PlanetScale’s founders invented the technology called Vitess that scaled YouTube and Dropbox. Now they’re selling it to any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible. And thanks to its ability to re-shard databases while they’re operating, it can solve businesses’ troubles with GDPR, which demands they store some data in the same … Continue reading Andreessen pours $22M into PlanetScale’s database-as-a-service
Computing
Stanford’s Doggo is a petite robotic quadruped you can (maybe) build yourself
Got a few thousand bucks and a good deal of engineering expertise? You’re in luck: Stanford students have created a quadrupedal robot platform called Doggo that you can build with off-the-shelf parts and a considerable amount of elbow grease. That’s better than the alternatives, which generally require a hundred grand and a government-sponsored lab. Due … Continue reading Stanford’s Doggo is a petite robotic quadruped you can (maybe) build yourself
Whither native app developers?
I’ve noticed something interesting lately. Five years ago, senior developers with significant iOS experience available for new work seemed approximately as easy to find as unicorns who also laid golden eggs. Even two years ago, they were awfully hard to unearth. This year, though? Maybe it’s just a random blip — but this year, like … Continue reading Whither native app developers?
underscore naming convention in Python
Single and double underscores have a meaning in Python variable and method names. Some of that meaning is merely by convention and intended as a hint to the programmer—and some of it is enforced by the Python interpreter. If you’re wondering “What’s the meaning of single and double underscores in Python variable and method names?” … Continue reading underscore naming convention in Python
Python Decorators
In short, a decorator takes in a function, adds some functionality and returns it. This feature in Python is very similar to what is in Ruby. You open up a class and add feature to it - monkey patching. Python has an interesting feature called decorators to add functionality to an existing code. This is … Continue reading Python Decorators
*args and **kwargs in Python
In Python, there are two special symbols that you can use when defining functions to allow them to take in a variable number of arguments. The syntax is to use the symbol * to take in a variable number of arguments; by convention, it is often used with the word args. What *args allows you … Continue reading *args and **kwargs in Python
Captcha if you can: how you’ve been training AI for years without realising it
All those little visual puzzles add up to AI advances Congratulations are in order. You, yes you, dear reader, have been part of something incredible. Thanks to your hard work, millions of books containing pretty much the sum-total of human knowledge have been successfully digitised, saving their texts for future generations. All because of you. … Continue reading Captcha if you can: how you’ve been training AI for years without realising it
MJIT: A Method Based Just-in-time Compiler for Ruby
Those of you who are already familiar with JITs and how they work might want to skip directly to the interview, the rest of us are going to hang out for a minute and learn about how things presently work in Ruby, and what it is exactly that the MJIT would change. How does a … Continue reading MJIT: A Method Based Just-in-time Compiler for Ruby
What’s the difference between using “let” and “var” to declare a variable in JavaScript?
ECMAScript 6 introduced the let statement. The difference is scoping. var is scoped to the nearest function block and let is scoped to the nearest enclosing block, which can be smaller than a function block. Both are global if outside any block. Also, variables declared with let are not accessible before they are declared in … Continue reading What’s the difference between using “let” and “var” to declare a variable in JavaScript?
Making async http requests with python-aiohttp
In this post I’d like to test limits of python aiohttp and check its performance in terms of requests per minute. Everyone knows that asynchronous code performs better when applied to network operations, but it’s still interesting to check this assumption and understand how exactly it is better and why it’s is better. I’m going … Continue reading Making async http requests with python-aiohttp
Eric's playground 