Building Business Rules Engines with Drools – Power to the SMEople
One of the most amazing things about working in software development is the ability to work in many different industries – especially if you’re a consultant. Most software development skills you learn while working within one industry are directly transferable to any…
Ractive.js – Web Apps Made Easy
In today’s rapidly proliferating landscape of JavaScript frameworks and libraries, selecting the one on which you want to base your development can be quite a challenge. After all, once you go down the path of using a particular framework, migrating your code…
MySQL Master-Slave Replication on the Same Machine
MySQL replication is a process that enables data from one MySQL database server (the master) to be copied automatically to one or more MySQL database servers (the slaves). It is usually used to spread read access on multiple servers for…
Meet Volt, A Promising Ruby Framework For Dynamic Applications
Volt is a Ruby framework designed for data rich applications. Both the server and client sides are written in Ruby (which is then compiled to JS using OPAL), so this allows the developer to write very dynamic applications without having…
Predicting Likes: Inside A Simple Recommendation Engine’s Algorithms
A recommendation engine (sometimes referred to as a recommender system) is a tool that lets algorithm developers predict what a user may or may not like among a list of given items. Recommendation engines are a pretty interesting alternative to search fields,…
Growing Growth: Perform Your Own Cohort Analysis with This Open Source Code
Cohort analysis, retention, and churn are some of the key metrics in company building. But this isn’t just another article about cohort analysis. If you’re a seasoned data scientist that already knows the importance of the topic and want to skip the introduction, you can jump to…
Introduction to Apache Spark with Examples and Use Cases
I first heard of Spark in late 2013 when I became interested in Scala, the language in which Spark is written. Some time later, I did a fun data science project trying to predict survival on the Titanic. This turned out…
The Top 10 Most Common Mistakes That Node.js Developers Make
Since the moment Node.js was unveiled to the world, it has seen a fair share of both praise and criticism. The debate still continues, and may not end anytime soon. What we often overlook in these debates is that every programming…
Application Development with Rapid Application Development Framework AllcountJS
The idea of Rapid Application Development (RAD) was born as a response to traditional waterfall development models. Many variations of RAD exist; for example, Agile development and the Rational Unified Process. However, all such models have one thing in common:…
Data Encoding: A Guide to UTF-8 for PHP and MySQL
As a MySQL or PHP developer, once you step beyond the comfortable confines of English-only character sets, you quickly find yourself entangled in the wonderfully wacky world of UTF-8. Unicode is a widely-used computing industry standard that defines a comprehensive mapping of unique…