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  What the Heck are Algebraic Data Types? ( for Programmers )

This post is meant to be a gentle introduction to Algebraic Data Types. Some of you may be asking why you should learn Algebraic Data Types and how will they change your world?  I am not going to answer that, but suffice it to say that Algebraic Data Types are the underpinning of the type systems to the ML derived languages, Haskell and OCaml included, and their construction and properties allow for the power (and inference) that accompanies these type systems.  They are cropping...

   Algebraic Data Type,Set,Operator,Programmer     2011-12-30 08:31:43

  Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows

For designers, it’s easy to jump right into the design phase of a website before giving the user experience the consideration it deserves. Too often, we prematurely turn our focus to page design and information architecture, when we should focus on the user flows that need to be supported by our designs. It’s time to make the user flows a bigger priority in our design process. Design flows that are tied to clear objectives allow us to create a ...

   Web design,Paradigm,Advice,User experience,Flow     2012-01-05 08:16:18

  How Query Optimizer Works in RDBMS

In a previous post, we discussed how the various relational operators are implemented in relational database systems. If you have read that post, you probably still remember that there are a few alternative implementations for every operator. Thus, how should RDBMS determine which algorithm (or implementation) to use? Obviously, to optimize the performance for any query, RDBMS has to select the correct the algorithm based on the query. It would not be desirable to always use the same algori...

   DATABASE,DATABASE DESIGN,DATABASE OPTIMIZATION     2019-04-20 07:26:32

  The Death Of The Spec

Earlier today, my colleague Matt Burns wrote a post noting that most tablet makers may be largely failing because they’ve sold their soul to Android and are now just in the middle of a spec war, which no one can win. I’m gonna go one step further in that line of thinking: the spec is dead.There have been a few key stories from the past couple of weeks that highlight this new reality. Barnes & Noble unveiled the new Nook Tablet. Consumer Reports looked at the...

   Specification,Android,Platform,Software design     2011-11-15 08:20:22

  SQL Injection through HTTP Headers

During vulnerability assessment or penetration testing, identifying the input vectors of the target application is a primordial step. Sometimes, when dealing with Web application testing, verification routines related to SQL injection flaws discovery are restricted to the GET and POST variables as the unique inputs vectors ever. What about other HTTP header parameters? Aren’t they potential input vectors for SQL injection attacks? How can one test all these HTTP parameters and whic...

   Code security,SQL injection,HTTP header     2012-04-05 11:42:04

  A Python Optimization Anecdote

Hi! I’m Pavel and I interned at Dropbox over the past summer. One of my biggest projects during this internship was optimizing Python for dynamic page generation on the website. By the end of the summer, I optimized many of dropbox.com’s pages to render 5 times faster. This came with a fair share of challenges though, which I’d like to write about today:The ProblemDropbox is a large website with lots of dynamically generated pages. The more pages that are dynamically generat...

   Python,Anecodate,Optimization,Efficiency     2011-10-25 10:33:20

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