Blogs

The Internet is abuzz with the news about various crypto-currencies. From the old favourite BitCoin to the bold newcomers, such as Etherium and Ripple (not that new actually), lots of frantic trading and even more frenzied discussion is taking place. The new currencies are viewed as the end of era of the old money dominance over the finances of the world.

Many web sites' developers seem to think "the more the better" and clutter their pages with endless images, flashy colours, countless videos and flash animations. This is hugely distracting. For years I have been using a couple of buttons to zap these annoyances from this helpful page. And just now I realised I can combine a few of my favourite ones into one button. It removes images, hides iframes and plugins and makes the colour scheme black and white.

Heroku, a cloud solution for various application engines, supports django out of the box. It does a pretty good job of providing you with a deployment process which at one hand is relatively simple, and on the other hand allows them to control their resources.

Recently I had to write a Python script which needed to parse large gzip-ed CSV files. First I reached for the standard csv module, which is quite straightforward to use. Unfortunately, it proved to be too slow. In fact, I gave up waiting for it to parse even a single file containing about 30 million rows! And my whole data set had more than 300 million rows altogether.

String interpolation is a useful feature in many programming languages which helps the developers to generate formatted messages easier. An example from C# 6 could read like:

TL;DR; It has been about a year since I joined Toptal as a developer. And overall the experience is rather disappointing so far. For a developer of my level and background I think it's more or less a waste of time. Let me explain why.

For quite some time I wanted to have a Drupal theme that would allow me to have a bootstrap based theme together with the look and feel as dictated by the Material Design principles from Google. Mainly because I like the way these two look and because I myself have very limited abilities in creating pretty user interfaces.

I have recently upgraded my Amazon cloud t2.micro instance from Ubuntu 15.04 to 15.10. And soon I noticed a very strange high load on the machine - constantly above 2.0, and without doing much. The apparent culprit seemed kswapd0 process. I tried various simple steps to reduce the load, but nothing seemed to work, mainly because, as I already mentioned, no heavy activity was supposed to be happening.

Developers often have to look at log files. This is sometimes boring, sometimes tedious, but it's a fact of life. It would really help if some special lines, such as errors, warnings etc. could stand out. One way to do it is to use the clog utility.

To make clog usage more streamlined from a terminal, you can define this bash function:

Cmake is a great build tool. It takes care of generating build system files, targeting, among others, Unix makefile, MS Visual Studio, ninja, XCode etc. There are various extra modules available for Cmake. One in particular allows the discovery of MySQL development files, such as headers and libraries. It can be found here. Unfortunately, it has a few issues: it doesn't work for Windows, and it has a bug towards the end. Other alternatives I found on the web were even worse.