Around the world in 80ms
My slides for my talk on how the internet and the web works at Insights Conference 2015 in Cyprus. The audience was semi-technical so I simplified a lot of technical concepts.
Alex Michael
Ramblings on tech, startups and other oddities.
Latest posts
Which letter consumes the most pixels on screen?
I recently discovered an interesting question on Stack Overflow: I am trying to do some dynamic programming based on the number of chars in a sentence. I need to know which letter of the English alphabet takes up the most pixels in the screen??? The most popular answer was great – simple and to the point. But, counting the background as pixels consumed by the letter didn’t feel right to me so I…
Delightful testing with pytest and Flask-SQLAlchemy
If words bore you, you can find the code in this gist . If you’re not familiar with either Flask-SQLAlchemy or pytest , you can read up on them here and here . Goals Before we dive in the code, let’s establish two important goals for our test suite: Fast : Slow tests become a friction point in your development workflow. Database setup and truncating or dropping tables cause delays. Isolated : Each…
A solution to problem #79 on Project Euler
Problem 79 is an interesting problem which actually uncovers how easy it is for someone to recover the passcode of a user using a keylogger. The problem is phrased as follows: A common security method used for online banking is to ask the user for three random characters from a passcode. For example, if the passcode was 531278, they may ask for the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th characters; the expected reply…
Approach: Building a toy template engine in Python
If you wish to dive straight into the code, then Github is your friend. Language design Our language is pretty basic. We will have two types of tags, variables and blocks . 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 <!-- variables are surrounded by `{{` and `}}` --> <div> {{my_var}} </div> <!-- blocks are surrounded by `{%` and `%}` --> {% each items %} <div> {{it}} </div> {% end %} Most blocks need to be closed as in the…
How to win your next hackathon: 8 top tips
On the weekend of 10-11th of November, we took part in the first ever AngelHack London . For those who haven’t heard of it, AngelHack claims to be the world’s biggest hackathon and holds events from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. Judging from the amount of people participating in the London hackathon at Bloomberg’s offices, their claim could quite possibly be true. Over 350 developers, designers and…
Hack Cyprus 2012: A tale of hacking in Cyprus
First, some geography. Do you see that little island in the middle of Turkey, Lebanon and Egypt? That’s Cyprus. Its population? Less than a million people. According to Google, it doesn’t even deserve a country tag at this zoom level. Cyprus experienced its first hackathon last weekend, and it was awesome. More than 80 people got together and hacked for around 30 hours building stuff ranging from…