Category: Web work

These days, most of my work is very related to the online world. Building web sites, reviewing web applications, integrating with web services, coordinating people who are far away from each other, etc. Whenever I find a new tool or service or an innovative, interesting idea about working online, I share it in this category.

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.

Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda

For all those of you who want to try out Amazon Lambda with PHP, here’s a quick and simple guide as to how to set it up: Serverless PHP on AWS Lambda.

This is some pretty exciting stuff!

Machine Learning 101 by Jason Mayes

There is a tonne of information both online and offline on the subjects of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Some resources provide just the bare minimum introductory information. Others dive deep into specifics. But I haven’t seen one that is as easy to follow as Jason Mayes’ Machine Learning 101 slides deck.

It’s so easy in fact that is probably useful to even the non-technical people who want to know how this whole AI thing works. I particularly liked how the slides are separated into green background for general knowledge and blue background for in-depth knowledge, making them easy to skip. I also find the balance between the details in the slides and the further reading / watching resources to be just right.

SSH Examples, Tips & Tunnels

“SSH Examples, Tips & Tunnels” is a nice collection of tips and examples for Secure Shell (ssh) users. It covers a variety of scenarios from simple remote connections, to file copying, to tunnels and jump hosts.