Author: esantanche
-
Finding your way in the railway network
When you use ticket machines to buy a train ticket, they will find the shortest route for you. This is done thanks to a very complicated program which computes the shortest path between two points. In my case, I was working for the Italian national railways company. The program doing the above calculations used bit…
-
Billions of phone calls a month
Yes, the major Italian telecommunications company stores information about every call made. There are more than one billion of them per month. To treat this enormous quantity of data you need a mainframe and not a small one. It was an S/390 and used terabytes of storage. When a program stops working and you can’t…
-
A datacentre with hundreds of servers
When you buy hosting for your website, a server in a datacentre will run your website. I worked in such a datacentre for many years. There were 300 servers and a lot of other hardware. We needed to write a lot of software to monitor these servers and to manage the information about them. There…
-
Virtual Internet Service Provider
If you want a free email address, you can find a lot of them on the web. Many of these websites offering free email don’t actually do the job. There is another company behind the scenes doing it for them. They just put their name on the package. I worked for one of those companies…
-
PLC programming
Imagine having a big Meccano set with thousands of moving parts which you control using a computer. I have played with Meccano toys. They are fun. They have been around for more than a century. I am pleased to live, now, in the homeland of Meccano toys. When I was doing PLC programming, my Meccano…
-
Compass/Sass
Compass helps Sass authors write smarter stylesheets and empowers a community of designers and developers to create and share powerful frameworks. Put simply, Compass is a Sass framework, designed to make the work of styling the web smooth and efficient. Much like Rails as a web application framework for Ruby, Compass is a collection of…
-
WordPress
What is WordPress? At its core, WordPress is the simplest, most popular way to create your own website or blog. In fact, WordPress powers over 29% of all the websites on the Internet. Yes – more than one in four websites that you visit are likely powered by WordPress. On a slightly more technical level, WordPress…
-
Drupal
Drupal is content management software. It’s used to make many of the websites and applications you use every day. Drupal has great standard features, like easy content authoring, reliable performance, and excellent security. But what sets it apart is its flexibility; modularity is one of its core principles. Its tools help you build the versatile,…
-
Angular
Angular is a platform that makes it easy to build applications with the web. Angular combines declarative templates, dependency injection, end to end tooling, and integrated best practices to solve development challenges. Angular empowers developers to build applications that live on the web, mobile, or the desktop
-
How do I make my application secure?
I have worked for many years in a bank. There were 300+ servers providing internet services. Security was a top priority as you can imagine. Every incoming or outgoing communication was carefully inspected and needed authorization. A day the Shark begun to send distress signals. The Shark has nothing to do with the fish. It’s…