Programming *

Most solutions to algorithmic problems can be grouped into a rather small number of patterns. When we start to solve some problem, we need to think about how we would classify them. For example, can we apply fast and slow аlgorithmic pattern or do we need to use cyclic sortpattern? Some of the problems have several solutions based on different patterns. In this series, we discuss the most popular algorithmic patterns that cover more than 90% of the usual problems.

It is different from High-School Algorithms 101 Course, as it is not intended to cover things like Karatsuba algorithm (fast multiplication algorithm) or prove different methods of sorting. Instead, Algorithmic Patterns focused on practical skills needed for the solution of common problems. For example, when we set up a Prometheus alert for high request latency we are dealing with Sliding Window Pattern. Or let say, we organize a team event and need to find an available time slot for every participant. At the first glance, it is not obvious that in this case, we are actually solving an algorithmic problem. Actually, during our day we usually solve a bunch of algorithmic problems without realizing that we dealing with algorithms.

The knowledge about Algorithmic Patterns helps one to classify a problem and then apply the appropriate method.

But probably most importantly learning algorithmic patterns boost general programming skills. It is especially helpful when you are debugging some production code, as it trains you to understand the execution flow.

Patterns covered so far:

Sliding Window I

Sliding Window II

Merge Intervals

Dutch National Flag

Matrix Spiral

Iterative Postorder Traversal

Bit Manipulation

Stay tuned :)

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In this article, we discuss the postorder traversal of a binary tree. What does postorder traversal mean? It means that at first, we process the left subtree of the node, then the right subtree of the node, and only after that we process the node itself.

Why would we need to do it in this order? This approach solves an entire class of algorithmic problems related to the binary trees. For example, to find the longest path between two nodes we need to traverse the tree in a postorder manner. In general, postorder traversal is needed when we cannot process the node without processing its children first. In this manner, for example, we can calculate the height of the tree. To know the height of a node, we need to calculate the height of its children and increment it by one.

Let's start with a recursive approach. We need to process the left child, then the right child and finally we can process the node itself. For simplicity, let's just save the values into slice out.

C# capabilities keep expanding from year to year. New features enrich software development. However, their advantages may not always be so obvious. For example, the good old yield. To some developers, especially beginners, it's like magic - inexplicable, but intriguing. This article shows how yield works and what this peculiar word hides. Have fun reading!

Have you ever heard of Image File Execution Options (IFEO)? It is a registry key under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE that controls things like Global Flags and Mitigation Policies on a per-process basis. One of its features that drew my attention is a mechanism designed to help developers debug multi-process applications. Imagine a scenario where some program creates a child process that crashes immediately. In case you cannot launch this child manually (that can happen for various reasons), you might have a hard time troubleshooting this problem. With IFEO, however, you can instruct the system to launch your favorite debugger right when it's about to start this troublesome process. Then you can single-step through the code and figure what goes wrong. Sounds incredibly useful, right?

I don't know about you, but I immediately saw this feature as a mechanism for executing arbitrary code when someone creates a new process. Even more importantly, it happens synchronously, i.e., the target won't start unless we allow it. Internally, the system swaps the path to the image file with the debugger's location, passing the former as a parameter. Therefore, it becomes the debugger's responsibility to start the application and then attach itself to it.

So, are there any limitations on what we can do if we register ourselves as a debugger? Let's push this opportunity to the limits and see what we can achieve.

What happens to your MongoDB replica set when it comes to failures like network partitioning, restarting, reconfiguration of the existing topology, etc.? This question is especially important these days because of the popularity gained by the multi-cloud model where chances of these scenarios are quite realistic.

However, is there a solution, preferably a free one, for testing such cases that would obviate the need of writing manual scripts and poring over the official documentation? As software developers, we would be better off preparing our applications in advance to survive these failures.

Most solutions to algorithmic problems can be grouped into a rather small number of patterns. When we start to solve some problem, we need to think about how we would classify them. For example, can we apply fast and slowalgorithmic pattern or do we need to use cyclic sortpattern? Some of the problems have several solutions with different patterns. In this article of series Algorithms in Go we consider an algorithmic pattern that solves an entire class of the problems related to a matrix. Let's take one of such problems and see how we can handle it.

How can we traverse a matrix in a spiral order?

rotor is a non-intrusive event loop friendly C++ actor micro framework with hierarchical supervising, similar to its elder brothers like caf and sobjectizer. There is a bulk of important changes since the last release announcement v0.09

As Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is being refreshed using new C++ standard, deprecating tbb::task interface, the need for high-level tasking interface becomes more obvious. In this article, I’m proposing yet another way of defining what a high-level parallel task programming model can look like in modern C++. I created it in 2014 and it was my last contribution to TBB project as its core developer after 9 wonderful years of working there. However, this proposal has not been used in production yet, so a new discussion might help it to be adopted.

The recent Qt 6 release compelled us to recheck the framework with PVS-Studio. In this article, we reviewed various interesting errors we found, for example, those related to processing dates. The errors we discovered prove that developers can greatly benefit from regularly checking their projects with tools like PVS-Studio.

The flag of the Netherlands consists of three colors: red, white and blue. Given balls of these three colors arranged randomly in a line (it does not matter how many balls there are), the task is to arrange them such that all balls of the same color are together and their collective color groups are in the correct order.

For simplicity instead of colors red, white, and blue we will be dealing with ones, twos and zeroes.

Let's start with our intuition. We have an array of zeroth, ones, and twos. How would we sort it? Well, we could put aside all zeroes into some bucket, all ones into another bucket, and all twos into the third. Then we can fetch all items from the first bucket, then from the second, and from the last bucket, and restore all the items. This approach is perfectly fine and has a great performance. We touch all the elements when we iterate through the array, and then we iterate through all the elements once more when we "reassamble" the array. So, the overall time complexity is O(n) + O(n) ~= O(n). The space complexity is also O(n) as we need to store all items in the buckets.

Can we do better than that? There is no way to improve our time complexity. However, we can think of a more efficient algorithm in regard to space complexity. How would we solve the problem without the additional buckets?

Let's make a leap of faith and pretend that somehow we were able to process a part of the array. We iterate through part of the array and put encountered zeroes and ones at the beginning of the array, and twos at the end of the array. Now, we switched to the next index i with some unprocessed value x. What should we do there?

There is an open project COVID-19 CovidSim Model, written in C++. There is also a PVS-Studio static code analyzer that detects errors very well. One day they met. Embrace the fragility of mathematical modeling algorithms and why you need to make every effort to enhance the code quality.

In PVS-Studio, we often check various compilers' code and post the results in our blog. Decompiler programs, however, seem to be a bit neglected. To restore justice in this world, we analyzed the ILSpy decompiler's source code. Let's take a look at the peculiar things PVS-Studio found.

The PVS-Studio analyzer is regularly updated with new diagnostic rules. Curiously enough, diagnostics often detect suspicious code fragments before the end of the work. For example, such a situation may happen while testing on open-source projects. So, let's take a look at one of these interesting finding.

In 2013 Canonical tried to crowdfund Ubuntu Edge smartphone. Its main feature could be the ability to use the smartphone as a full-fledged PС. Unfortunatly, the crowdfunding campaign did not accumulate enough money, so a dream of having a universal device remained to be the dream.

I've been searching for universality, too, on the software side, not the hardware one. Today I can confidently say I found the necessary combination: Git and JavaScript.

As you know, I have already described the benefits of browser applications (nCKOB static site generator) and the benefits of using Git instead of yet another back-end with API (GitBudget to track personal spendings). Once GitBudget was out, I spent the remaining 2020 to build a system allowing one to create browser applications right inside browsers. GitJS is the name of that system.

All Prometheus metrics are based on time series - streams of timestamped values belonging to the same metric. Each time series is uniquely identified by its metric name and optional key-value pairs called labels. The metric name specifies some characteristics of the measured system, such as http_requests_total - the total number of received HTTP requests. In practice, you often will be interested in some subset of the values of a metric, for example, in the number of requests received by a particular endpoint; and here is where the labels come in handy. We can partition a metric by adding endpoint label and see the statics for a particular endpoint: http_requests_total{endpoint="api/status"}. Every metric has two automatically created labels: job_name and instance. We see their roles in the next section.

Prometheus provides a functional query language called PromQL. The result of the query might be evaluated to one of four types:

Scalar (aka float)

String (currently unused)

Instant Vector - a set of time series that have exactly one value per timestamp.

Range Vector - a set of time series that have a range of values between two timestamps.

At first glance, Instant Vector might look like an array, and Range Vector as a matrix.

If that would be the case, then a Range Vector for a single time series "downgrades" to an Instant Vector. However, that's not the case:

What is distributed tracing? Distributed tracing is a method used to profile and monitor applications, especially those built using a microservices architecture. Distributed tracing helps pinpoint where failures occur and what causes poor performance.

Let’s have a look at a simple prototype. A user fetches information about a shipment from `logistic` service. logistic service does some computation and fetches the data from a database. logistic service doesn’t know the actual status of the shipment, so it has to fetch the updated status from another service `tracking`. `tracking` service also needs to fetch the data from a database and to do some computation.

In the screenshot below, we see a whole life cycle of the request issued to `logistics` service:

This is the third part of a series covering the implementation of algorithms in Go. In this article, we discuss the Merge Interval algorithm. Usually, when you start learning algorithms you have to deal with some problems like finding the least common denominator or finding the next Fibonacci number. While these are indeed important problems, it is not something that we solve every day. What I like about the Merge Interval algorithm is that we apply it in our everyday life, usually without even noticing that we are solving an algorithmic problem.

Let's say that we need to organize a meeting for our team. We have three colleagues Jay, May, and Ray and their time schedule look as follows (a colored line represents an occupied timeslot):

This article is about security. I’ll focus on this in the context of web applications, but I’ll also touch on other types of applications. Before I describe approaches and frameworks, I want to tell you a story.

Background

Throughout my years working in the IT sphere, I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects in a variety of fields. Even though the process of authenticating requirements remained relatively consistent, methods of implementing the authorization mechanism tended to be quite different from project to project. Authorization had to be written practically from scratch for the specific goals of each project; we had to develop an architectural solution, then modify it with changing requirements, test it, etc. All this was considered a common process that developers could not avoid. Every time someone implemented a new architectural approach, we felt more and more that we should come up with a general approach that would cover the main authorization tasks and (most importantly) could be reused on other applications. This article takes a look at a generalized architectural approach to authorization based on an example of a developed framework.

Approaches to Creating a Framework

As usual, before developing something new, we need to decide what problems we’re trying to solve, how the framework will help us solve them, and whether or not there is already a solution to these issues. I’ll walk you through each step, starting with identifying issues and describing our desired solution.

We’re focusing on two styles of coding: imperative and declarative. Imperative style is about how to get a result; declarative is about what you want to get as a result.

It may seem that when you are a beginner, you'll do simple things only. No need to learn data structures and algorithms. No need to understand Big O notation, complexity and stuff like that. 

This couldn't be further away from the truth!

In 2008, when I just started learning to program, I spent a lot of time reading books on PHP and MySQL. Months later, when I felt confident, I took my first freelance project. It was a real estate website. A simple one. I used a custom-made ORM and everything worked just fine!

When I released it, the search feature quickly became sluggish and made the website unusable. 

I was wondering what the heck had happened. I figured out that database queries became very slow when there were over 200 real estate objects added to it. 

This is it. What worked fine during testing did not work in real life.

I was a self-taught developer. I did not know how to measure if my project scaled well. I didn't even know that I had to do it.

I thought algorithms mattered only for launching a spaceship.

If I had some basic understanding of algorithms, I would have known that the more the input, the longer it takes. 

I am not saying I would have come up with a robust solution as a junior, but I would have looked for a solution because I knew there would be a problem. 

Please, don't make the same mistake!

Of course, data structures and algorithms are much more than that and they apply differently depending on what you work on.

But a basic understanding of data structures and algorithms is a must for every software developer.