You’re validating email addresses all wrong!

Xavier Spriet

VP of Technology, Opreto

7 minute read

Ever tried entering your email address, only to receive a “Please enter a valid email address” error? Frustrating, right?

There’s a lot more to email validation than just spotting an ‘@’ and a ‘.com’. Dive into the world of RFCs where email addresses are not just strings, but a complex interplay of rules and standards. From the subtle nuances of RFC 5321 and 5322 to the curious world of quoted strings and dot-atoms, we’re tackling the real challenge of validating emails. Because let’s face it, nobody wants to be told their perfectly good email is “invalid” – especially not by a machine.

Escape from Agile

Aaron Mavrinac

VP of Operations, Opreto

2 minute read

I discovered Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom a couple years ago, via the Philosophize This! podcast. In this work, Fromm dissects the human psyche’s intricate dance with freedom and authority. His thesis pivots around a paradoxical tendency in human behaviour: the flight from the liberating yet daunting responsibility that freedom entails, seeking refuge in authoritarian structures.

While Fromm was reacting to the rise of fascism in Europe at the height of World War II, having fled Nazi Germany himself, it occurs to me that some of his observations are relevant to a matter more mundane: the resistance we often encounter to fully embracing Agile principles.

Cognitive Biases in Agile Estimations and How to Avoid Them

Alan P. Laudicina

President, Opreto

7 minute read

Cognitive biases, often unconscious influences on human judgment and decision-making, can significantly distort the accuracy of Agile estimations. These biases, like invisible bugs in our mental software, can lead to errors that affect the outcomes of project planning. Whether it’s anchoring to the first piece of information heard or overly optimistic predictions about project timelines, they can subtly undermine the efficiency of even the most experienced Agile teams.

Agile Software is an Immortal Jellyfish

Dylan Herbert

VP of People, Opreto

4 minute read

Anyone who has ever purchased software is aware that it must be updated occasionally to a new release, with new features and security and performance updates. And anyone with a huge reliance on the work facilitated by that software is acquainted with reading changelogs to stay current with changes that have been made, as the changes may often impact the end user and how they use the tool. Software should never stop moving or be allowed to become static. The moment a codebase stops changing, it becomes vulnerable to software rot; a gradual decline in responsivity and updates with respect to the changing environment in which it resides.

Metrics as Beacons, Not Scorecards: My Take on Software Metrics

Xavier Spriet

VP of Technology, Opreto

1 minute read

Metrics in software development are like fire - handy but dangerous if not handled correctly. Let’s get into a topic that deserves a brighter spotlight: the Hawthorne Effect. This phenomenon describes how people change their behavior when they know they’re being observed. Knowing that metrics like sprint velocity, build frequency, test coverage, or codebase contributions are being scrutinized can shift the team’s focus from delivering value to gaming numbers.

DevOps for Robotics

Aaron Mavrinac

VP of Operations, Opreto

6 minute read

DevOps, a set of practices designed to automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT operations, has transformed how we deliver cloud and web applications over the past decade. Although the language used to illustrate these practices in books and courses is rather particular to that technical domain, the principles can apply more broadly. The world of robotics—specifically, mobile robots like self-driving cars and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)—is a domain the usual language of DevOps doesn’t immediately conjure, but where its concepts can nonetheless flourish.

The Remote Agile Playbook: Tools for a Dispersed Team

Alan P. Laudicina

President, Opreto

2 minute read

Having a robust tech stack is crucial for remote Agile teams. At Opreto, we’ve meticulously assembled a set of tools designed to foster productivity and enhance our Agile methodologies.

Content Addressing: Marvels & Magic

Dylan Herbert

VP of People, Opreto

4 minute read

The technology of Content Addressing is marvellous. It is, ex post facto, a simple and powerful concept, demonstrably elegant and the basis for many of the most interesting and powerful technologies of the past two decades. I have already written about Why I love the InterPlanetary File System, and touched on Content Addressing in my post about Installing and Running an IPFS node, but it is constantly remarkable to me that this approach underpins blockchain networks like Bitcoin, version control systems like Git, and file distribution networks like BitTorrent as well. Content Addressing has changed the way we interact with and share key data, but I don’t think it gets the recognition it deserves, as a seminal building material of the modern Internet. Luckily, there is one surefire way in 2023 to communicate just how cool something is - describing it in terms of a Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game!

The Scaling Paradox

Xavier Spriet

VP of Technology, Opreto

7 minute read

Companies like Google, X (Twitter), Spotify, and Atlassian have created very popular and brilliant product lines, and often embody Agile, DevOps, and software architecture best practices. Yet, the quality of their products has witnessed noticeable erosion. It’s called the Scaling Paradox, and a large degree of it is an unavoidable byproduct of scale and success, but some organizations handle it much better than others.

Solve It In Software

Aaron Mavrinac

VP of Operations, Opreto

3 minute read

The philosopher Bill Rapaport identifies four great insights of computer science, culminating with the Church-Turing thesis, which says that any real-world computation can be translated into an equivalent Turing machine program. The idea of universal hardware is incredibly powerful. It substantially decouples the work of building computers, and of iterating on their efficiency, from the work of doing computations. Once the computer is built, provided it is fast enough, whatever your problem is, we can solve it in software.