Development

Apache Kafka is a distributed event-streaming platform designed to handle real-time data feeds. It allows applications to publish, process, and subscribe to streams of data in a highly scalable, fault-tolerant manner.

Have you ever struggled to turn business ideas into a product? Or tried to understand the way another team works?

If you have, you know how exhausting it can be. Different ways of thinking –business, analysis, and engineering – don’t always fit together easily.

This article blends a simple story with engineering tools to show how creativity and structure can work together. Using characters like The King, The Troll, and The Prince, it explores how storytelling can help solve tough problems and make complex ideas clearer.

If you’ve ever faced a "troll" at work, this story might help you see things differently – and maybe even make the process a bit more fun.

Are you ready to level up your skills as a developer in 2025? In this article, I show 10 books that will help you become a better programmer, enhance your coding practices, and improve your overall software engineering skills. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, these books cover essential topics like clean coding, debugging, system design, productivity, and more.

/Sandbox 23.12.2024/

On 17.10.2024, the article “A new inherent approach to solving the Collatz 3n+1 problem and its analogues” was published on the Academia.edu website [1]. The second link is for those who find it easier to read in Russian “Новый внутренне присущий подход к решению проблемы Коллатца 3n+1 и ее аналогов” [2].

The English version was originally intended for the arXiv preprint platform, but they suggested first publishing in a peer-reviewed mathematical journal. Attempts to access other platforms HAL, Qeios, and ResearchGate were met with the requirement for affiliation, which an independent researcher does not have.

The process took almost two months — more than the research itself from idea to text. As a result, the article ended up on the Academia site, which is free from “face control”. I think it will be useful for anyone interested in the Collatz conjecture to read it. Exclusively for Habr, this short text summarizing the content and meaning of the publication.

Any SEO expert knows the pain of collecting Google keyword data. It’s one thing if you can count all the queries on one hand, but what if they number in the thousands? How do you check the search volume in Google for each keyword? Frankly, once you hit tens of thousands of keywords, it’s enough to make your head spin. You’ll be tempted to reach for outdated, familiar tools, only to find modern reality throwing a curveball: the old formula of Key Collector + Google Ads + a few proxies simply doesn’t cut it anymore. We’re entering a new era, and without direct access to the official API, things get grim and complicated fast.

In the fast-paced world of software development, ensuring the quality and reliability of applications is crucial. With the ever-increasing complexity of software systems, it becomes essential to adopt a comprehensive and structured approach to testing. One such approach can be encapsulated in the acronym "RABBIT," where each letter stands for a distinct branch of testing. This multifaceted strategy covers various testing methodologies that together create a robust framework for quality assurance. This article explores each branch of RABBIT testing in detail, providing insights into their significance, implementation, and appropriate use cases.

Automation can be an exhilarating, albeit exhausting, journey‑especially for those just dipping their toes into it. The tasks are often labeled as “interesting” or “non‑standard,” which, let”s be honest, often translates to “challenging” or even “impossible.” Among these challenges, one question halts around 50% of novice automators in their tracks: How to bypass CAPTCHA!

In today's digital world, where applications process increasing amounts of sensitive data, ensuring reliable user authentication is critical. Authentication is the process of verifying the identity of a user who is trying to access a system. A properly chosen authentication method protects data from unauthorized access, prevents fraud, and increases user confidence.

However, with the development of technology, new authentication methods are emerging, and choosing the optimal solution can be difficult. This article will help developers and business owners understand the variety of authentication approaches and make informed choices.

At Altenar, we often use RabbitMQ as an entry point for our products. How to protect the TCP load balancer with a ManagedSSL certificate is described further.

What if you could build an entire Web App just by describing it? Today, I'll show you how Vercel's V0 revolutionizes web development. In about 5 minutes, you'll learn how to turn text into a production-ready Web App. Let's dive in!

Gen Z – a generation of young people born between the last few years of the 20th century and the first ten years of the 21st, are the primary users of a modern-day Internet. They started using technology since their early childhood, being almost constantly glued to their smartphones and tablets, which led to them being very demanding users that have their own requirements in UX. At the same time, they are known for their sense of humor and straightforwardness – which means they love using products that are both easy to navigate but full of interactive elements. Below we’ve collected a few things you should consider when creating a UX design aimed at a young audience.

In my previous article, Puppeteer CAPTCHA bypass: Tokens or Clicks? Let’s Break It Down (which I also published on Dev.to), I compared two CAPTCHA bypass methods (clicks and tokens) using Puppeteer. I also announced that in the next article (this one), I would conduct a practical comparison of the same methods using Selenium. This will complete the CAPTCHA bypass picture, so to speak. Well, let’s not waste time and get straight to the point.

In my work, I often encounter various services designed to simplify tasks across different areas. I’m not talking about tools like GSA or A-Parser but about Zennoposter or BAS. I am no professor in automation, so I’ll explain in layman's terms: these services are essentially complex, multi-layered platforms that allow the creation of bots and scripts to perform almost any task without human intervention—a sort of “basic neural network.” By the way, such services existed long before neural networks became mainstream for everyday use.

While exploring BAS, I encountered a situation where many developers creating BAS scripts (ironically, developers developing) idealize CAPTCHA solving using clicks.

In today's interconnected development world, secure authentication is not just a luxury—it's a necessity. Whether you're a seasoned DevOps engineer or a junior developer just starting your journey, understanding SSH key pairs is crucial for your daily workflow. They're the unsung heroes that keep our git pushes secure, our server access protected, and our deployments safe from prying eyes.

But let's be honest: SSH keys canbe confusing. With terms like “public key infrastructure,” “cryptographic algorithms,” and “key fingerprints” floating around, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. This guide aims to demystify SSH key pairs, breaking down complex concepts into digestible pieces that will help you make informed decisions about your security setup.

When we go abroad for vacation or meet a foreigner on the street who doesn’t speak Russian but is trying to ask, “Where is the restroom? How do I get to…”, we wonder how to explain things to them in Russian in a way they would understand.

I asked myself a similar question when trying to explain something to a colleague using SQL while they were working with Java. The main goal of my work was to create a quality test model. Without it, there would be no proper regression testing later on.

I started by building a framework filling it with test cases. We held a meeting where we discussed priority of positive and negative test cases briefly. When developing the test scenarios, I used the incremental model, but as practice showed, this approach also required an iterative method. For example, it is like having the outline of the Mona Lisa first, then adding colors, painting the background, and so on.

It’s better to maintain the checklist in Excel format to add columns, write notes, and more. And let’s not forget that, as we take on the role of Leonardo da Vinci, we use different colors and get creative.

I am a manager by profession specializating in Production Management. My motivator is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) methodology, which focuses on identifying and managing the key constraint of a system to determine the efficiency of the entire system as a whole:

The explicit reparameterization trick is often used to train various latent variable models due to the ease of calculating gradients of continuous random variables. However, due to its peculiarities, explicit reparameterization trick is not applicable to several important continuous standard distributions, such as mixture, Gamma, Beta and Dirichlet.

An alternative method for calculating reparameterization gradients relies on implicit differentiation of cumulative distribution functions. The implicit reparameterization trick is much more expressive and applicable to a wider class of distributions

This article provides an overview of various reparameterization tricks and announces a new Python library, irt.distributions, for sampling from various distributions using the implicit reparameterization trick.

This article is the first in the series about the upcoming PostgreSQL 18 release. Let us take a look at the features introduced in the July CommitFest.

Planner: Hash Right Semi Join support
Planner: materializing an internal row set for parallel nested loop join
Planner support functions for generate_series
EXPLAIN (analyze): statistics for Parallel Bitmap Heap Scan node workers
Functions min and max for composite types
Parameter names for regexp* functions
Debug mode in pgbench
pg_get_backend_memory_contexts: column path instead of parent, new column type
Function pg_get_acl
pg_upgrade: pg_dump optimization
Predefined role pg_signal_autovacuum_worker

Mobile developers can use Apple Wallet and Google Wallet integrations for different types of apps.

Once we already wrote our own library for Apple Wallet in React Native because we couldn't find anything ready to use. But now that Google Wallet is fully released, it's time to update it.

Now, this library provides integration with both Apple Wallet on iOS and Google Wallet on Android. It allows you to add, remove, and check for existing passes on iOS, and add passes to Google Wallet on Android.

OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a global project formed around a geographic information database which is being filled by all comers — both enthusiasts and interested companies. Anybody can contribute, but the openness has its downside: incorrect edits often get into the database. Hence plenty of validators of OSM data have been written which allow to maintain the data quality at an acceptable level.

Since 2016 there exists an open source subway preprocessor that validates (generates error reports) rapid transit routes in OSM for completeness and logical/topological errors, and converts them into formats that are suitable for routing and rendering, e.g. GTFS. Besides OSM data it takes a list of public transport (PT) networks which contains the checking information about the number of lines, stations etc. per a PT network. The preprocessor has successfully proven itself in the preparation of PT data for applications such as Maps.me and Organic Maps.

In this article, I would like to share an approach to detecting one of the types of errors that occur quite often in OSM data and automatic detection of which is somewhat challenging. It's an accidental loss of a station from a route. The source code of the validator and the described algorithm are open source. But first, let's define the concepts used to represent PT data in OpenStreetMap.

Every SEO professional has encountered CAPTCHA. If not, they are either not professionals, misunderstand the term SEO (possibly confusing it with SMM or CEO), or are very new to this challenging field.

One could endlessly deny and argue that CAPTCHA is overrated and does not deserve significant resources. But these arguments end the moment one needs data from a search engine result page, like Yandex, without knowledge of XML requests… Or, say, a client wants to scrape the entire Amazon (just because they do) and offers good pay...