Programming Archives - aster.cloud

6 min

Learn Expect By Writing And Automating A Simple Game

Code a “guess the number” game in Expect. Then, learn the real power of Expect with a separate script to automate playing the game. While trying to automate my workflow, I hit upon a configuration utility that defied meaningful automation. It was a Java process that didn’t support a silent installer, or support stdin, and had an inconsistent set of prompts. Ansible’s expect module was inadequate for this task. But I found that the expect command was just the tool for the job. My journey to learn Expect meant learning a bit of Tcl. Now that I have the background to create simple programs, I can better…

SQL

7 min

Infrastructure from Code: the New Wave of Cloud Infrastructure Management

This overview of date and time values in MySQL will help you take advantage of temporal values in your database tables. Both new and experienced users of the popular MySQL database system can often get confused about how temporal values are handled by the database. Sometimes users don’t bother learning much about temporal value data types. This may be because they think there isn’t much to know about them. A date is a date, right? Well, not always. Taking a few minutes to learn how MySQL stores and displays dates and times is beneficial. Learning how to best take advantage…

3 min

Programming

Go 1.20 Is Released!

Today the Go team is thrilled to release Go 1.20, which you can get by visiting the download page. Go 1.20 benefited from an extended development phase, made possible by earlier broad testing and improved overall stability of the code base. We’re particularly excited to launch a preview of profile-guided optimization (PGO), which enables the compiler to perform application- and workload-specific optimizations based on run-time profile information. Providing a profile to go build enables the compiler to speed up typical applications by around 3–4%, and we expect future releases to benefit even more from PGO. Since this is a preview release of PGO support, we…

4 min

Tiny Snippets Of Code That Changed The World

Only a few short lines can have a massive, global impact. In 1997, Ethan Zuckerman broke the Internet — by inventing the pop-up ad. He was working for Tripod.com, an online service that let people make little web pages for free. To make money, Tripod sold ads that ran alongside the pages. The problem was, ads would wind up running next to racy content — a user’s page devoted to anal sex, say — and advertisers did not like this. Zuckerman’s boss asked him to figure out some solution. Wasn’t there some way to position the ads so they weren’t right next…

8 min

How To Migrate Your Code From PHP 7.4 to 8.1

With the recent end-of-life for PHP 7.4, it’s time to migrate your code. Here are a few options to do that. The end-of-life (EOL) for PHP 7.4 was Monday, November 28, 2022. If you’re like me, that date snuck up much faster than anticipated. While your PHP 7.4 code isn’t going to immediately stop working, you do need to begin making plans for the future of this codebase. What are your options? You could continue to remain on PHP 7.4, but there are several benefits to updating. The biggest are security risk and support. As we move farther and farther away from the…

5 min

10 Tips For Writing Clean Code

Clean code is a reader-focused development style that produces software that’s easy to write, read and maintain. Knowing how to produce clean code is an essential skill for software developers. Often, you may be tempted to consider your work complete when the application operates as expected. But we’re not merely writing code for computer consumption. Clean code is about recognizing that your audience isn’t just a computer, it’s real-live humans! With this principle in mind, let’s review the reasons clean code matters and dive into some tips and tricks when it comes to how we can do it in practice. What…

4 min

Compose For Wear OS 1.1 Is Now Stable: Check Out New Features!

Today we’re releasing version 1.1 of Compose for Wear OS, our modern declarative UI toolkit to help developers build beautiful, responsive apps for Wear OS. Since the first stable release earlier this year, we have seen many developers taking advantage of the powerful tools and intuitive APIs to make building their app simpler and more efficient. Todoist and Outdooractive are some of the developers that rebuilt their Wear apps with Compose and accelerated the delivery of a new, functional user experience. Todoist increased its growth rate by 50% since rebuilding their app for Wear 3 and Outdooractive reduced development time by 30% and saw a significant…

2 min

Introducing The Architecture Templates

We released a new project on Github called Android Architecture Starter Templates. The goal of these templates is to get you started quickly when doing an experiment or starting a brand-new app from scratch. They follow the new Architecture recommendations that we released recently, which are a summary of the official Architecture guide. These templates are not empty, they contain some opinions in the form of architectural patterns and used libraries: Room Database Dependency injection with Hilt Jetpack ViewModel UI using Jetpack Compose and Material3 Jetpack Navigation Reactive data layer Kotlin Coroutines and Flow Unit tests UI tests using fake data with Hilt KTS gradle files Version catalog A simple…

5 min

Programming

6 Best Python Programming Books Ranked By Reviews

Programming is more than just typing a few words into a computer. It’s a massive process that requires the knowledge of its own languages. Python is one of these languages, and its use is becoming more widespread each day. As computers become more advanced, companies make use of Python to assist in managing the modern world. On top of it being found in many popular websites, services, and even video games, Python is also used for extremely complex purposes like machine learning and data science. As a result, there is a massive demand for coders skilled in this language. Even…

4 min

Complexity Pitfalls: How To Simplify And Fix Your Complex Code?

Every developer loves working on code that’s simple to read and understand. But obtaining this level of code simplicity isn’t always easy. Why? Code complexity is not evident to developers or the development team until it advances through levels. Developers spend a lot of time developing their code and spend even more maintaining it. In addition, since the project goals and functions vary over time, the codebase generally expands and evolves through the process. Whenever a developer examines the code in the later stages, they come across many lines of unnecessary code. By this time, the code has often become so complex that…

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