National Geographic published its selection of the best photos of 2016.
Here is a gallery of National Geographic’s 52 best images of the year—curated from 91 photographers, 107 stories, and 2,290,225 photographs.
Some are, as always, absolutely amazing. Some are not so much. For a global collection of pictures, it’s surprising to find the word “Yellowstone” mentioned 13 times on the page.
This one is my favorite:
Of those with people in them, I liked this one:
“Taking the Pain Out of MySQL Schema Changes” covers the following approaches to deploying MySQL schema changes:
The last one is the usage of pt-online-schema-change tool developed by Percona guys, as part of their Percona Toolkit – an Open Source set of command-line tools for MySQL.
I’ve been catching up with the CakePHP roadmap. One of the tickets for the next release (CakePHP 3.3.10, scheduled for tomorrow), is this ticket, relating to the breadcrumbs navigation.
When building applications with CakePHP, you have a couple of easy ways to generate breadcrumbs for the easier user navigation. One, is to use HTML Helper, which provides a quick and simple way. The other, is to use a feature rich Breadcrumbs Helper, available since CakePHP version 3.3.6 (but not mentioned in the release notes).
Digging further down into templates, and best practices for user navigation, and different ways of styling breadcrumbs (Smashing Magazine, Hongkiat, UI Patterns), I thought – wouldn’t it be nice to have breadcrumbs navigation built into a human brain?
I mean, how many times did you catch yourself in some dark corner of the Internet, trying to figure out how did you get there? If only humans had breadcrumbs navigation built into our brains, that would be so easy to trace back the steps. Browser history can, of course, help, but with so many open tabs and several things happening in parallel, a flat list of tabs is not much help.
This bit from the WordPress Dev Chat Summary made me smile today:
Minor releases will continue to follow the philosophy of trying to fix more bugs than we create.
Simple, elegant and effective…
DB-Engines.com provides some insight into some of the most popular database engines (312 of them to be precise). Nothing too surprising there – Oracle and MySQL leading the charts, but it’s nice to have the numbers and trends.
There are, of course, many different ways how the popularity can be calculated. Their method is based on the popularity of each engine in a variety of online outlets, from Google Search to social networks.
- Number of mentions of the system on websites, measured as number of results in search engines queries. At the moment, we use Google, Bing and Yandex for this measurement. In order to count only relevant results, we are searching for <system name> together with the term database, e.g. “Oracle” and “database”.
- General interest in the system. For this measurement, we use the frequency of searches in Google Trends.
- Frequency of technical discussions about the system. We use the number of related questions and the number of interested users on the well-known IT-related Q&A sites Stack Overflow and DBA Stack Exchange.
- Number of job offers, in which the system is mentioned. We use the number of offers on the leading job search engines Indeed and Simply Hired.
- Number of profiles in professional networks, in which the system is mentioned. We use the internationally most popular professional networks LinkedIn and Upwork.
- Relevance in social networks. We count the number of Twitter tweets, in which the system is mentioned.
It seems objective and representative enough to me.