Data Science and Databases

Image processing algorithms are often very resource intensive due to fact that they process pixels on an image one at a time and often requires multiple passes. Successive Mean Quantization Transform (SMQT) is one such resource intensive algorithm that can process images taken in low-light conditions and reveal details from dark regions of the image.

In this article, Toptal engineer Daniel Angel Munoz Trejo gives us some insight into how the SMQT algorithm works and walks us through a clever optimization technique to make the algorithm a viable option for handheld devices.

When Mike Bostock created D3.js, he introduced a tried and true reusable charts pattern for implementing the same chart in any number of selections. However, the limitations of this pattern are realized once the chart is initialized. In this article, Toptal engineer Rob Moore presents a revised reusable charts pattern that leverages the full power of D3.js.

Bitcoin created a lot of buzz on the Internet. It was ridiculed, it was attacked, and eventually it was accepted and became a part of our lives. However, Bitcoin is not alone. At this moment, there are over 700 AltCoin implementations, which use similar principles of CryptoCurrency.

Google’s new cloud code platform does not appear to be taking on GitHub head on. Instead, Cloud Source Repositories (CSR) will allow users to connect to repositories hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. However, everything is automatically synced to the Google Cloud Source Repository.

The good news is that a Google CSR can be connected to another Git repository hosted on GitHub or Bitbucket. All changes will be synchronised on both platforms, as you can set Google CSR to automatically mirror from GitHub and Bitbucket.

In-memory data collection manipulation is something that we often need to do in data-centric reporting and visualization applications. When needed, we often tend to resort to complex loops, list comprehensions, and other suboptimal means, which can easily end up being a huge mess of hard-to-maintain spaghetti code. Supergroup.js is an in-memory data manipulation library that can be used to solve some common data manipulation challenges on limited datasets.

To retain its users, any application or website must run fast. For mission critical environments, a couple of milliseconds delay in getting information might create big problems. As database sizes grow day by day, we need to fetch data as fast as possible, and write the data back into the database as fast as possible. To make sure all operations are executing smoothly, we have to tune Microsoft SQL Server for performance.

Microsoft Bond is a modern data serialization framework. It provides powerful DSL and flexible protocols, code generators for C++ and C#, efficient protocol implementations for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. This article is a quick guide of the features and use of this framework.