Programming

We present a guide to name entities in code based on putting naming in perspectives of semantic space, design, and readability. 

The main idea is that naming should not be considered as creation of tags, but as a fundamental part of design process, which implies integral and consistent vocabulary to be used. We discuss naming process and naming formalism from these perspectives and we provide guidelines for practical use.

The work is based on 15 years of experience in engineering work, coding and development management in high-tech industries.

The "Click to Call" button on the website is an "innovation" that has been around for about 10 years. The technologies under the hood have changed, but the principle remains the same: someone clicks on the button on the site page, then JavaScript launches and requests access to the microphone and establishes a connection to the server — WebRTC SIP gateway. Further, the first client-server leg is a browser gateway, the second leg can be arbitrarily long and through the SIP proxy chain can eventually connect to a mobile or landline phone. Thus, the browser turns, in a sense, into a softphone and becomes a full participant in VoIP telephony.

When creating a .NET library with a partially platform-specific API, we should think about how to pack it into a NuGet package so that the installed library will work in various scenarios (.NET Framework, .NET Core, self-contained application and so on). Unfortunately, it is difficult to find a step-by-step instruction on the web that describes how to perform this task. This article is intended to be such an instruction.

The popularity of online education is increasing every month. And since there is an increase in popularity, there is an increase in competition and an improvement in quality: many authors of online schools realized that nowadays it's not enough to just make something mediocre using the frontal camera of the iPhone 4. You need to work on the quality of the picture, sound, presentation of material, etc. Not only did the pandemic prove that you can teach salsa and even crochet online, so it also gave an excellent push to improve the materials taught + diversity in the labor market. Moms on maternity leave can rejoice - now you can truly earn a hundred thousand million per second, sitting at home.

During the lockdown, which is now weakening, then becoming more active with a vengeance, a huge number of new professions have appeared. Proficients in creating involving Instagram Stories, course producers, e-learning specialists and other unknown-before-creatures - all of them have mastered a new job that gave them the holy bread in the pandemic. Once you hire a creator of involving Instagram Stories (and let's all hope this person was teached by a professional, not a snake oil salesman), your business grows just with adding some creativity in advertising that will take the heart of even the most fastidious customer. Same works with e-learning specialists: you recruit them and they do all the important tasks from writing articles that will also help in promoting your classes to arranging lessons on your Coursera course. A complete flight of imagination: if it seems to you that some jobs don't exist, then you just don't spend enough time online. In general, online work has become popularized as never and now hardly anyone will say: "He is engaged in some kind of garbage - he makes TikToks but it would be better for him to toil at the factory!". In total, online work has become popularized as never and now hardly anyone will say: "He is engaged in some kind of garbage - he makes TikToks, but it would be better for him to toil at the factory!".

Setting up Atom for working with python is quite a tricky task. I've spent a lot of time making it work. Autocompleting, autoformatting, type hints, and much more will be available to you after reading this tutorial.

As you know, YouTube doesn't have a feature for capturing an RTSP stream, but we would like to change this and help YouTube to make their viewers happy.

Many of us spend time in specialized telegram groups. The power over communication here belongs to random people with their own shortcomings. Conflict and abuse occurs regularly. Is there another way to keep order so that scam spam doesn't flourish and no one has total control over group members?

In my case, these thoughts led to the development and testing of a system that can be connected to your Telegram today.

In this series, I would like to discuss some reaches of Go programming language. There is no shortage of Go-Language-Of-Cloud style articles in which you can explore the great benefits that Go indeed provides. However, there are lees to every wine, and Go does not go without blemish. In this highly opinionated series, we cover some controversies and, dare I say, pitfalls of the original Go design.

We start tough and begin with the essence of Go — it's inbuild data types. In this article, we put slice to the test. Let's move a step further from the Go Tour and use slice more extensively. For example, there is no separate data type as stack in Go, because slice type is intended to cover all its usage scenarios.

Let's briefly recap the usage of the stack. We can create a stack in two seconds using a couple of paper stickers. You write "buy milk" on the first sticker and put at the desk, and then "make the dishes" on the second and pile it on the first sticker. Now, you have a stack: the dishes sticker came last but will be served first, as it is on the top of the stack. Thus, there is an alternative name for stack — LIFO, Last-In-First-Out. To compare, there is the "opposite" data structure queue or FILO — first in, first out. In programming, stacks are everywhere, either in the explicit form or in the implicit as stack trace of the execution of a recursive function.

Ok, let's put slice into use and implement stack.

This article is a part of Algorithms in Go series where we discuss common algorithmic problems and their solution patterns.

In this edition, we take a closer look at bit manipulations. Bit operations can be extremely powerful and useful in an entire class of algorithmic problems, including problems that at first glance does not have to do anything with bits.

Let's consider the following problem: six friends meet in the bar and decide who pays for the next round. They would like to select a random person among them for that. How can they do a random selection using only a single coin?

The solution to this problem is not particularly obvious (for me:), so let's simplify a problem for a moment to develop our understanding. How would we do the selection if there were only three friends? In other words, how would we "mimic" a three-sided coin with a two-sided coin?

As software developers, we always want our software to work properly. We'll do everything to improve the software quality. To find the best solution, we are ready to use parallelizing or applying any various optimization techniques. One of these optimization techniques is the so-called string interning. It allows users to reduce memory usage. It also makes string comparison faster. However, everything is good in moderation. Interning at every turn is not worth it. Further, I'll show you how not to slip up with creating a hidden bottleneck in the form of the String.Intern method for your application.

In this series, we will be discussing interesting aspects and corner cases of Golang. Some questions will be obvious, and some will require a closer look even from an experienced Go developer. These question will help to deeper the understanding of the programming language, and its underlying philosophy. Without much ado, let's start with the first part.

Value assignment

What value y will have at the end of the execution?

func main() {
    var y int
    for y, z := 1, 1; y < 10; y++ {
        _ = y
        _ = z
    }
    fmt.Println(y)
}

According to the specification,

Looking out for the best in app chat solution providers to enhance your business.

Getting confused with so many options to choose among  Sendbird and Twilio competitors. 

Then, let’s have some clarity with a detailed discussion over the feature comparison to go for the best Twilio and Sendbird alternative.

Most influential programmers say that code must be self-documenting. They find comments useful only when working with something uncommon. Our team shares this opinion. Recently we came across a code snippet that perfectly proves it.

Here I am going to cover my own approach to compilation of mathematical functions into Linq.Expression. What we are going to have implemented at the end:

1. Arithmetical operations, trigonometry, and other numerical functions

2. Boolean algebra (logic), less/greater and other operators

3. Arbitrary types as the function's input, output, and those intermediate

Hope it's going to be interesting!

Most solutions to algorithmic problems can be grouped into a rather small number of patterns. When we start to solve some problem, we need to think about how we would classify them. For example, can we apply fast and slow аlgorithmic pattern or do we need to use cyclic sortpattern? Some of the problems have several solutions based on different patterns. In this series, we discuss the most popular algorithmic patterns that cover more than 90% of the usual problems.

It is different from High-School Algorithms 101 Course, as it is not intended to cover things like Karatsuba algorithm (fast multiplication algorithm) or prove different methods of sorting. Instead, Algorithmic Patterns focused on practical skills needed for the solution of common problems. For example, when we set up a Prometheus alert for high request latency we are dealing with Sliding Window Pattern. Or let say, we organize a team event and need to find an available time slot for every participant. At the first glance, it is not obvious that in this case, we are actually solving an algorithmic problem. Actually, during our day we usually solve a bunch of algorithmic problems without realizing that we dealing with algorithms.

The knowledge about Algorithmic Patterns helps one to classify a problem and then apply the appropriate method.

But probably most importantly learning algorithmic patterns boost general programming skills. It is especially helpful when you are debugging some production code, as it trains you to understand the execution flow.

Patterns covered so far:

Sliding Window I

Sliding Window II

Merge Intervals

Dutch National Flag

Matrix Spiral

Iterative Postorder Traversal

Bit Manipulation

Stay tuned :)

<Promo> If you interested to work as a backend engineer, there is an open position in my squad. Prior knowledge of Golang is not required. I am NOT an HR and DO NOT represent the company in any capacity. However, I can share my personal experience as a backend engineer working in the company. </Promo>

In this article, we discuss the postorder traversal of a binary tree. What does postorder traversal mean? It means that at first, we process the left subtree of the node, then the right subtree of the node, and only after that we process the node itself.

Why would we need to do it in this order? This approach solves an entire class of algorithmic problems related to the binary trees. For example, to find the longest path between two nodes we need to traverse the tree in a postorder manner. In general, postorder traversal is needed when we cannot process the node without processing its children first. In this manner, for example, we can calculate the height of the tree. To know the height of a node, we need to calculate the height of its children and increment it by one.

Let's start with a recursive approach. We need to process the left child, then the right child and finally we can process the node itself. For simplicity, let's just save the values into slice out.

C# capabilities keep expanding from year to year. New features enrich software development. However, their advantages may not always be so obvious. For example, the good old yield. To some developers, especially beginners, it's like magic - inexplicable, but intriguing. This article shows how yield works and what this peculiar word hides. Have fun reading!

Have you ever heard of Image File Execution Options (IFEO)? It is a registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE that controls things like Global Flags and Mitigation Policies on a per-process basis. One of its features that drew my attention is a mechanism designed to help developers debug multi-process applications. Imagine a scenario where some program creates a child process that crashes immediately. In case you cannot launch this child manually (that can happen for various reasons), you might have a hard time troubleshooting this problem. With IFEO, however, you can instruct the system to launch your favorite debugger right when it's about to start this troublesome process. Then you can single-step through the code and figure what goes wrong. Sounds incredibly useful, right?

I don't know about you, but I immediately saw this feature as a mechanism for executing arbitrary code when someone creates a new process. Even more importantly, it happens synchronously, i.e., the target won't start unless we allow it. Internally, the system swaps the path to the image file with the debugger's location, passing the former as a parameter. Therefore, it becomes the debugger's responsibility to start the application and then attach itself to it.

So, are there any limitations on what we can do if we register ourselves as a debugger? Let's push this opportunity to the limits and see what we can achieve.

What happens to your MongoDB replica set when it comes to failures like network partitioning, restarting, reconfiguration of the existing topology, etc.? This question is especially important these days because of the popularity gained by the multi-cloud model where chances of these scenarios are quite realistic.

However, is there a solution, preferably a free one, for testing such cases that would obviate the need of writing manual scripts and poring over the official documentation? As software developers, we would be better off preparing our applications in advance to survive these failures.