Around IT in 256 seconds

Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby programming language,
famously said: “I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the
world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy.”
Honestly, not many programming languages were built with developer’s
happines in mind. And to be honest, Ruby is a joy to work with. It’s
fairly easy to learn, easy to read, yet, very powerful. Also, with the
appearance of Ruby on Rails, it became insanely productive. But first
things first.

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Border Gateway Protocol, BGP for short, is probably the most
important protocols you might have never heard of. Well, you did at
least once, in October 2021. When Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and
Messenger all went down because of BGP misconfiguration. Or that one day
back in 2008 when all YouTube traffic was accidentally routed to
Pakistan. Because of BGP… misconfiguration. So what’s the big deal with
BGP? First we must understand how the Internet works.

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SQLite is by far the most common SQL database ever deployed. Are you
lsitening to this on iPhone or Android device? It runs SQLite. Or maybe
through a web browser? Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Android
Browser all use SQLite underneath. Are you running MacOS or Windows?
It’s built-in. Most Linux distributions have it as well. “But I’m
listening to your podcast while driving a car”, you say. Well, most
automotive systems use SQLite internally. If you happen to listen to my
podcast while coding in PHP or Python, they include SQLite out-of-the
box. Oh, and it’s the default choice for Ruby on Rails as well. I’m
pretty sure SQLite is used somewhere on the International Space Station
and it maybe even landed on other planets? So, what makes this unsung
hero so popular to run at least one trillion databases
worldwide?

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Scala is a programming language running on the Java Virtual Machine.
It’s statically typed, and you can use it both as functional and
object-oriented language. Even at the same time. The functional side of
Scala supports higher-order (and higher-kinded) types. For those of you
know what it means. On the other hand, object-relational features of
Scala are equally strong. Including powerful trait composition, that you
can somewhat compare to multiple inheritance. Combine than with great
Java interoperability and no wonder why Scala became a go to language
for many ex-Java developers.

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K-means clustering is an algorithm for partitioning data into
multiple, non-overlapping buckets. For example, if you have a bunch of
points in two-dimensional space, this algorithm can easily find
concentrated clusters of points. To be honest, that’s quite a simple
task for humans. Just plot all the points on a piece of paper and find
areas with higher density. For example, most of the points are located
on the top-left of the plane, some at the bottom and a few at the
centre-right. However, this is not that straightforward once you can no
longer rely on graphical representation. For instance, when your data
points live 3-, 4- or 100-dimensional space. Turns out, this is not that
uncommon. Let me clarify.

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