Notes on codes, projects and everything
Recently I volunteered in building a site that reports whether certain websites are blocked locally (please don’t ask why that is happening). As it is a very simple app reporting status I wanted it to be easily scrape-able. One of the decision made was I want it to have things to see on first load, this practically removes the possibility of using react, which is my current favorite.
Javascript is getting so foreign to me these days, but mostly towards a better direction. So I recently got myself to learn react through work and the JSX extension makes web development bearable again. On the other hand, I picked up a little bit on Vue.js but really hated all the magic involved (No I don’t enjoy putting in code into quotes).
Just managed to migrate all my blog sites to one centralized multi-site, so no more half-baked solution and hopefully this brings better plugin compatibility. I have not check with other related services (like Google Webmaster Tools) whether this cause any breakage though. Well, the main purpose of this blog post is actually a draft of what I did for the past two months for my postgraduate programme. Yea, I should have posted more stuff to this blog (just realized that my last post here is already like half a year ago).
Recently I switched my search code to Annoy because the input dataset is huge (7.5mil records with 20k dictionary count). It wasn’t without issues though, however I would probably talk about it next time. In order to figure out what each parameters meant, I spent some time watching through the talk given by the author @fulhack.
I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.
It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.
After comparing my own implementation of MVC with CodeIgniter’s, now I’m comparing Kohana’s and Zend’s. I have just shifted from CodeIgniter to Kohana recently in work and is currently learning on how to use Zend Framework to build my web-app. As everybody knows, Zend Framework is more like a collection of library classes than a framework a la Ruby on Rails, using MVC in Zend Framework would require one to begin from bootstrapping stage. However, in Kohana, just like other frameworks, bootstrapping is done by the framework itself so the developer will get an installation that almost just works (after a little bit of configuration).