Benchmarking is the process of measuring performance for a piece of technology against other pieces of technology. Typically, processors are benchmarked by running programs and software that heavily taxes the system. This allows the processor to truly shine (or, possibly, the opposite). For the purposes of this post, the i5 and i7 processors’ performance were measured in five different categories, each using one test:
You may have seen them on college dorm room walls or on your plate of cauliflower… you may know them when you see them, but what are fractals, really?
The relational model was proposed in a paper published in 1970 by Edgar Codd, a computer scientist working at IBM. In previous years, some storage systems had already emerged, but the relational model was first proposed with a strong theoretical basis.
As part of my exploration of a minimum set of devops tools, I’ve been learning how to stack containers full of Rails apps onto the Docker. There are plenty of examples of how to get started with Rails and Postgres on Docker, even one from the whale’s mouth, as it were. Working from this example, it was pretty clear to me that one of Docker’s major strengths is that it makes it really, really easy to get something running with a minimum of fuss; it took all of about a half day to learn enough Docker to hoist anchor, and even tweak a few things to my liking. One thing kept nagging me about the Docker example, though, and that was a warning from bundler when running docker-compose.
One of the great things about Grio is that designers and developers often work together on projects. We have lunch together and tell each other jokes while collaborating to solve challenging problems brought to us by our clients. Some projects come with constraints that force the team to be savvy in the way we produce deliverables. As a result, sketches and sketched wireframes are often a suggested deliverable.
Scalability is a hot topic, especially in Content Delivery Networks (CDN) where scalability, robustness and availability are crucial. A CDN is a system that has the aim to deliver Web content, such as videos, images, and any other type, to end users. Content providers such as media companies need to deliver their content with high availability and high performance, and CDNs offer them the infrastructure to do it. There are different approaches, each one with its advantages and flaws.
Modern cryptography is a very murky subject for many people, so today I will try to explain to you one of the more complex subjects, Elliptic Curves. Many of you may have heard their name before, but likely don’t know much about them beyond that. To begin, I will describe what an elliptic curve is.
Software Engineering is about more than just writing code. It is a complex process that has a lot of moving parts. Requirements gathering, planning, testing, deployment and source control management are just a few of the pieces to the software engineering puzzle. So how do we manage all this complexity? Software methodologies come to the rescue.
In the past we would often treat a server as a machine which has a variety of roles. A single server may be responsible for serving web content, email, processing background jobs, and even hosting a database system. Your application is really only one of the many things that runs on that machine.
A common way to describe requirements on Agile projects is through the use of user story mapping, and, as a result, user stories. This post will not cover this process, but rather the process of taking an existing set of user stories and leveraging them within our development workflow to ensure that an application is built as accurately and efficiently as possible. To this effect, we will set up tools (Rails, RSpec, Capybara, FactoryGirl, and Guard, to be precise) for implementing our app using behavior-driven development. Structuring our app in this way gives us much better odds of producing robust, low-defect code that delivers on the requirements we set out to build.