In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital entertainment, the year 2023 has witnessed a profound transformation in Video On Demand (VOD) Over-The-Top (OTT) platforms. These platforms have redefined how audiences access and consume content, introducing cutting-edge technologies and innovative features that have revolutionized the entertainment industry.

Embracing Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR)

In 2023, VOD OTT platforms have embraced AR and VR technologies to provide viewers with immersive and interactive experiences. Users can now step into virtual worlds, interact with characters, and actively participate in the content they are watching, transcending the boundaries of traditional passive viewing.

Imagine exploring an ancient civilization through the eyes of a protagonist, feeling the thrill of an adrenaline-pumping car chase, or even interacting with virtual avatars of celebrities and influencers. The integration of AR and VR into VOD OTT platforms has ushered in a new era of interactive and experiential entertainment.

Personalization: The Heart of the VOD Experience

Powered by advanced artificial intelligence (AI), VOD OTT platforms have taken personalization to new heights. By analyzing user behavior, preferences, and viewing habits, these platforms deliver tailor-made content recommendations, ensuring that viewers find exactly what they love without extensive searching.

This level of personalization ensures that users are presented with content that resonates with their tastes, creating a seamless and enjoyable content discovery experience. By removing the need for extensive searching, VOD OTT platforms have become the go-to destination for viewers seeking highly relevant and engaging content.

I wrote a small e-book about terrible tips for C++ developers. Actually, it describes bad programming practices and explains why it's better to avoid them. However, every chapter of this mini-book starts with a terrible tip — just for fun.

By the way, these tips may seem artificial but believe me, they are based on the real experience. In other words, the described terrible tips occur in developers' lives — that's why it's worth discussing them. First of all, this book will be useful for junior developers. But more skilled C++ developers can also find interesting and useful tips.

Even though it's a mini-book, it clearly does not fit into the Habr format. Too many words. So, I decided to write here the review. Here is the link to find the full version of the mini-book: 60 terrible tips for a C++ developer.

If you still hesitate whether to read it or not, below you will find a list of terrible tips that will be discussed in the mini-book.

View the terrible tips:

I'm Alex Movergan, DevOps team lead at Altenar. I focus on automation in general and on improving troubleshooting skills within my team. In this article, I'll share a captivating tale that revolves around Kubernetes, validation webhooks, kubespray, and Calico.

Join me on this DevOps journey as we explore real-world scenarios unraveling the intricacies of troubleshooting in a Kubernetes environment.

Push notifications are similar to promoters. You're peacefully walking down the street, and suddenly promoters approach you, urging you to take their flyers. You take them, but you don't read them and throw them into the nearest trash can.

The same goes for push notifications. You're reading an article, and suddenly a notification pops up with a promo code for free delivery of products. Then another one arrives, informing you about a giveaway. And then another one, offering a discount on all fruits. Notifications can appear on your screen at any time. If there are too many of them, your reaction is either to ignore them or disable them.

In this article, we will talk about how to write push notifications that people will click on and show you how to build a push notification strategy. At the end, we will provide a template for a push notification strategy.

Push Notifications - What is it?

A push notification is a pop-up message on a smartphone screen. To send one, you need to use a delivery service. You can send a notification instantly, schedule it for a specific time, or set up a trigger-based delivery - a chain of notifications that will be triggered by specific user actions.

Triggered push notifications are sent after a specific action is taken. For example, if a person starts adding items to their cart but doesn't complete the purchase, you can send them a notification urging them to complete the transaction after a certain period of time.

Notifications are sent to users who fall into specific segments for targeting. Segments are formed based on specific events. For example, the event "6 hours ago, a product was added to the cart but no purchase was made" will divide users into two segments: those who made a purchase and those who didn't.

I believe listicles have a huge potential for testing demand hypotheses. Have you tried using listicles for your demand validation? If so - let us know in the comments how this worked for you.

Do you know these "Top N something something" kind of articles? Like:
- 5 best GPS vehicle trackers
- The 14 hair growth products that actually work
- Top 10 Best CRM Software Tools in 2023
They are often referred to as "listicles" - articles presented in the form of a list.

I love them - they make picking a new phone, a movie to watch, an app to install much easier. I also use them at work all the time while looking for solutions to everyday challenges.

So what if we use one of them to benchmark our product against the best available alternatives?

This is a series of articles dedicated to the optimal choice between different systems on a real project or an architectural interview.

At work or at a System Design interview, you often have to choose the best message broker. I plunged into this issue and will tell you what and why. What is better in each case, what are the advantages and disadvantages of these systems, and which one to choose, I will show with several examples.

How we listened to the needs of our customers and implemented the feature with the maximum capabilities of the iOS and Android platforms. Then we looked into analytics, added onboarding, and usage grew. At the end of the article there are some cool conclusions and insights. Developing a video conferencing mobile app is fun!

So far we've discussed query execution stages, statistics, and the two basic data access methods: Sequential scan and Index scan.

The next item on the list is join methods. This article will remind you what logical join types are out there, and then discuss one of three physical join methods, the Nested loop join. Additionally, we will check out the row memoization feature introduced in PostgreSQL 14.

In this article, I will break down all the secrets of quantum computers piece by piece: what superposition (useless) and entanglement (interesting effect) are, whether they can replace classical computers (no) and whether they can crack RSA (no). At the same time, I will not mention the wave function and annoying Bob and Alice that you might have seen in other articles about quantum machines.

The first and most important thing to know is that quantum computers have nothing to do with conventional ones. Quantum computers are analog in nature, they have no binary operations. You have probably already heard about Qubits that they have a state of 0, 1 and 0-1 at the same time and with the help of this feature calculations are very fast: this is a delusion. A qubit is a magnet (usually an atom or an electron) suspended in space, and it can rotate on all three axes. In fact, the rotations of a magnet in space are the operations of a quantum computer. Why can it speed up calculations? It was very difficult to find the answer, but the most patient readers will find it at the end of the article.

Queries in PostgreSQL. Index scan

In previous articles we discussed query execution stages and statistics. Last time, I started on data access methods, namely Sequential scan. Today we will cover Index Scan.

Sometimes programming with mutexes gets too complicated and messy. Maybe you need to meet a new friend — the Event Loop pattern.

There is a list of well-known electronics design tools for Android which can be found in every review for the last 10 years: “Electrodoc”, “Every Circuit”, “Droid Tesla”, “Electronics Toolbox”, “RF & Microwave Toolbox” and so on. Also, there is a lot of trash on the market that turns finding a good tool into a quest.

This short review is about an unknown but cool tool “Circuit Calculator” working on Android devices and intended for professional electronics designers.

In Rust strings can be represented in two ways:

a)       String type

b)      String slice

String type:

String type is defined as a struct of the following structure:

Depending on arch (in my case x86 64bit it is 24byte)

{

   pointer to the address where string characters are stored (8b)

   capacity (8b)

   length (8b)

}

Once a upon a time I moved to brand new project. And without much thought, I decided to take DevOps responsibilities (after a long period of Frontend). Huge mono-repository (Angular and Node.js) gives rise to many specific problems. And this project was no exception. At the very beginning CI/CD duration was about 1.5h. And that was the biggest problem to take care of.

But at first, I want to talk about "Bourne again shell", cause CI/CD automation almost entirely was implemented by means of shell scripts (Bash). In context of huge mono-repo even regular build becomes a piece of odd stuff. That`s why a huge amount of scripts with complicated logic inside (build, test, deploy, generation of release notes, collection of logs and metrics, ...) was another significant problem.

Regardless of lang, quality of complex logic should be under control. It is no secret that key aspect of code quality control - is tests. For example, to refactor safely major logic should be covered with tests. We decided to keep shell scripts untouched and cover the major ones with tests before any refactoring. Of course, it is possible to use Jest (or Mocha) with a bunch of awful utils to test shell scripts. This approach is a bit wordy and has no value if scripts under test is written in Bash. Also I have no idea how to mock external shell commands (such as curl, ls, touch, npm, ...) with Jest or similar framework.

Hello! I'm kicking off another article series about the internals of PostgreSQL. This one will focus on query planning and execution mechanics.

In the first article we will split the query execution process into stages and discuss what exactly happens at each stage.

3D printing startups often struggle. Despite growing demands and optimistic predictions, the pandemic negatively affected the industry: the material shortage, logistical problems, lockdowns and factory shutdowns form the conditions that are far from perfect. But new interesting ideas still emerge and it seems that the pandemic is far from being the main problem for startups. 

Technically, each of those businesses goes through similar stages: from searching for ideas and like-minded people to attracting investors and scaling up. But this article will not cover the product release but will rather be focused about the things that a startup would face out of its ‘garage’.

This is a moment when Joseph Prusa, a godfather of 3D printers with the kinematics named after him, released a 3D printer with a CoreXY kinematics. But his team isn’t planning to move away from an older solution. In this article we will talk about what the Original Prusa XL will look like, as can be seen in the pictures from the Formnext 2021 exhibition. 

2021 is coming to an end, which means it's time to sum up the year! Today we'll tell you about the new features we added to PVS-Studio in the past year. Buckle up and let's go!

Flipper Zero is an open-source multi-tool for geeks and penetration testers. It so happened that the Flipper Zero project and the PVS-Studio analyzer crossed paths. A philosophical question: should we check the project, if the project developers have already started fixing errors? Let's try to do this.

Back in 2016 an United States based music composer and performer Sergio Elisondo released an one-man band music album A Winner Is You (know your meme), with multi-instrumental cover versions of tunes from numerous memorable classic NES games. A special feature of this release has been its version released in the NES cartridge format that would run on a classic unmodified console and play digitized audio of the full album, instead of the typical chiptune sound you would expect to come from this humble console. I was involved with the software development part of this project.

This year Sergio makes a return with a brand new music release. This time it is all original music album You Are Error, heavily influenced with the video game music aesthetics. It also comes with a special extra. This time we have raised the stakes, and a new NES cartridge release includes not only the digitized audio, but full motion videos for each song, done in the silhouette cutout style similar to the famous Bad Apple video. Yet again, this project is crowdfunded via Kickstarter. It already got the asked amount in a mere 7 hours, but there is still a little time to jump on the bandwagon and get yourself a copy. In the meantime I would like to share an insight on the technical side of both projects.