COVID-19 has been with us for almost a year as a news item. The reports indicate, that a lot of people died of the disease. Every lost life is a tragedy, of course. It is important to understand, how exactly the pandemic affected mortality in large populations. Unfortunately, the cause of death attribution to COVID-19 is not always accurate. Sometimes people are recorded as have died of the virus simply … more »

The number of large software systems in the world is growing steadily. Old first generation solutions get improvements and grow more sophisticated. Completely new areas open up for automation. More systems, more lines of code. More complexity everywhere. Inevitably, more questions about the behaviour - why did it do that??? And, of course, more errors, from bugs in the systems themselves to malfunctioning of external dependencies and processes.There are various … more »

The world we live in is not perfect. Not everyone has enough food. Some people lack even good drinkable water. Lots of children go about without proper education, or any education at all for that matter. Some dudes can't get their hands on that great Maserati they have been dreaming about all their lives. And only one thing seems to be available in abundance - online social networks!Facebook, Instagram (owned … more »

The year 2020 has been a hard one for many. COVID-19 was a surprise, although health experts made predictions for years regarding a future unknown virus. The restrictions, introduced by governments around the world in order to combat the disease, did as much damage to the humanity as the infection itself. We will continue to feel the consequences for years, if not decades to come, even if an end to … more »

What if you find yourself managing more than one Django-based web site at the same time in production? Do you have to deploy each one of them on a separate server? Or can you manage with just one, saving on hosting expenses? How will you go about the setup in this case, ensuring smooth running of these sites side by side.For "real" production web site, with medium to heavy traffic, … more »

Electronic trading, also known as automated trading, algo/algorithmic trading is, quite simply, a process of automatic buying and selling of financial instruments. It can be fully or partially automated. In recent years electronic trading of various flavours became extremely popular. Large banks, hedge funds and other investment institutions are on one end of scale of users, while small day traders and other part time and amateur players can be found … more »

Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS styling framework, originally developed by Twitter, and currently published in open source. While not the only player in that field, it remains a very popular choice for many web developers. It helps people with limited artistic abilities, such as yours truly, to create web sites that are reasonably easy on the eye. It provides many styles and utilities to make the visual layout of a web … more »

Close to 15 years I have been using Drupal for my personal web sites. Drupal is a flexible and configurable CMS (Content Management System) web framework, similar to Wordpress. It has been a relatively dependable working horse for my hosting needs - simple and not too flexible, but relatively robust and reliable. It was quite straightforward to bring up a new web site via it:Create a new MySQL databaseCreate a … more »

Telegram, one of the largest instant messaging applications, introduces bot support some time ago. Their main purpose, it seems, is to have a sort of interactive communications with users. However, you can use the API for much more prosaic, but constructive purposes. For example, bots are perfect for sending notifications for your DevOps/admin activities, or for your automation scripts. Of course, you can utilize email for the same purpose, but … more »

Django is a web development framework for Python. I used it for a few web sites, including a relatively large one. I must say, my overall impression is rather ambivalent.First of all, Django is definitely excels when you need stuff done, quickly. A lot of stuff simply works out of the box or with minimum effort, including DB access and ORM, caching, templating and so on. And there are so … more »