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Being a low-code sceptic

Every day a new neural network appears and every day more opportunities are opened to designers to simplify their workflow. Someone fundamentally refuses to use them, because “there is no life in machinex and technologies”, and someone is only happy to find a way to reduce the amount of work. Personally, I belong to the second type and want to share the most detailed gait on neurons I have acquired lately. 

As a programmer, building connections with industry professionals can help you in advancing your career. Whether you're looking for a new job or want to connect with industry professionals, networking can help you achieve your goals. In this article, we'll examine the importance of networking for programmers and share practical tips and techniques for making strong connections in the programming community.

From attending industry events to exploiting social media for developing soft skills and building a personal brand, we'll cover everything you need to know to network effectively as a programmer. So, whether you're just starting your career or looking to take it to the next level, read on to learn how to build connections and get hired through effective networking.

As many times before, I keep writing cheat sheets after the tasks which made me search a lot and glue things together before I found a solution. Long story short, this time I was asked to set up Google SSO for Kibana without switching from a basic license to a paid one. Kibana, by the moment, already had authentication set up and the customer wanted to log in there with the use of Google Workspace user accounts. Along with that, the customer wanted to keep user account which was already there, in Kibana. There was no need for role mapping or other advanced features, just plain SSO and that's all. As you probably know Elastic provides SSO feature only on paid license, so I have had no other way to get it working except for using 3rd party software. But first things first, let's list the steps we should go over:

It takes a lot of time and effort to develop a game. Finding and fixing errors before the release is one of the most crucial stages of the whole process, and the bigger your project is, the more people are usually involved in testing. Even the most uncomplicated games require a proper and thorough examination by QAs. The processes are automated to provide high-level project maintenance by increasing testing speed and reducing the influence of the human factor.

Automated testing is done with the help of specific programs, like Selenoid and Appium (although such frameworks are rarely used in games). 

However, the chances of successful automation depend primarily on the genre. Plus, it doesn’t cover all stages. For example, while the analytical issues can be automated, the visual aspect and gameplay are still tested manually (or are they really? We’ll get back to this later). We differentiate the two most popular types of auto testing: 

The life of Langton's Ant seems sad and lonely, but, as we'll soon discover, he is not ready to put up with such an outrageous situation and is trying his best to escape. American scientist Christopher Langton invented his ant back in 1986. Since then, no one has been able to explain the strange behavior of this mysterious model...

In Swift, when working with objects, it’s important to manage memory correctly. One way to do this is by using weak references to avoid retaining objects too long and causing memory leaks. In this article, we will discuss how to create an array of weak references in Swift using a generic wrapper.

In this post I'll share my experience in adjustment of WiFi physical channel. The channel was implemented on a software defined radio (SDR) platform. WiFi looks like a very complicated thing standardized over hundreds of pages. Could a non-expert with a PC and a couple of 100$ devices (HackRFs) somehow improve it? Here I try to develop a WiFi optimization approach basically agnostic of protocol implementation details. There's some math and Python programming in it.

There is a task to develop a solution that allows:

- Access control to web applications via #oidc/#saml

- Access control to vanilla #Kubernetes

- SSH access control to bare-metal hosts - using SSH certificate technology if possible

- Authorizing users to other server applications such as #Vault, #PostgreSQL, #Kafka, #ClickHouse, #MongoDB

- Being able to connect users from third-party organizations to certain resources based on group membership, etc

- Ensuring that everything described above works, including the bare metal environment

On the Internet and in non-fiction literature you can often find various mathematical tricks. The Collatz conjecture leaves all such tricks behind. At first glance, it may seem like some kind of a trick with a catch. However, there is no catch. You think of a number and repeat one of two arithmetic operations for it several times. Surprisingly, the result of these actions will always be the same. Or, may be not always?

Last week, I introduced you to the world of onchain analysis and explored some of the ways it can be used to gain insights into the cryptocurrency market.

Today, we're taking things up a notch with a tutorial that will guide you through running your own onchain analysis. By the end of this tutorial, you'll have the skills and knowledge you need to start analyzing blockchain data and making informed decisions about your cryptocurrency investments. So let's dive right in and see what insights we can uncover!

This tutorial is built around the Bitcoin blockchain, but many of the techniques are applicable to any other blockchains as long as they have wallets, balances, and transactions.

In this tutorial we'll learn how to write cross-platform code in C using the system functions on popular OS (Windows, Linux/Android, macOS & FreeBSD): file management functions and file I/O, console I/O, pipes (unnamed), execution of the new processes. We're going to write our own small helper functions on top of low-level userspace system API and use them so that our main code can run on any OS without modifications. This tutorial is Level 1, the easiest. I split the difficult stuff into parts so the code samples here shouldn't be overwhelming for those who has just started to program in C. We'll discuss the differences between the system API and how to create a cross-platform programming interface that hides all those differences from the user.

TL;DR: All AI-based noise cancellations suck, only the physical cancellation technique works! And physical cancellation is implemented well only in Jabra devices yet, but other features suck them! All Bluetooth headsets suck too! So, no solution yet, just complaints!

The environment: I work in a pretty talky office room, where sit around 10 people, and all of them have many online conferences every day, including me. So, silence in the room is a rare situation.

The problem: The main problem is that most of the microphones pick up all side talk pretty loud, which makes it very unpleasant for other people to listen to my voice in meetings!

We continue to follow the news of the PostgreSQL 16 release, and today, the results of the fourth CommitFest are on the table. Let's have a look.

If you missed the previous CommitFests, check out our reviews for 2022-07, 2022-09 and 2022-11.

Hey there, my fellow crypto enthusiast! Are you looking to take your trading game to the next level and gain a deeper understanding of the market trends and behavior? If so, then onchain analytics is the perfect tool for you.

In this article, we will learn about autofill methods for input fields/forms in WebView used inside of an android app. I’d like to stress that the main topic is the autofill in WebView, because, when filling standard EditText views in the app - no issues arise. But when we display content owned by other parties, we can’t fill the form with our data in a simple way.

Microfrontend as it supposed to be: Single Page Application, Server-side rendering and Independent deployments.

Example that proves it's possible using React 18 + Suspense on server and Webpack Module Federation

Programming textbooks usually do not indulge us with variety of examples. In most manuals, exercises are similar to each other and not particularly interesting: create another address book, draw a circle using turtle, develop a website for a store selling some kind of "necessary" advertising nonsense. Too far from the authentic imitation of "The Matrix". Although…

How about taking over the control and starting to invent exercises yourself?

Would you like to write your own personal little "Matrix"? Of course, not the one with skyscrapers, stylish phones of the time, and the ubiquitous invincible Agent Smiths. We will need a couple of more months of learning for that. But any beginner programmer can write a model of the cult splash screensaver with the green streams of digits flowing down the screen. Let's try to creat it in the "great and mighty" Python.

This is a translation of my own article

The release of NewLang language with a brand new "feature" is coming, a remodeled version of the preprocessor that allows you to extend the language syntax to create different DSL dialects using macros.

What is it about?

DSL (Subject Oriented Language) is a programming language specialized for a specific application area. It is believed that the use of DSL significantly increases the level of abstractness of the code, and this allows to develop more quickly and efficiently and greatly simplifies the solution of many problems.

Conditionally, we can distinguish two approaches to DSL implementation:

• Development of independent syntax translators using lexer and parser generators to define the grammar of the target language through BNF (Backus–Naur form) and regular expressions (Lex, Yacc, ANTLR, etc.) and then compiling the resulting grammar into machine code.
• Development or integration of the DSL dialect into a general-purpose language (metalanguage), including the use of various libraries or special parsers / preprocessors.

We will talk about the second option, namely the implementation of DSL on the basis of general-purpose languages (metalanguages) and the new implementation of macros in NewLang as the basis for DSL development.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source image editing software that provides users with a wide range of tools for editing and manipulating digital images. Python is a high-level programming language that is often used for scripting and automation tasks. The combination of GIMP and Python provides a powerful platform for users to create custom image editing plugins that can automate repetitive tasks, extend the functionality of GIMP, and customize the software to suit their specific needs.

Python provides a flexible and easy-to-learn language for writing GIMP plugins. GIMP provides an API (Application Programming Interface) that allows Python scripts to interact with the image editing program Python plugins for GIMP can be used for a wide range of tasks, including automating repetitive tasks, enhancing the functionality of GIMP, and customizing the software to suit specific needs. Some examples of tasks that can be automated using Python plugins include batch processing of images, resizing and cropping of images, and converting file formats.

Plugins can also add new features to GIMP, such as custom brushes, filters, and effects. Additionally, plugins can be used to create custom user interfaces that enable users to interact with GIMP in new and unique ways.