Data Science and Databases

Data conversion, translation, and mapping is by no means rocket science, but it is by all means tedious. This article introduces MetaDapper, a .NET library that strives to simplify, streamline, and automate the data conversion process to the greatest extent possible.

Scientific computing is hard. But thanks to an ever-growing landscape of open source tools, really tough problems are becoming easier to solve. Toptal engineer Charles Cook provides an in-depth example, leveraging open source tools to solve a problem in computational fluid dynamics.

This Machine Learning tutorial introduces the basics of ML theory, laying down the common themes and concepts, making it easy to follow the logic and get comfortable with the topic.

Once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8.

Indeed, navigating through UTF-8 related issues can be a frustrating and hair-pulling experience. This post provides a concise cookbook for addressing these issues when working with PHP and MySQL in particular, based on practical experience and lessons learned.

The recent resurgence in Artificial Intelligence has been powered in no small part by a new trend in machine learning, known as “Deep Learning”. In this article, I’ll introduce you to the key concepts and algorithms behind Deep Learning, beginning with the simplest building block.

The need to adapt legacy code and systems to meet modern day performance and processing demands is widespread. This post provides a case study of the use of Erlang and CloudI to adapt legacy code, consisting of a decades-old collection of multi-user game software written in C, to the 21st century.

As a veteran telecommuter through multiple jobs in my career, I have witnessed and experienced the many joys of being a remote worker. As for the horror stories, I have more than a few I could tell. With a bit of artistic inclination and a talent for mathematics, I also have a fascination with patterns: design patterns, architectural patterns, behavioral patterns, social patterns, weather patterns—all sorts of patterns!

When I first encountered anti-patterns, I discovered a trove of wisdom I wish I had known before I had learned the hard way. Anti-patterns are recognizable repeated patterns that contribute significantly to failure. For example, the manager that keeps interrupting the employee in order to see if the employee is getting any work done is engaging in an anti-pattern that serves to prevent the employee from getting any work done!

Based on my own experiences and experiences of friends and co-workers, I am assembling descriptions of anti-patterns related to telecommuting.

In 2007, Bennett Haselton revealed a minor hack with major implications: querying ranges of numbers on Google would return pages of sensitive information, including Credit Card numbers, Social Security numbers, and more. While Haselton’s hack was addressed and patched, I was able to tweak his original technique to bypass Google’s filter and return the same old dangerous results.

From the very first days in our lives as programmers, we’ve all dealt with data structures: Arrays, linked lists, trees, sets, stacks and queues are our everyday companions, and the experienced programmer knows when and why to use them.

In this article we’ll see how an oft-neglected data structure, the trie, really shines in application domains with specific features, like word games.

Web Developers often fail to consider the consequences of thousands of users accessing our applications at the same time. Perhaps it’s because we love to rapidly prototype; perhaps it’s because testing such scenarios is simply hard.

Regardless, I’m going to argue that ignoring scalability is not as bad as it sounds—if you use the proper set of tools and follow good development practices. In this case: the Play! framework and the Scala language.

The foreign exchange (forex) market is the most liquid market in the world. Learn from a software developer’s firsthand experience creating forex algorithmic trading strategies—and more—in this trading tutorial.

But this isn’t just another article about cohort analysis. If you already know the importance of the topic and want to skip the introduction, you can jump to the simulator, where you can either simulate startup growth based on retention, churn, and a number of other factors, or analyze your own PayPal logs with the code I’ve open sourced.

If, however, you don’t realize that these are some of the most important metrics around–continue reading.

Porn is a big industry. There aren’t many sites on the Internet that can rival the traffic of its biggest players.

And juggling this immense traffic is tough. To make things even harder, much of the content served from porn sites is made up of low latency live streams rather than simple static video content. But for all of the challenges involved, rarely have I read about the developers who take them on. So I decided to write about my own experience on the job.