Archiv der Kategorie: English Articles

Creativity, curiosity, craziness – the real superpowers of human cooperation

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Following philosopher Yuval-Noha Harari, cooperation is the key to our human being and what humans achieved in evolution, making us humans more successful than other creatures on earth. „It is the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers“ that makes us unique. No other creature on earth can cooperate in a way like this, ants and bees, f.e. also cooperate, but in a very rigid way or only close relatives. So you can’t compare an ant workforce and their cooperation with humans. 

Interactions with strangers and building new social cooperation networks in such an effective way is a human privilege.

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LSH – an efficient approach to nearest neighbour search

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In Image similarity search with LIRE we explained how to compare and find similar images using the Java library LIRE. The idea was to transform the complicated problem of comparing a large bunch of pixels to the simpler problem of comparing vectors representing histograms and other higher-level properties. In other words, if we can compress the information inherent in a bunch of pixels to a point in n-dimensional space (an array with n entries – the so called feature vector of the image), we can regard the distance between two such points as a similarity measure for the corresponding images. We can then find the images similar to a search image by selecting those images whose feature vectors have a small distance to the feature vector of the search image.

However, a naive approach to the problem – comparing the feature vector of the search image to all feature vectors in the database – is rather slow if our database is large. In this article, we show how to implement a fast similarity search for even very large databases.

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Ivory Becomes FOS Now – CKEditor Bundle for Symfony

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Maybe you heard about it: The Symfony Bundle „egeloen/ckeditor-bundle“ was looking for a new maintainer. And the Symfony 4 compatibility was missing. Having the downloads in mind I did not expect it to be that difficult to find new maintainers. At the end Marko Kunic and I took that place. But let us take a look back into the history.
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Of Love and Hate: TypeScript, Redux and immutable.js

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I love Redux. It’s such an elegant and simple concept that solves so many problems. But like every other solution, adding new concepts to your code base can also introduce the occasional headache.

One of these headaches is that Redux does not enforce a lot of it’s conventions, but when you don’t adhere to them, things start breaking further down the road in strange ways.

Today, I’m going refer to one of Redux‘ three principles: State is read-only
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Three ways to create Word documents with PHPWord

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Creating Microsoft Word documents in PHP can be a challenge. Word offers a multitude of options and settings and while creating a document in PHP you want do take advantage of those options to achieve a satisfying result. Perhaps you need to dynamically create documents for a client and the client will only know the capabilities of Mircosoft Word, but not the limitations of PHP libraries. This can result in an unsatisfied client.

In this article we will take a closer look at PHPWord and three different ways to create Word documents with it: basic easy templating, the creation of Word documents from scratch, and (going a little crazy there) the combination of both by merging existing templates with dynamically created documents. Hopefully, after reading through the text, you will have an idea of how to implement the perfect Word creator for your needs.
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DreamFactory Intermediate Service

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DreamFactory is a BaaS (Backend as a Service) that connects a multitude of data sources to APIs that apps can connect to. With our Agile Anti-Pattern App (MAPA), we wanted to move the patterns database out of the app, so that we did not have to publish a new version of the app every time we added or changed patterns. The simplest way for this was to put the complete data set (a tiered json file) on a webserver and tell the app to download from there. This would solve the problem, but be a pain to edit or version. The optimal solution would of course be a somewhat normalized database of patterns, their symptoms, their remedies, categories and a pattern-categories relation.
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React gets Context & Suspense. Quo vadis, Redux?

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Disclaimer: this article targets developers that are using Redux with React. If you are using Redux with another Framework, this article might not be important for you.

Last thursday, Dan Abramov gave a talk on JSConf Iceland called „Beyond React 16“. A few hours later, react-etc.net featured an article titled RIP Redux: Dan Abramov announces future fetcher API. While I agree with almost nothing that article has to say about Redux, the article got one thing right: Somewhere between 6 or 12 months from now, the way we are using Redux (at least when starting a new project) will be drastically different from the way we are using it today.

But before we take a gaze into the crystal ball, let’s take a step back and see what happened.

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Of races and mutexes: synchronizing async operations in JavaScript

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While JavaScript is a strictly single-threaded language, the asynchronous nature of its execution model can easily lead to situations in which two or more async operations run at the same time and compete with the program flow depending on which operation succeeds first. The result is a specimen of the dreaded species of race conditions.

Issues of this type can be arbitrarily hard to reproduce, debug and fix, and I guess that every seasoned JavaScript developer can relate one or two horror stories where they literally spent days before finally fixing such an issue for good.

Race conditions are a well-known problem from any language that supports for concurrency, and often a mutex is used as a tool to synchronize such operations. This article shows how to apply the concept of mutexes to JavaScript in order to avoid race conditions.

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Travel Your Project

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As a traveler and project guy, I often noticed that these two important things in my life have a lot in common. Things that happen while I’m on the road are similar to situations I observe in my daily project business. When I struggle in a new or existing project I often think about similar situations I had on journeys with my backpack.

9 Tips How Travel Experience Will Improve Your Project Skills

Traveling people are described to gain skills abroad that help them in their everyday life. Not only in everyday life, but also in projects or working environment. So „traveling your project“ could be a legit approach in dealing with certain situations. Some of the skills I think to be helpful are collected in this article.

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