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  Easy Parallel Processing in PHP

The proliferation of multicore CPUs and the inability of our learned CPU vendors to squeeze many more GHz into their designs means that often the only way to get additional performance is by writing clever parallel software. One problem we were having is that some of our batch processing jobs were taking too long to run. In order to speed the processing, we tried to split the processing file into half, and let a separate PHP process run each job. Given that we were using a dual core serv...

   PHP,Parallel processing,Multithreading like,Sleep     2011-12-12 10:58:59

  You know what UTF-8 is when you see it?

When we are coding we may often see some encoding specifications in our source codes such as UTF-8,GB2312. Do you know what these encoding mean and why we need them? In this post, Julián Solórzano will introduce the most widely used encoding specification around the world accomodating all different character sets in the world. UTF-8 is a method for encoding Unicode characters using 8-bit sequences. Unicode is a standard for representing a great variety of characters from many ...

   UTF-8,Encoding     2014-04-18 22:13:44

  It’s Not China; It’s Efficiency That Is Killing Our Jobs

The majority of wealth is now concentrated at the top of the social ladder. This is particularly true in the US, and the gap is widening every year. This, I believe, is because of efficiency, not China. Today the best ideas can efficiently and quickly propagate worldwide, and everyone can efficiently find them and buy them. This makes the owners of these ideas filthy rich, and those ideas that are not the best, can hardly survive. It’s not just transfer of information that is fast; wealth...

   China,Efficiency,Job,Opportunity,Wealth     2011-10-23 11:43:18

  Some lovely software design quotes

  Every time when I read technical books, I like reading the quote of a famous person at the start of a chapter(if any), usually they are very interesting. Here is a collection of famous quotes. Life’s too short to build something nobody wants – Ash Maurya, Running Lean author Give someone a program, you frustrate them for a day; teach them how to program, you frustrate them for a lifetime. – David Leinweber There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is...

   Quote,Software design     2012-10-13 09:13:34

  Esmerelda's Imagination

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine...

   Programmer,Go,Immagination,Complaint     2011-12-31 23:38:13

  Esmerelda's Imagination

An actress acquaintance of mine—let's call her Esmerelda—once said, "I can't imagine being anything except an actress." To which the retort was given, "You can't be much of an actress then, can you?"I was reminded of this exchange when someone said to me about Go, "I can't imagine programming in a language that doesn't have generics." My retort, unspoken this time, was, "You can't be much of a programmer, then, can you?"This is not an essay about generics (which are a fine...

   Programmer,Imagination,Lack     2012-02-08 10:31:09

  On testers and testing

Over the years, I’ve come to hold some strong. opinions on testing, testers and the entire business of quality assurance. Inspired by this post on Facebook’s testing, I wanted to write this down so I can point people to it. Some of this is controversial. In fact, even mentioning some of this in conversation has caused people to flip the bozo bit on me. Most product teams don’t need a separate testing role. And even if they do, the ratio of full time dev:full time te...

   Software tester,Testing,Development,Understanding     2012-01-08 10:00:49

  30-Minute Exercise to Become a Better Programmer

I believe that motivation is really important. That’s why from time to time I read books about time management (as they motivate me to be focused and continue evolve my TM-system) and books about software craftsmanship. The other day I finished one of this kind of books - “Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman”. This book motivated me to think carefully what I want to invest my time in. Also, it coincided with my 25th birthday and, of co...

   Programmer,Exercise,Skill,Requirements     2012-01-28 07:21:13

  What kind of automated testing does Facebook do?

We do several kinds of testing. Some specifics:For our PHP code, we have a suite of a few thousand test classes using the PHPUnit framework. They range in complexity from simple true unit tests to large-scale integration tests that hit our production backend services. The PHPUnit tests are run both by developers as part of their workflow and continuously by an automated test runner on dedicated hardware. Our developer tools automatically use code coverage data to run tests that cover the ...

   Facebook,Testing,PHP,Automated testing     2012-02-28 08:10:10

  Why do I need a debugger?

  When I begin to learn a new programming language, I will try and master the debugger for it as early as possible. For example, in 2013, while I touched the Go, there seems only gdb for use. Although gdb itself is not a good choice (From Debugging Go Code with GDB): As a consequence, although GDB can be useful in some situations, it is not a reliable debugger for Go programs, particularly heavily concurrent ones. But at that time there was no other choice. So after delve&nb...

       2017-07-21 22:53:16

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