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.

Amazon AWS : Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users

ENT309 Scaling Up to Your First 10 Million Users from Amazon Web Services

This must be one of the greatest presentations on the Amazon AWS that I’ve ever seen. It uses a gradual approach – from small and simple to huge and complex. It covers a whole lot of different Amazon AWS services, how they compliment each other, at which stage and scale they become useful, and more.

Even quickly jumping through the slides gave me a lot to think (and Google) about.

GitHub : Archiving Repositories

Last week, GitHub introduced archiving of repositories. While it might not seem like a news worthy feature, it is quite useful for both individuals and teams. Two particular scenarios that I find helpful are:

Indicate that a particular repository / project is obsolete and is not maintained. This should save quite a bit of time for people who randomly end up on a project’s page, via searching GitHub/Packagist/Google or somewhere else.
Provide an insight into how many of the person’s or team’s profile are active. It’s often difficult to estimate at a first glance, when looking at a GitHub profile of a person or a team who have been developing for a long time, how many of their projects are actually actively maintained.

Easily optimize images using PHP

Via this blog post I came across this PHP image optimization library, which somewhat reminds me of this blog post from a couple of years ago. As good as ImageMagick is, it takes time and effort to find all the right options. With Spatie Image Optimizer you have an almost out of the box solution for optimizing images in a variety of formats.

This package can optimize PNGs, JPGs, SVGs and GIFs by running them through a chain of various image optimization tools.

Best Automation Testing Tools for 2018 (Top 10 reviews)

Here is a nice review of the top 10 best automation testing tools circa 2018. It covers the following:

If you are just setting up the QA team or department and want to know what’s new and hot, or old and tested in the world of automated testing, have a look at these tools.

A Look Back at the History of CSS

“A Look Back at the History of CSS” is a nice trip down the history lane as to where and how CSS came about. It’s hard to imagine these days that CSS wasn’t always around and the web looked like whatever your browser decided to make it look like.