Category: Programming

A big part of my work has to do with code. I’ve worked as system administrator – installing, patching, and configuring someone else’s code. I’ve worked as independent programmer, writing code on my own. I also programmed as part of the team. And on top of that, I worked as Team Leader and Project Manager, where I had to interact a lot with programmers. Programming world on its own is as huge as the universe. There is always something to learn. When I find something worthy or something that I understand enough to write about, I share it in this category.

Learning Machine Learning and NLP from 187 Quora Questions

Machine Learning is a hot subject these days. And as with any other hot subject, there is a multitude of books, online course, videos, and guides available all over the web. I think that this curated list of 187 Quora questions is an interesting way of approaching the subject.

While Quora has FAQ pages for many topics (e.g. FAQ for Machine Learning), they are far from comprehensive. In this post, I’ve tried to provide a more thorough Quora FAQ for several machine learning and NLP topics.

Quora doesn’t have much structure, and many questions you find on the site are either poorly answered or extremely specific. I’ve tried to include only popular questions that have good answers on general interest topics.

Addict – Active Directory REST API in 30 seconds

Addict is a drop-in REST API microservice for Active Directory implementations. Just like that.

I’m leaving it here for the next time that I’ll have to deal with the Active Directory. Or, hopefully, never.

Browser screenshots with PHP and Google Chrome 59+

The release of Google Chrome 59 brought some really cool features. One of them in particular was all over the technology news – headless mode. Being able to run the browser engine without the graphical interface, and having control from the command line and API has many benefits.

One of the benefits is being able to take web page screenshots. “Easily convert webpages to images using PHP” is one of the many blogs and articles that explain how to do it, using your preferred programming language (or mine in this case). Browsershot is a very simple PHP library, which you can install with Composer and start using straight away.

I’ve tried it out and it works pretty well. The screenshot above has been taken by the following script:

<?php 
require_once 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Spatie\Browsershot\Browsershot;

Browsershot::url('https://mamchenkov.net')
  ->windowSize(1600,900)
  ->save('screenshot.png');

Improving the output of PHPUnit

Via “Improving the output of PHPUnit” I’ve learned about PHPUnit Emoji Result Printer. Obviously, this sounds like fun, but I’m also sure there is some really smart way of using this.

Too bad I couldn’t try it on one of our work projects just yet, as this requires PHPUnit 6+, while we are still on PHPUnit 5.7. But we’ll get there.

In Java 3 = 12

And then, after all that bashing of PHP being ugly and unpredictable, here comes this:

System.out.println(1 + 2 + " = " + 1 + 2);
// Output:
3 = 12

I understand why this happens, and how to work around it. But I wasn’t expecting something as … simple … from the oh magestic Java.