We live in an unprecedented era of customizability of physical goods and services. One problem that still appears relatively unsolved is the proliferation of settings. I will speak about software, since it’s the domain I’m more familiar with. Many could argue, this is a problem only if your application doesn’t Read more…
My next instalment on distributed systems after Elasticsearch and Redis is Apache Kafka. The intended audience, as usual, is absolute beginners with distributed systems. I’ve spent a significant amount of time on doing the diagrams to facilitate explanations. Please consider subscribing and giving a thumbs up if you’ve liked the content. Read more…
On my quest to make shorter videos on programming fundamentals, I’m kicking this initiative with a video explaining the mechanics of compiled and interpreted programming languages and the trade-offs associated with each. The presentation inside the video is embedded below as well. Enjoy! If you find it useful, give it Read more…
One of the most interesting datasets I have is my own Apple Health data, which I’ve always liked playing with. Some years ago, I did share a post analyzing the data using Jupyter Notebook. Today is 2021 and a popular visualization tool with software developers for collecting system metrics is Grafana. Read more…
After a month and half of making, in this 3-part series I go over the How Video Streaming Works, if you find any of the videos useful – like & subscribe! Terminology HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) Content Distribution Network (CDN)
Recently, I’ve noticed a lot of people (novices and experienced developers) are not using even the popular shortcuts in Windows File Explorer, which prompted me to share some tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Fortunately, Microsoft has kept the majority of keyboard shortcuts consistent since Windows 95. I’ll Read more…
In this post we’ll explore what is GraphQL and when it makes sense to use it. We’ll map an existing SQL database (SQLite) with an Object Relational Mapping (ORM) system – SQLAlchemy in Python, and finally unify both concepts by using the ORM bindings inside GraphQL queries and start up Read more…
This setup guide is intended for people starting up web development and some of the best tips & tricks when working with Visual Studio Code in 2020. Nowadays, you have quite a few options for text editors and IDEs, but the most established and still gaining steam is Visual Studio Read more…
It’s been a while since I last wrote a blog post, let alone a one building a new tiny game. So the latest addition is https://pong.ivaylopavlov.com as you can probably guess, it’s a simple game of pong. I remember that back in the day, many programmers started out with building Read more…
Since writing Setting up Oh-my-Zsh, I’ve levelled up in terms of shell usage and customization. I’ve also switched to Windows as my primary development environment due to variety of reasons. The main one being that I finally built myself a desktop PC and switched away from my trustworthy 7 year-old Read more…
I was looking for a project to improve my knowledge of the most significant ReactJS feature in recent time – hooks, alongside the new bits in TypeScript 3.7. Something relatively simple, in the spirit of the previous games I’ve built in TypeScript/ES6, seemed to be a Minesweeper clone. In this Read more…
I was curious to see if over time the type of music I listen to has changed. Have I started listening to quieter genres or more bass-heavy tracks? After a small search, it turned out Spotify conveniently provides the Spotipy python package that interacts with their Web API and allows Read more…
I’ve set myself to write this Home Theatre Setup Guide, as there is a lot of information on home theatre systems, however none of it is well compiled and to the point or it’s just a blatant advertisement for the manufacturer of the equipment. Most of the knowledge I’ve gathered Read more…
After setting up Oh-My-Zsh as out default shell, the natural flow, goes to set up a multi-screen environment. Nowadays, most of the GUI consoles that comes with Gnome, KDE, etc. have support for tabs, however XTerm and PuTTY and others do not. iTerm 2 on Mac OS has native support Read more…
Everything started when my flatmate, Stefan, wanted to play Battle City. It’s a very old game with tanks defending their base for NES. It was very popular in the 90s. When I was little I loved playing this game with friends, so I decided to see what’s available out there besides Read more…