Published in CodeX·1 day agoMember-onlyHow should your API handle data dependencies?When two fields in a data structure are linked, usability can be tricky So your team has designed an API that takes, as input, an address. You begin by internationalizing the address into country-neutral field names such as country, region, postalCode, city, and address. Pop quiz: Which of these fields…API6 min read
Published in CodeX·5 days agoMember-onlyPractical data analytics for moviesHow to plan and execute a data analytics project using movie data For today’s exploration of data analysis, let’s imagine we are about to publish an article on the movie industry. To create this article, we need a data source: a collection of facts about movies. The techniques we will…Data Science5 min read
Published in CodeX·Sep 8Member-onlyCapturing screenshots in Selenium and TypeScriptUse full screenshots to validate that your web scraper worked as intended When you use selenium automation to capture data from complex websites, it’s important to make sure that the results you get match the data you wanted to retrieve. …Selenium3 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Aug 26Member-onlyWeb scraping with selenium and C#Automate your data collection using this powerful toolkit When I need to gather data on the Internet, I typically prefer to retrieve data from a website using an HTTP connection and a regular expression. …Selenium4 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jul 20Member-onlyThe simplest cache: the lazy loaderYou can get most of the benefits of caching with virtually none of the work Your code is fast, and your database is fast. You can read data from it anytime you want, and you never have to worry about stale records. But are you leaving performance on the table? …Caching4 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jul 11Member-onlyThirteen API caching mistakes to avoidSo many ways to mess up your API with poorly designed caches It’s always a good time to start with my favorite programming joke: There are only two difficult things in computer science; cache coherency, naming things, and off by one errors. I may not be able to fix the…API11 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jul 1Member-onlyThe enduring weirdness of the Sega SaturnA transitional fossil in between the era of scan-line sprites and triangles In November of 1994, Sega released one of the most unusual console game systems of all time: the Saturn. …Gaming13 min read
Published in tedspence.com·Jun 2Member-onlyCaching database queries in TypeScriptAn effective strategy for storing relevant data using invalidation and stale-refetch In my previous post on caching for authentication, I described a tiered caching strategy that would preserve the validation results of a cryptographic validation function that could taken dozens of milliseconds to execute. The same approach can also optimize…Typescript6 min read
Published in CodeX·May 16Member-onlyWhat makes a Jupyter notebook good?Charts are nice, but a notebook needs a compelling story to tell I review dozens of Jupyter notebooks each week from my DA320 students at Bellevue College. Even though all students study the same material — a dataset with information about Superhero movies — the quality of notebooks varies widely. …Jupyter Notebook4 min read
Published in CodeX·Apr 30Member-onlyBranching considered harmfulDevelopers should work on trunk, use a monorepo, and automate deployment As a company grows in size, it tends to accumulate source code in a variety of repositories and branches. One startup I joined had over 80 repositories — about eight repositories for each developer they employed at the time. …Version Control7 min read
