it wasn't because that would mean a lot of people calling me for help to get some hardware-device working or asking how to get email attachments running by double-clicks. Linux is a set of tools, *NIX environments are great to get services up and running and to keep them up and running. Apart from that, who needs a Linux-Desktop except from professionals working mostly on Server or Embedded environments, in shells like BASH or ZSH or in highly specialized IDEs? Don't get me wrong, I like the Linux Desktop a lot and right now I wouldn't dream of using anything else. Still this hype about 2009 being the year of the Linux desktop is a bit embarrasing. Like Microsoft Sales Dept. proclaiming that 'year YYYY is the year of the Windows Server', which obviously would be nothing more than horror-scenario. We need to think of computers as a complex tool kit to get things done or to solve a specific problem. The tool that get it done in less time for less money usually wins. Not every kind of tool is fit for every kind of task.
(2009)
 
The crisis. Is it still there? I'm in a cryogenic state of sleep of now next to Ted Williams and Walt Disney and I'm waiting for it to pass. Nah, just kidding. Fact is, that I'm far too busy to be bothered by any crisis and if I'd be out of work permanently I'll go pick grapes or fix electrical devices for a living. I have strong libertarian views about a state's economy and I dare to say that I have this luck to live by these standards, concerning social security, health insurance, taxes, business ventures. It means that in open markets the the power of the marketplace decides what should happen next and it implies on a broader scale that a limited government-funded program cannot fix what is wrong with businesses that have failed. Also, it is paid for with non-existing funds and it is secured with nothing more than promises deducted from a GNI forecast. A bubble to save another bubble.
In case you'd like some more business advice you should come to my cryogenic pod and wake me - if I'm not in the vineyards picking grapes.
(2009)
 
I just turned down an offer. Doesn't happen that often, so it's worth an entry here. Everything seemed to be right. Fame. Payment. Nice, pleasant work. Then I saw the existing code. Well, generally speaking it would have been nice. But back to LAMP, where the capital P stands for PHP? I have seen to many ailing projects based on PHP that I had to fix. And fixing wrong PHP was no fun to begin with, and was still going on my nerves when it was finished. It worked out OK but I am too ashamed to mention them here (You know you are!).

There is a very fine Python development framework for web applications out there by the name of Django (http://www.djangoproject.com). It has a steep learning curve, the framework imposes properly written code on you and it's quite conservative. Which is all good. You should remember this name. And yes, Django was named after the famous guitarist.
(2008)
 
SCO is finally toast and the Nasdaq has delisted The SCO Group whose stock plummeted to $0.065 a share. This is really good news but I wonder what took it so long to happen.
I remember that somewhere 2003 I was called by one of Darl McBride's aides who desperately wanted to see journalists at some PR event. I told him frankly that no one takes SCO seriously and that he will have a hard time to find anyone to attend this event. He sounded really depressed on the phone and wouldn't he have worked for SCO I would have felt sorry for him. Let's hope that he too has a better job now (I do).
This company was sawing off the branch they were sitting on, i.e. suing its own customers over patent issues in SCO's own software. Apart from that they didn't do anything productive in 6 years. Can you believe this? They just burned their investor's money with a lawsuit that was doomed from the beginning. And today they still charging for their UNIX base systems and demand extra fees for tools and components that come as a standard in their competitors' operating systems. I seriously doubt that this company will ever make a come back and I hope that it was Microsoft's money they wasted. Update 2008: I still want to doubt that investment bankiers tricked customers into investing in this train wreck. But, alas, everything seems possible.
(2008)
 
The whole Web 2.0 thing shouldn't really be there. It is an abnormality. A step back. Nothing new, nothing revolutionary. It's just proper use of technolgy that has been around for a long time: scripting, DHTML and CSS. So it might seem that this hype comes a bit late.
Still, these things can create a hype in a world where bad practice and hoaky style of development has been the standard for too long. And only now we see web sites and projects that really should have been there 5 years ago.
In a short time this Web 2.0 things will be a burden, because client side scripting is something flimsy, unstable, too easy to break. The typical Web 2.0 AJAX code today consists of a bunch of work-arounds and undocumented hacks.
We really shouldn't speak of Web 2.0 until we see full featured web sites that really innovate on the server-side. The client side is mud hole with a dinosaur's graveyard in it. We should pull out there.
(2007)
 
With 8+ years in IT-publishing in Europe I witnessed the sharp decline of quality and revenue of most major periodicals. IT publishing is now in a sorry state: Most magazines don't take their readers seriously thus creating the problem that no one takes the magazines seriously any more. This decline of IT magazines will continue and underdog websites will eventually replace them. And if you don't want to feel sorry about it, pick up a random printed mainstream computer magazine. And try to read it.
(2006)
 
There is one advice that every IT journalist should heed: never believe Microsoft. Never ever. They say A, then it is presumably B. They say today, then chances are that it'll be the end of the week. They say that some technology will be a bummer? Then it will most likely be thriving. If you believe Microsoft, you are fucked. And probably you also believe in Santa Claus and that kissing causes pregnancy. Update: And you bought a Zune because you don't get your iPod running with Vista
(2005)



 
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