WordPress 5.0

WordPress 5.0 has been released today.  It is by far the largest update to the system since … since I can remember.  In fact, to some, it might look like a completely different system, thanks to a totally new editing experience – Gutenberg.

I have already upgraded this blog to the new version, and I’m writing this post with the new editor.  It is awesome!  It’ll take some getting used, but not because it’s difficult, rather because I’ve been using WordPress for too long.

I also can’t wait to see what all the creative people will come up with in their themes and plugins, pushing WordPress websites to the new high.

Great work and huge thanks to everyone involved!

12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business

12 Best API Monitoring Tools for Your Business” lists a bunch of services that are useful for the monitoring of your API.  Read the whole thing for more details.  Here’s the list of the services covered:

Greatest safety instructions ever


Over the years, I’ve seen quite a few of similar videos, but I think this is the funniest of them all!  Given how seriously airlines take safety, I hope this flight attendant is not fired or punished any other way.  Because, unlike all those regular instructions, people will actually listen to these, and, on top of them, will actually remember…




PHP: Countries and currencies


Many software projects deal with the lists of countries and currencies.  Some of the most common tasks include country an currency dropdowns, country flags next to the IP, or pre-filling country codes in phone numbers.

All of that information is of course standardized and you often just need a library or two to provide and use it.  And there are many of those.  We’ve been mainly using these two:

Today, however, I came across a better option – antonioribeiro/countries, which is a collection of country and currency information for Laravel PHP framework.  Laravel is not required though.  This library provides way more information and in a much more flexible way.  It includes:

  • 266 countries (with more codes, common names, official names, and more)
  • 256 currencies
  • 1,570 flags
  • 248 geometry maps
  • 248 topology maps
  • 4,526 states
  • 7,376 cities
  • and a lot more!




Practical Cryptography for Developers


Practical Cryptography for Developers” is a free book (with GitHub repository) by Svetlin Nakov, which aims at teaching developers some of the most practical concepts of cryptography.  The book covers hashing functions, random generators, symmetric and asymmetric keys, digital signatures, and more.  Each chapter is rich with diagrams, illustrations, code samples, as well as exercises.