Advent of Code - Day 4 Disclaimer: There is surely a better solution than this one. But I’m fairly okay with this one. And I wrote it, so… Okay, this day was a bit more complex now. But not in understanding what needed to be done, but implementing it. And then, part two of course. Day 4 - Part 1 We met a squid this day and decided to play a round of Bingo with it. Because, why not? Bingo is a simple game. You have several papers on which there are a couple numbers in a square. Someone draws a number, and you need to find that number on your boards, cards, slips, whatevers. Once you have marked 5 numbers in a row, or a column ( or, in the original game diagonal also goes ) you win. ...

Advent Of Code - Day 3 Here we go for day 3! This day was a tiny bit more complex. A lot of more things to read for sure! But all the more exciting! Let’s get to it! Day 3 - Part 1 We are dealing with binary numbers. At fist glance it can be daunting, but it’s actually not that complicated. We have to find two numbers. gamma rate and epsilon rate. To do that, we have to parse some binary numbers and then convert them to decimal. The two numbers can be found by looking for the most common bit at a given position in all of the numbers and the least common one at a given position in all of the given numbers. Better put, as we read on, find the bit that occurs most of the time and the one that occurs least of the time in all numbers and put them together. That’s your new number. ...

Advent Of Code - Day 2 Here we go for day 2! These first couple of problems prepare you on how to deal with input mainly. Learn and get used to parsing lines, and get comfortable with data structures. Day 2 - Part 1 We continue the story of Santa and the submarine. This time, he has the task of trying to steer the thing. The task is straightforward. You get a couple of instructions and based on a value you increase or decrease a positions. ...

Advent Of Code - Day 1 Since 2015, Advent Of Code has been a part of my life. I’ve done various posts on it already, but this year will be different. I’m going to blog every day every solution, why and how I’ve gotten to that solution. This isn’t going to be ever December, because I’m usually unable to solve a problem on a single day in the later days from day 10 or so. It takes more time then I have. But I will solve all of them. At the time of this writing, I have completed almost all puzzles except for year 2019 which I didn’t much enjoy to be honest. ...

Prologue Hello all. This is a summary of the book Programmer’s Brain. Let me begin by saying the book is fantastic and you should definitely read it. The research put into it is phenomenal, and the many linked notes, data and reference make for an amazing and compelling read! Not to mention that it is fantastic that someone put actual effort and data into finding out how programmers operate, think and behave. And most of all, how our code behaves and reading, and dealing with code is not just about understanding algorithms and finding the best possible and most optimized code ever. ...

Reader’s Digest I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is July of 2021 so far. Enjoy. Ultimate Go This book is a culmination of Bill Kennedy’s Ultimate Go course and notes which were spawned from them by Hoanh An. Bill Kennedy set out to put everything together and create a notebook which can be read and followed like the personal notes of a student. ...

Reader’s Digest I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is June of 2021 so far. Enjoy. Hell Divers 6: Allegiance I love the Hell Divers series. I listened to this one on audible as always and it was fantastic, as always. King Xavier Rodriguez. That sounds as bad ass as it is. We follow King Xavier and Rhino, his trusted subordinate into battle with a new threat called Skin Walkers and of course the machines, the defectors which are trying to kill everyone. Also, there is now a signal from a possible group of people who are surviving on the surface for more than 200 years! Xavier hates being king but does anything to keep the peace and humanity alive. Sadly, not all of his people agree to that especially not after what they did to their people. The people of the metal island, the cannibals are harsh people. And they don’t get along nicely all the time. ...

Blog Refactor Finally, I went back and fixed a lot of old posts and old code entries. I tried to fix and repair links and images, but some are lost forever on some obscure WordPress blog which I used to use. I’m glad though that the code is intact and I could re-read a lot of my old stuff. It’s interesting to see how much I evolved, how much my writing evolved. I used to write a lot of groovy and python and java and bash and ruby. ...

Reader’s Digest I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is April of 2021 so far. Enjoy. Invincible After seeing it air on Amazon Prime, I had to go and read the comic. It’s quite a lot, but I assure you it’s worth it. Some spoiler alerts… Okay, so we follow this guy, Mark Grayson. He’s Invincible. He is also and alien, called a Viltrumite. I can hardly summaries over 3000 pages of comic books so I’ll try to be brief. ...

Reader’s Digest I thought it would a cool idea if I kept a summary of the things I’ve read or listened to on a monthly basis. Here is March of 2021 so far. Enjoy. The Aurora Database paper The paper about Aurora database from AWS can be found here: Paper. It details the design decision taken to support a highly available, fault tolerant, fast replicating database. They take the following approach… They modified mysql database such as that they only send around the redo log and the redo log is enough to recover / replicate in order to achieve write and read consistency. They separate the data into Protected Groups and speed up terabytes of recovery by doing 10 Gigabyte segments in parallel. The database IS the logs. By only replicating the log instead of the data and the data page, they save millions in networks costs. The main gain however, is that the storage was modified to understand the application. Instead of using General store they use a storage which understand the data. In this case, decoupling storage from the database, as so many do, was actually a drawback. ...