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 »

2020 just arrived and it's time for something new. I have been using Drupal since 2006, so we have been together for almost 14 years! It's an impressive journey and I am look back with satisfaction - Drupal is simple to use if it fits the requirements exactly, and I stoically avoided touching any of its smelly PHP bowls. However, with the arrival of Drupal 8 I realised, that I … more »

Bokeh is a nice library, helping python web developers to visualise your data in the browser. It is on good terms with pandas, the statistical and data manipulation package beloved by data scientists. It can source points from a dataframe object directly. Unfortunately, it can't get a result of a group by object directly to display it as multiple lines, yet. But no worries, with just a few lines of … more »

Sometimes you might need to generate tables in good old plain text. Doing so by hand might be very tedious and error prone. Better let the computer to do the job! Luckily, off the self components exist to do just that. Specifically, Python can be used to perform this task. Here's a link to the relevant python recipe . Alternatively, there is a ready made module TextTable , which is … more »

Yaml is a convenient format for config storing . There are bindings in most of the popular programming languages, including .NET. The latter is well served by the library called YamlDotNet. Yaml has a nice feature calls anchors which allows you to reuse portions of config. It works like this: more »

Microsoft is continuously improving its record with the open source community. First dumping massive chunks of .NET into github, then actually making very dedicated effort to clean it up and make it portable to Linux and Mac. Now comes another step, albeit smaller, in the same direction. Visual Studio 2017 will support CMake projects in a native way, without the need to generate .proj and .sln files first. This is … more »

The Internet is abuzz with the news about various crypto-currencies. From the old favourite BitCoin to the bold newcomers, such as Etherium and Ripple (not that new actually), lots of frantic trading and even more frenzied discussion is taking place. The new currencies are viewed as the end of era of the old money dominance over the finances of the world. In my view we are still very far from … more »

TL;DR; It has been about a year since I joined Toptal as a developer. And overall the experience is rather disappointing so far. For a developer of my level and background I think it's more or less a waste of time. Let me explain why. The interview process I seem to encounter many references to the interview process in Toptal. Some say it's too hard, but most professionals seem to … more »

Many web sites' developers seem to think "the more the better" and clutter their pages with endless images, flashy colours, countless videos and flash animations. This is hugely distracting. For years I have been using a couple of buttons to zap these annoyances from this helpful page . And just now I realised I can combine a few of my favourite ones into one button. It removes images, hides iframes … more »