I recently saw a talk from Brian Lonsdorf, where he talks about the obsession with speed in the JavaScript world. I have to say, I agree with him in many points. As a matter of fact, I don’t think it’s only in the JavaScript world (although it might be more evident nowadays) but it’s more or less generalized. It’s all about speed and scale! Many of us have participated in discussions where an idea is being pitched and, it’s not even a full idea yet, and people are already focussing on “if it scales”....

So, you’ve been using Python 2 since forever right? Well, Python 2 is still strong but you will, eventually, have to move on. The will be no Python 2.8. Python 3 is currently on version 3.4.1 and all of us should at least try it out. Or maybe you want to try some other “Python flavor”, like PyPy for example. Virtualenv will help us. Sure, you might be working professionally with Python 2 and you still want that to be your default....

Disclaimer: I’m not a PHP developer. Any of the practices here described do not claim to be _“good practices”_. Improvements and/or other solutions, tricks and tips are much appreciated. A while back I was asked for some support/analysis on a PHP web application (CakePHP to be a little more specific) . Well, my knowledge of PHP is (to be kind!) limited. Apart for some PHP coding back in college I never had any professional experience with it nor with any of it’s frameworks....

Following my last post, on Merge Sort, I decided to try out a possible implementation in Scala. Furthermore we’ll see here a parametrized implementation, to sort lists of any type. My previous post on the subject was aimed at explaining the algorithm and was exemplified, for simplicity, with a concrete example for lists of integers. Let’s extend that. As a first step, let’s start simple and analyse a possible implementation only lists of integers....

Sorting has always been a popular subject in Computer Science. Back in 1945 Mr. John von Neumann came up with Merge Sort. It’s an efficient divide and conquer algorithm, and we’ll dive right into it. The general flow of the algorithm comes as follows: (1) divide the list into n lists of size 1 (being n the size of the original list), (2) recursively merge them back together to produce one sorted list....