Growing with the Web

When working on an application that interfaces with an Azure Cosmos DB backend you could use an actual Cosmos DB instance to test against but that’s a bit of a hassle as it involves setting up and configuring an actual instance. It turns out there is an emulator that runs in a docker container that you can test against instead.

GitHub wikis are great for documentating projects due to their ease of use and high visibility. The problem is though that there are only two options for access; full access for everyone or restricted to collaborators only. Unfortunately it’s rarely the case you want the public to have full edit access to the wiki, and restricted prevents external contributions completely. This article describes how I recently got around this to enable contributions to the Visual Studio Code wiki via pull requests.

The AVL tree, named after its inventors Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, is a type of self-balancing binary search tree. The tree re-organises itself after every insert and delete so that the tree height is approximately \log n nodes high, allowing search in O(\log n) time. The re-organising does not guarantee a perfectly balanced tree, it is however good enough to guarantee O(\log n) search.

Putting yourself out there and answering questions on Stack Overflow is a great way to grow as a software developer. Not only does it let you practice more at what you’re good at, it also let’s you dip your toes into areas where you’re less familiar or learning. There is a lot to providing great answers on Stack Overflow, here are some tips to help out.

This snippet is useful when applied to events that occur many times such as resize and scroll, particularly when the callback does heavy processing. It throttles the calls to the callback by only calling in to the callback if the event has not occurred again in the last 300ms. This technique is called ‘debouncing’.

Mozilla Firefox recently implemented the highly anticipated CSS variables spec. Since then, some articles started appearing hinting that they are now largely obsolete with the advent and widespread use of preprocessors like Sass, Less, and Stylus. I would argue however that they provide something that preprocessors can’t, well at least can’t efficiently.

Fibonacci heap

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A Fibonacci heap is a heap data structure similar to the binomial heap, only with a few modifications and a looser structure. The Fibonacci heap was designed in order to improve Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm from O(m \log n) to O(m + n \log n) by optimising the operations used most by the algorithm. Its name derives from the fact that the Fibonacci sequence is used in the complexity analysis of its operations.

Bubble sort

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While studying efficient sorting algorithms is beneficial, studying slow ones, at least initially is as well since it teaches us why they’re bad. Bubble sort is one of those bad sorting algorithms. I recall as a young programmer, around 11 years old before I had any formal training, bubble sort is how I intuitively sorted a list.

Binomial heap

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A binomial heap is a priority queue data structure similar to the binary heap only with a more strict structure, it supports quicker merging of two heaps in Θ(\log n) at the cost of a slower find minimum operation. A binomial heap is made up of a series of unique ‘binomial trees’ which are constructed from smaller binomial trees.

Design patterns in software engineering are generic solutions to some commonly occurring problems encountered when creating software. They are incredibly useful tools for both communicating a solution to a problem to other developers and also for saving time solving problems that have already been solved in quite elegant ways. Learning the big design patterns is a also just a great way to improve your skills as a software developer.

Selection sort

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Selection sort is an O(n^2) sorting algorithm that works by searching through a list to find the minimum element and swapping it for the first in the list. After every swap, selection sort is performed on the list with the head removed (ie. the minimum element). Due to the way that elements are swapped anywhere in the list, this is not a stable sort.

q HTML element

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The q HTML element is used to represent an inline quote. Now regular quotes (“”) can represent this just fine, surrounding the quote in the q tag differs in that it explicitly indicates that the text is a quote, removing ambiguities that it could be emphasis, irony, etc.

Moving to the US for work

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I eventually made it to the US in September and have started working at Amazon! It was a pretty intense period in the couple of months leading up to leaving Australia. I have compiled a list of things that that helped me and also what I wished I had known before starting the move.

Dart, my first steps

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A couple of weeks ago I jumped in to Dart with a little project to learn the language; to convert my canvas-astar.js project. I’m glad to say that what Google claims is true, since Dart borrows syntax from some common languages, it’s very easy for the seasoned developer to learn. It took me around an hour of studying and then an hour of porting to get it in the state that it is.

One year

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Just over a year has passed since I created my blog and I just wanted to reflect a little on how I feel everything has gone, the impact it’s had on my life and go over the most popular posts to date.

There are a lot of questions on Stack Overflow, probably a lot than you realise. This is understandable when you consider over 7,000 questions are being asked every day. No I’m not just talking about the 5 million odd that you can access via the questions tab (4,930,418 and counting at time of writing). There are also a ridiculous amount of deleted questions which only users with at least 10,000 reputation can see.

C# passing a reference type by ref

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You may ask yourself why you would ever want to pass a reference type into a method using the ref keyword, or why the C# compiler even allows this. Using ref on a reference type is actually slightly different to not using it. The difference is that the ref keyword makes it a reference (pointer) to the variable, not just the object. This allows assigning to the source variable of the parameter from within the method.

Triangles in CSS

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Creating triangles with CSS is a pretty good way to reduce the number of images within an application. They’re a bit tricky to get your head around at first but once you understand them it’s really easy.

I stumbled upon this little gem, a search engine called Symbol Hound that unlike Google, doesn’t ignore symbols in fast it is actually optimised for searching with them. It only searches within Stack Overflow but that means it’s very focused on programming and really if you’re not finding your answer to a programming operator question on SO, it deserves to be asked.

I’ve compiled some information about time complexity and underlying data structures of .NET simple collections and dictionaries. It was difficult to find some of this information on official sources like MSDN and non-official sources seemed to differ, so I used reflector and actually had a look at the .NET framework code to confirm these cases.

One of the new features in VS2012 is the ability to ‘preview’ a file instead of opening it fully which will open it in the ‘preview’ pane (docked to the right). To do this Left click on the file in the solution explorer. The great thing about it is that you can only have one preview open at a time. So when you’re searching for something looking through several files in the process, the ones that aren’t needed will close themselves.

I answered a question on Stack Overflow a couple of days ago and it sparked memories of several years ago when I was new to the industry. Something that confused me a little when starting out was around the use of interfaces. All of a sudden they started popping up in mass quantity as I started working on projects of significant size.

Binary heap

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A binary heap is a binary tree data structure that typically uses an array or list as its underlying data structure. Heaps are one of the fundamental data structures that all software developers should have in their toolkit due to its fast extraction of either the minimum or the maximum element in a collection.

Unfortunately when deleting items in entity framework the SQL commands are issued as single DELETE statements for each entity. This really becomes a bottleneck when there are a several thousand items. This handy set of extension methods allows convenient and efficient deletion of all entities for a particular type T. The GetTableName<T> used function even takes into account table mappings set up with the ModelBuilder.

Red-black tree

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The red-black tree is a type of self-balancing binary search tree that assigns a colour of red or black to each node. On every insert or delete, the tree re-organises itself so that it is approximately \log n nodes high, allowing search in O(\log n) time. The re-organising does not guarantee a perfectly balanced tree, it is however good enough to guarantee O(\log n) search.

Quicksort

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Quicksort is an O(n^2) sorting algorithm that runs in O(n \log n) time on average. It has a number of favourable qualities; it’s an in-place sort, requiring O(\log n) auxiliary space in the worst case; and is also a divide and conquer algorithm making it easy to parallelise. Unfortunately however it’s not a stable sort.

I just received my new Nexus 10 and am loving it. As usual when it comes to setting up Android development, I had a few issues. It was really never the smoothest process in my experience, at least it’s nice and smooth for the most part when it’s all up and running. Not many relevant results came through so here’s how I got it up and running under Windows 8.

Heapsort

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Heapsort is an O(n \log n) sorting algorithm that works by first constructing a heap out of the list and repeatedly pulling the root off the top of the heap and reconstructs it until there are no items left in the heap. The values that are pulled off of the top of the heap come out in sorted order. If the heap used was a min-heap, the resulting list will be in ascending order, and a max-heap will give them in descending order.

Have you ever started working on a giant project containing many JavaScript files and needed to find out what some random button is doing? A pretty easy way to find out is to enable the mouse click’s event listener breakpoint in the Chrome developer tools. This will break execution when you next click on the page allowing you to step into the code seeing exactly what is happening.

Merge sort

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Merge sort is a sorting algorithm that runs in O(n \log n) time. It is a divide and conquer algorithm, so it can get the most out of today’s multi-cored systems. It works by continually splitting up the array until each item stands on its own. The items are then merged back with the items that they were split with in the correct order.

In response to Ron’s comment on the attr('id') vs [0].id post last week asking about the jQuery.fn.prop’s vs jQuery.fn.attr’s performance, I extended the program to include prop and enabled profiling across all browsers (thanks to time.js). The program also does the tests a little more thoroughly, running 1000000 operations 5 times per each operation and averages the result.

So I was wondering for a while exactly what the performance difference is between the jQuery function attr('id') and getting the native JavaScript object and grabbing the id that way was. Surely attr('id') was slower but how much slower… I decided to write a little HTML page that tested each method by doing 1 million operations of each. In interest of being complete I added the getAttribute and get(0).id methods also.

Redesign #1

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I decided to give the blog a major overhaul and redesign the template as previously it was just using a one of the built-in Blogger templates with a few minor alterations. I was originally quite hesitant in modifying the template directly as I didn’t really understand how it was put together, the blog has been in place for some time now so I thought it was about time to give it a go.

Pseudo-classes vs pseudo-elements

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The difference between pseudo-classes and pseudo-elements can be a little confusing until you have it spelt out for you. Basically a pseudo-class is a selector that assists in the selection of something that cannot be expressed by a simple selector, for example :hover. A pseudo-element however allows us to create items that do not normally exist in the document tree, for example ``::after`.

CSS selectors you must know

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Here is a collection of CSS selectors that you really need to know if you work with CSS. Each section will first describe what is selected and then provide an example first with the CSS and then the HTML if applicable, the selected elements will be marked.

Extension methods

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Extension methods are a nice piece of syntactic sugar added to C# version 3.0 as part of .NET framework 3.5. They allow you to add methods to existing types, for example you can add a new method to the type System.String or System.IO.File.

The delegation design pattern allows an object to delegate one or more tasks to a helper object. Two classes are used to achieve this; the delegate and delegator, both which realise a common interface. A method (or methods) on the interface represent the functionality to be delegated. A call to the delegator calls the matching function on the delegate.

I was faced with a problem recently where a web page needed to create an email with the user’s email client. This is normally trivial, simply redirect the user to mailto:<emails>. The issues was that the maximum length of a URL across different platforms is approximately 2000 characters, and the amount of emails required far exceeded that in some cases. So a solution would need to make multiple mailto requests.

What is a CSS reset?

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A CSS reset is a chunk of CSS that attempts to “reset” all styles so that a web developer can start with a plain canvas that is consistent across browsers. Having all styles uniform including heading tags makes the web site much easier and nicer to style.

Game development introduced me to programming when I was around 10 years old, and I’ve loved it ever since. One of the first formal algorithms I learned before entering university was A* (pronounced “A star”), and I really had a great time learning about it. It’s one of the most widely used pathfinding algorithms and is one that you would likely be introduced to first when approaching the subject of pathfinding. A pathfinding algorithm takes a start point (also known as a node) and a goal and attempts to make the shortest path between the two given possible obstacles blocking the way.

Touch != Click

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I started programming for Android a few months ago, starting a few apps while playing around with the API, re-familiarising myself with Java and getting a feel for mobile development. Having spent the majority of my programming time during the last couple of years using WinForms, ASP.NET and other Microsoft technologies, I’ve really enjoyed breaking out and trying something new.

Sass stands for Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets, yes, I’m quite a fan of the name. It provides us with a much simpler and more elegant way of defining CSS, allowing the creation of more modular and manageable stylesheets. Sass has two flavours; Sass-style and SCSS-style, the basic difference being that Sass-style uses indentation to separate code-blocks instead of curly braces. The examples used in this post will be using the SCSS-style.