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SEARCH KEYWORD -- Complexity

  Yes, Virginia, Scala is hard

Let me first say that I am a Scala lover and have been a Scala champion for almost 5 years.  I've written books and articles on Scala.  I've worked with dozens of companies that have launched Scala and Lift projects.  I've code reviewed many dozens of Scala projects.I used to think that Scala was easy.  It was, and continues to be, a cure for some of the numerous problems with Java.  From the "stuff that's hard or impossible in Java is simple in Scala," Scala is a very e...

   Scala,OOP,FP,function programming,hard,idiom     2011-11-08 08:47:43

  How I Develop Things and Why

I've always considered myself a bit of a software junkie. Nothing excites me more than a great piece of new software. Some of my best childhood memories are our trips to Grandma's house, where I'd have access to a computer with a dial-up connection that I'd use to obtain freeware and shareware. I'd bring 4 or 5 floppies with me and try to cram all the games, waveform editors, and utilities that I could sneaker-net home. Luckily today, excellent software written with passion oozes out of ...

   Development,Software,Why,How,Experience     2012-01-28 07:01:34

  What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie?

As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at lea...

   C,Father,Dennis Ritchie,Death,Father of C,UNIX     2011-10-17 10:12:02

  The trap of the performance sweet spot

This post is about JavaScript performance but I would like to start it by telling a story that might seem unrelated to JS. Please bear with me if you don’t like C.A story of a C programmer writing JavaScriptMr. C. is a C programmer as you can probably guess from his name. Today he was asked by his boss to write a very simple function: given an array of numbered 2d points calculate vector sum of all even numbered points... He opens his favorite text editor and quickly types somet...

   C,JavaScript,Sweet spot,Memory,Low level,Trap     2011-11-06 14:45:01

  Venn Diagram entirely in CSS

The HTML5 Microzone is presented by DZone and Microsoft to bring you the most interesting and relevant content on emerging web standards.  Experience all that the HTML5 Microzone has to offer on our homepage and check out the cutting edge web development tutorials on Script Junkie, Build My Pinned Site, and the HTML5 DevCenter. A friend of mine alerted me this weekend to just how much I have a weird fascination with Venn diagrams. I decided to roll with it. So yeah...

   CSS,Venn Diagram,Implementation     2012-02-06 08:10:41

  Why is single threaded Redis so fast

Redis is a high-performance, in-memory key-value database. According to official test reports, it can support around 100,000 QPS (queries per second) on a single machine. However, Redis uses a single-threaded architecture in its design. Why does Redis still have such high performance with a single-threaded design? Wouldn't it be better to use multiple threads for concurrent request processing? In this article, let's explore why Redis has a single-threaded architecture and still maintains its spe...

   REDIS,SINGLE-THREADED,MULTI-THREADING     2023-02-28 05:16:22

  Have you used these JavaScript libraries before?

Are you a vanilla JavaScript developer or a JavaScript library lover?  If you are a vanilla JavaScript developer, please feel free to step away silently because you may not get what you want, but if you are a library or framework lover, please bookmark this page as what we list below are what you may use in the future. There are tons of JavaScript libraries created to ease the headache of developers who have to deal with different browsers on different devices. You may use some of them befo...

   JavaScript,Framework,Library     2014-09-27 22:06:55

  RAM is the new disk...

Jim Gray, a man who has contributed greatly to technology over the past 40 years, is credited with saying that memory is the new disk and disk is the new tape. With the proliferation of "real-time" web applications and systems that require massive scalability, how are hardware and software relating to this meme? Tim Bray, in his discussions about grid computing before it became such a hot topic, pointed out how advances in hardware around RAM and networking were allowing for the creation...

   RAM,Flash,Memory,,Future,Disk     2011-08-12 07:34:27

  Some Thoughts on Twitter's Availability Problems

As a regular user of Twitter I've felt the waves of frustration wash over me these past couple of weeks as the service has been hit by one outage after another. This led me to start pondering the problem space [especially as it relates to what I'm currently working on at work] and deduce that the service must have some serious architectural flaws which have nothing to do with the reason usually thrown about by non-technical pundits (i.e. Ruby on Rails is to blame). Some of my suspicions ...

   Twitter,Architecture,Availability,Design     2011-08-12 07:39:21

  Should All Web Traffic Be Encrypted?

The prevalence of free, open WiFi has made it rather easy for a WiFi eavesdropper to steal your identity cookie for the websites you visit while you're connected to that WiFi access point. This is something I talked about in Breaking the Web's Cookie Jar. It's difficult to fix without making major changes to the web's infrastructure. In the year since I wrote that, a number of major websites have "solved" the WiFi eavesdropping problem by either making encrypted HTTPS web traffic an accou...

   Web traffic,Security,HTTPS.Encryption,Wifi     2012-02-24 05:02:58

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