Development

For one of my projects I was exploring Reddit to understand how players create characters in video games, what is important to them in this process, and what their preferences are. It turns out that communities sharing their creations or seeking help with specific character designs remain active even for games released years ago. This realization sparked the idea for a hobby project that could assist these players in creating the characters they envision.

ChatGPT-4, the latest model from OpenAI, boasts impressive capabilities like text generation, question answering, problem-solving, coding, and even image analysis. However, accessing it requires a $20 monthly subscription on OpenAI's website. For residents of certain countries, accessing the service poses additional challenges due to restrictions, necessitating the use of foreign payment methods and VPNs.

We've created a list of the top-4 services that offer completely free access to ChatGPT-4. This article will delve into the advantages and limitations of each option, comparing them side-by-side.

Secret Management and Why It’s Important

Hi! My name is Evgeny, and I work as a Lead DevOps at Exante. In this article, I will discuss the practical experience of setting up a high-availability HashiCorp Vault with a GCP storage backend and auto unseal in Kubernetes (K8s).

Our infrastructure used to consist of thousands of virtual and physical machines hosting our legacy services. Configuration files, including plain-text secrets, were distributed across these machines, both manually and with the help of Chef.

We decided to change the company’s strategy for several reasons: to accelerate code delivery processes, ensure continuous delivery, securely store secrets, and speed up the deployment of new applications and environments.

We decided to transition our product to a cloud-native model, which required us to change our approach to development and infrastructure. This involved refactoring our legacy services, adopting a microservices architecture, deploying services in cloud-based Kubernetes (K8s), and utilizing managed resources like Redis and PostgreSQL.

In our situation, everything needed to change—from applications and infrastructure to how we distribute configs and secrets. We chose Google as our cloud provider and HashiCorp Vault for secret storage. We've since made significant progress on this journey.

Why HashiCorp Vault?

There were several reasons:

In this article, I would like to introduce a new web browser called Ladybird. This ambitious open-source project aims to revolutionize the browsing experience. Although it hasn't been officially released, I had the opportunity to test it on Ubuntu. In this article, I'll show you what it looks like and explain how you can run it on your computer.

A story about evolving our CI process for a monolithic Python repo with tests, challenges faced, and solutions. Discussing Docker, linters, Allure TestOps, and more.

Today, I would like to share a simple tutorial on how to set up authentication in your Next.js project using Firebase. This guide will walk you through the process step-by-step, ensuring you can quickly implement a secure authentication system.

According to the description,

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited.

But how does Tree-sitter handle languages that require a preprocessing stage?

I recently stumbled upon a package called dart_mappable, and I feel compelled to share what I liked about it. If you're involved in Dart or Flutter development, this might be of particular interest to you.

In this article, I'd like to share my top 5 tools that have helped me become more efficient and faster as a web developer. You may already use some of these tools, but others could be new. Read the article to the end to make sure you don't miss the most essential tool :).

I’ve been wanting to sort it out about String memory optimization and all these ways to improve the performance and memory usage for Collections and Arrays in C#(as you remember String is an array of chars, loaded a bit differently but anyway) code. I finally managed to find some time to dive deeper into the System.Span.

I have put together this guide to share what I’ve learned. It’s filled with practical tips and examples to help you leverage Spans in your own projects. If you want to optimize your C# code, this guide is a great place to start!

Riverpod is a powerful library that I like to think of as the Swiss Army knife of Flutter development. It offers elegant solutions for both state management and dependency injection, giving you the freedom to "cook" your app architecture just the way you like it.

Prerequisites:
1. Install Docker
2. Install VSCode

STEP BY STEP

1. Open VSCode that you previously installed and click on "Extensions" tab right on the menu bar, then type 'docker' to find proper extension and click "install":

Hi, I’m Nastya, the Product Owner of EXANTE’s desktop and web trading terminals. I began working at the company nearly five years ago as a Junior QA Engineer. Since then, I’ve advanced to QA Lead and ultimately to Product Owner. In this article, I’d like to share my growth journey within the company and the steps that helped me progress. I hope that my story will be helpful to those seeking to advance their careers but are unsure where to start.

Code Push in Flutter

In the fast-paced world of mobile app development, the ability to quickly push updates to users is crucial. Enter Code Push - a game-changing technology that allows developers to update mobile apps instantly without going through the traditional app store review process. This article explores how to implement Code Push in Flutter applications using Shorebird, a powerful tool that brings this capability to the Flutter ecosystem.

On July 19, 2024, Microsoft's Azure cloud services experienced a significant outage, causing widespread disruption. This incident affected multiple Microsoft 365 applications and impacted various industries globally. Here's what developers need to know:

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to deploy a full-stack JavaScript web app into Firebase. We’ll deploy a Next.js application to Firebase hosting. I’ll show you a quick and efficient process that can be completed in 5 minutes. 

We are requesting 20,000,000 euro to place 900 orders on the exchange. What could go wrong?

Today, I will explain how to avoid losing billions in client money when executing large transactions on the exchange. This discussion focuses on an often overlooked and largely invisible problem that arises when handling large requests, particularly HTTP requests, which may not be fully executed. It's surprising how little attention is given to this issue and how few tools there are to address it.

Our task was to implement large-scale management of exchange orders, not just within a single exchange but globally, and to ensure it operates reliably. In this story, you'll encounter clients, servers, and cats. Stories are always more enjoyable with cats.

Do you want to know how to build an AI image analyzer? Then read this article till the end! I'm going to show you how to build AI analyzer tools really simply, so you almost don't have to have any prior knowledge. I will take you step by step, and we will use Project IDX and the Gemini API. This means you don't have to set up anything; everything we will do is on the cloud. If you're ready, then let's get started!

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the success of artificial intelligence (AI), although this usually means another achievement in the field of generative neural networks.

And few people, speaking about AI, try to explain what they themselves understand by the term “artificial intelligence.” After all, it’s one thing to write about “AI problems,” and quite another to endow an ordinary computer algorithm with at least the rudiments of intelligence.

After all, the etymology of the established phrase “artificial intelligence” is not unambiguous and can take on different meanings depending on what meaning the author is trying to put into it.

Quantum computers have gradually migrated from “natural” quantum objects like ions and quantum dots to “artificial” objects like transmons, where natural frequencies of LC circuit mimic energy levels. Coaxial cables attached to such circuits excite the system, read their state, and adjust their properties. They are still quantum objects and operate at low temperatures.

I wondered if a similar system can be built with large “classical” mechanical objects. Here I demonstrate 2 -qubit quantum computer built of coupled pendulums.