Humane Technology, or Ethics in Software Design

We live in a world where technology compete for our attention, especially on our smartphones. Apps do everything they can to get us to open the app, and not leave it. At least that’s how I feel, with endless newsfeeds, notifications and autoplay, it’s so easy to just open the phone and get stuck. The feeling is not new, but the thing that pinned it down for me was the book Zucked by Roger McNamee [1]. It highlighted the reason for the feelings, both why companies do it and what they do. By using data companies have on their users they maximise their consumption. This can be in the form of video content on a streaming platform or browsing the newsfeed on social media. ...

September 2, 2020 · 4 min · Oskar Edbro

a Journey from Technical Debts to Risks

Technical debt has become a common term when discussing the quality and maintainability of code. There are a lot of definitions of the debt, but they all have some things in common, that debt are the things in the solution that should be fixed but haven’t been fixed yet. This could include everything from lack of documentation or test coverage to code complexity. The debt might not have been there from the beginning, but rather been introduce while the solution grows. Another common denominator is that the debt will increase the cost of continued development within the solution. This can be seen in several different ways, for example adding a feature to a complex codebase would require more time than adding the same feature to the simple. ...

August 20, 2020 · 5 min · Oskar Edbro

Building a Webpage

So here we go, I finally got around to building a blog, and after looking around at different options i ended up using Jekyll and github pages. In addition to getting me this webpage, it allowed me to get some basic insight into ruby, making this a case of two birds one stone. Getting things to work have been quite a fiddle, so lets walk through how I got things up and running. ...

August 19, 2020 · 2 min · Oskar Edbro

Clicking on Links, What are the Risks?

One of the most common tips you hear in regard to security is to not click links, but how malicious can a link be in this day and age? In this article I’ll discuss the risks I see and what impact they may have, to initiate a discussion about these risks. The thing about the internet today is that everything is links, and many sites such as twitter and bit.ly use link shortening to track usage and hide the original address. This makes it hard to know beforehand if the link is legit, and thus might increase the risk, but the impact will be the same. Here are four risks that I see when clicking a link. ...

June 18, 2020 · 3 min · Oskar Edbro