How to become an author

Grind is a process of slowly getting valuable resources (be it experience points or loot) by repetitive and often simple tasks in video games. It has been present from the beginning of gaming but has become more widespread with the popularization of online RPG games because of their leveling systems and competitive elements. 

It is highly criticized by gamers around the world for making games boring and work-like, yet many people specifically choose to play grind-heavy games. The reason might be because they find simple repetitive tasks relaxing and distracting from real-life problems, as a form of escapism.

However, there is also a gameplay reason for grinding: getting valuable resources early can make a game easier later. Some popular games like Diablo are even centered around grind. Thus, everyone will have to grind at some point to prevent gameplay from getting too difficult, which quickly becomes an inescapable habit. Later, gamers might apply grinding even to games that do not require it. Interestingly enough, grinding early on can also make the late-game boring because it is going to be too easy if the game was not designed for grinding. For example, in Subnautica, getting a lot of resources early on will make some of the late-game tools useless because all the resources that could have been gained with them have already been gained.

From the example above, we can see that grind does not always improve the gameplay. We can also see that it is not always a necessary process and can be either minimized or avoided entirely: sometimes, the need for it exists only in our mind, forcing us to diminish the fun of actually playing the game. Is it just a question of habit or is there any other reason for us to grind?

In microservice world the problem of high load is exteremely big especially when we have a REST API which is accessed quite extensively. Why do we need throttling? The main answer is to decrease the load of the service at the moment.

Different frameworks have different solutions, mostly some additional libraries. Also there is a Guava RateLimiter and Bucket4J . What is interesting Spring MVC being one of the most popular solutions for building REST APIs (thank you Spring Boot) doesn't have any built in rate limiter. As for external solutions there not that many ways around.

Today, I would like to present a tiny experimental library specific for Spring MVC. It is called SpringRateLimitter. The library is very tiny ,works in runtime. The idea is to annotate entire rest controller or specific method , than count the number of incoming requests for the annotated URI and based on the values check if we exceed the allowed number of calls. In case of exceeding an HTTP error code 429 is thrown and after the throttling period is over , the endpoint is available again.

So How does it look like. As first step Maven dependency must be added

Technology is as adaptable and compatible as mankind; it finds its way through problems and situations. 2020 was one such package of uncertain events that forced businesses to adapt to digital transformation, even to an extent where many companies started to consider the remote work culture to be a beneficiary long-term model. Technological advancements like Hyper automation, AI Security, and Distributed cloud showed how any people-centric idea could rule the digital era. The past year clearly showed the boundless possibilities through which technology can survive or reinvent itself. With all those learnings let's deep-dive and focus on some of the top technology trends to watch out for in 2021.

Hey Habr! I'm Ruslan, a Java programmer with experience in IT of 15 years who still doesn't understand how to grow as a technical specialist in a company.

SWIG is a tool for generating cross-language interfaces - it provides interoperability of C++ and other languages (C++ and Java in our case). SWIG just simplifies and automizes cross-language interaction; otherwise, you may end up with thousands of lines of handwritten JNI code - but SWIG covers this for you.

This guide is for newbies (Part 1) and for those who experienced in SWIG (part 2). I'm starting from basic setup and usage and ending with complex & weird cases encountered in development. The latter cases are not so complex, rather usual for modern languages, which SWIG doesn't support yet (as lambdas).

This guide is practical. In opposition to overcomplicated huge-volume SWIG documentation, this guide is showing the cases practically. The bits developed by myself while working on the different projects or taken from StackOverflow. This guide allows you to quick-start an Android Studio project and giving practical examples of using SWIG. The link to the Android Studio project is here.

This guide is Android-first. The goal was to make it simple to onboard for Android developers. There are many articles about SWIG, but they are mainly for desktop Java applications, and it is quite an overhead to just try them on Android to check if the solution for the particular problem is working. While this guide includes an Android Studio project, with which you can play around instantly. Of course, all the information given here applies to any Java application.

Warning! I should warn you, that nowadays cross-platform development offers powerful tools. If you are developing a new application it is much more cost-efficient in practice to use ReactNative, Flutter of Kotlin-Native than the SWIG. While SWIG is more suitable to connect the C++ library or existing C++ application core.

This tutorial is aimed to help Django beginners who want to run a project on Heroku while storing static files on AWS S3. While being a major help for web developers, both services can be hard for beginners to set up correctly. I’ll admit these topics can be found covered separately elsewhere, but there are also some unaccountable nuances if you are trying to make both work in a single project.

Personally I couldn’t find a source which would not only cover Heroku deployment or S3 usage, but would address those nuances as well. Reading the manuals trying to figure out what do you have to do to deploy a project correctly might be an important part of learning, but it can also make you lose focus on what you are currently trying to study or, even worse, discourage you altogether. If this is your story, look no further. I hope instructions below will help you to deploy your project in a single track without having to consult with other resources.

The text is broken down into 3 logically distinct chapters: prerequisites for local Django app (a mini-chapter), integrating  AWS S3 into your app for storing static files, and finally deploying to Heroku. You might not want to go through the entire process in one sitting. In the beginning of each chapter an approximate time required to complete chapter’s instructions will be noted so it is possible for the reader to plan ahead. I would advise not to break down a single chapter into multiple sittings, but if it is not possible, at least try to complete all work covered by a single sub-chapter section in a single go.

Links to official documentation will be provided in text in case you might need extra details on particular actions.

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Designing a circuit that calculates integer cube root.

In this article I will make a circuit on Verilog HDL on FPGA which will calculate cube root from integer value.

Let's consider the following problem: we have an array of integers and we need to find out the length of the smallest subarray the sum of which is no less than the target number. If we don't have such a subarray we shall return -1.

We can start with a naive approach and consider every possible subarray in the input:

Example with JSONDecoder

struct Test<T>: Codable where T: Codable {
    enum CodingKeys: String, CodingKey {
        case value
    }
    
    let value: T
    let info: String
}

extension Test {
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)
        self.value = try container.decode(T.self, forKey: .value)
        self.info = "Default init(from decoder:)"
    }
}

extension Test where T == String {
    init(from decoder: Decoder) throws {
        let container = try decoder.container(keyedBy: CodingKeys.self)
        self.value = try container.decode(T.self, forKey: .value)
        self.info = "Custom init(from decoder:)"
    }
}

let data = #"{"value":"Hello, World!"}"#.data(using: .utf8)!
let object = try? JSONDecoder().decode(Test<String>.self, from: data)
print(object.debugDescription)

Optional(
    Test<String>(
        value: "Hello, World!", 
        info: "Default init(from decoder:)"
    )
)

The Chinese Mobile RPG: the Genre of Giants.

Chinese RPGs make up 56% of the top 500 grossing iOS games in China. According to data gathered in 2019 by Game Refinery’s Joel Julkunen. Let’s take a look at the genre and some important points for game developers and RPG enthusiasts to consider Chinese Mobile RPGs.

RPG or role-playing game is a game where the player plays as a character, often the main character, in a fictional game world.

PMP exam = your own project

Time

rotor is a non-intrusive event loop friendly C++ actor micro framework, similar to its elder brothers like caf and sobjectizer. The new release came out under the flag of pluginization, which affects the entire lifetime of an actor.

JavaCC 21 is a continuation of work on the venerable JavaCC parser generator, originally developed at Sun Microsystems in the 1990’s and released under a liberal open source license in 2003. It is currently the most advanced version of JavaCC. It has many feature enhancements (with more to come soon) and also generates much more modern, readable Java code. Also, certain key bugs have finally been fixed. (N.B. The “21” in JavaCC 21 is not a version number. It is simply part of the project name and means that this is a JavaCC for the 21st century!)

English translation of Philip Ranzim's post at his blog page here. (With author's permission)

Once upon a time, my girlfriend started using Instagram. She asked me to sign up for it and subscribe to it. I tried — I couldn't do it because you couldn't register at Instagram from a desktop computer. I then thought — how weird people are. Well, what kind of fool would make a software product that can't be used with a normal computer? They won't succeed, and this Instagram will be a marginal service for a bunch of strange women, who for some reason don't like desktops.

It has only been a few years, the market has put everything in place — and the biggest fool was me. And the geniuses at Instagram predicted how and where everything would develop. Today, most of the user applications are made primarily for mobile platforms. At best, they include a universal web client, which is still optimized for mobile phones. Because users love iPhones, not computers. Business people sat down, counted, and made a decision — let's make more money, let's have mobile First everywhere.

1. Introduction

How can I easily test my MongoDB multi-document transaction code without setting up MongoDB on my device? One might argue that they have to set it up first because in order to carry out such a transaction it needs a session which requires a replica set. Thankfully, there is no need to create a 3-node replica set and we can run these transactions only against a single database instance.

Tutorial level: Beginner/Junior

Motivation

Sometimes, when we surf dribbble, uplabs and similar design clouds, we often find many concepts or prototypes with animations, micro interactions, application flow and so on.
I often find illustrations of mobile apps that are good and interesting, but of course they are still in the form of concept, so therefore, why don't we try to apply them as an interface for applications that we will build next.

Original concept

In the Dribbble Challenge we will try to build an interface for Coffee Ordering, as I found on Dribble.

GIF here

A linked list is a linear data structure, which contains node structure and each node contains two elements. A data part that stores the value at that node and next part that stores the link to the next node as shown in the below image:

The first node also known as HEAD is usually used to traverse through the linked list. The last node (next part of the last node) points to NULL. The list can be visualized as a chain of nodes, where every node points to the next node.

Implementation of Singly Linked List

Representation:

In PHP, singly linked list can be represented as a class and a Node as a separate class. The LinkedList class contains a reference of Node class type.

//node structure
class Node {
  public $data;
  public $next;
}

class LinkedList {
  public $head;

  //constructor to create an empty LinkedList
  public function __construct(){
    $this->head = null;
  }
};