Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Swap – currency exchange rates library

Swap is a currency exchange rates library for PHP. It provides a single interface to conveniently work with currency exchange rates and integrates with more than a dozen of different exchange rates providers.

Awesome Interviews

Awesome Interviews is a curated awesome list of lists of interview questions. Technical interviews, mind you. It covers a wide range of areas from a variety of programming languages, frameworks and databases, to operating systems, data structures and algorithms. There also coding exercises and much more.

This list links to some really great resources for both candidates, who are preparing for the interviews, and interviewers who want to make their interviews better.

ULID – Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier

If you thought that UUID was the end of universally unique identifiers, think again. Here’s the ULID spec, with the following improvements:

  • 128-bit compatibility with UUID
  • 1.21e+24 unique ULIDs per millisecond
  • Lexicographically sortable!
  • Canonically encoded as a 26 character string, as opposed to the 36 character UUID
  • Uses Crockford’s base32 for better efficiency and readability (5 bits per character)
  • Case insensitive
  • No special characters (URL safe)
  • Monotonic sort order (correctly detects and handles the same millisecond)

Here’s how it looks:

ulid() // 01ARZ3NDEKTSV4RRFFQ69G5FAV

And there’s a wide selection of libraries implementing ULID for all major programming languages.

Guesstimate – a spreadsheet for things that aren’t certain

Guesstimate is a spreadsheet for non-precise calculations (estimations and approximations). Watch a two-minute video on the homepage to get a better idea of how it works.

While playing around with it and reading more on similar tools, I also found these two Wikipedia pages interesting:

Very cool stuff!