The number of large software systems in the world is growing steadily. Old first generation solutions get improvements and grow more sophisticated. Completely new areas open up for automation. More systems, more lines of code. More complexity everywhere. Inevitably, more questions about the behaviour - why did it do that??? And, of course, more errors, from bugs in the systems themselves to malfunctioning of external dependencies and processes.There are various … more »

Telegram, one of the largest instant messaging applications, introduces bot support some time ago. Their main purpose, it seems, is to have a sort of interactive communications with users. However, you can use the API for much more prosaic, but constructive purposes. For example, bots are perfect for sending notifications for your DevOps/admin activities, or for your automation scripts. Of course, you can utilize email for the same purpose, but … more »

Bokeh is a nice library, helping python web developers to visualise your data in the browser. It is on good terms with pandas, the statistical and data manipulation package beloved by data scientists. It can source points from a dataframe object directly. Unfortunately, it can't get a result of a group by object directly to display it as multiple lines, yet. But no worries, with just a few lines of … more »

Yaml is a convenient format for config storing . There are bindings in most of the popular programming languages, including .NET. The latter is well served by the library called YamlDotNet. Yaml has a nice feature calls anchors which allows you to reuse portions of config. It works like this: more »

Microsoft is continuously improving its record with the open source community. First dumping massive chunks of .NET into github, then actually making very dedicated effort to clean it up and make it portable to Linux and Mac. Now comes another step, albeit smaller, in the same direction. Visual Studio 2017 will support CMake projects in a native way, without the need to generate .proj and .sln files first. This is … more »

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: more »

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. That said, I didn't want to spend any time writing the necessary … more »

Scrapy is a nice python environment for web scraping, i.e. extracting information from web sites automatically by crawling them. It works best with anonymous data discovery, but nothing stops you from having active sessions as well. In fact, scrapy transparently manages cookies, which are usually used to track user sessions. Unfortunately, the sessions don't survive between runs. This, however, can be fixed quite easily by adding custom cookie middleware. Here … more »

After doing some web development work recently, I have clearly remembered why I hate JavaScript so much. Not only is it ugly as a language, lacking in type checking or even decent syntax for inheritance (actually faking it with various workarounds), but the actual fact of having effectively two separate code bases - front end and back end forces you to repeat quite a bit of code. And hunting for … more »

Yesterday I received an invitation to Google Inbox - a new mail service from Google on top of the famous GMail. I wanted to use it because it provided reminders and allowed you to snooze emails in the inbox until later. I find these features extremely useful. However, the current versions of both Android client and the web interface are not without issues. Here are some of them I have … more »