A Python package that draws and renders images of data structures — Introducing DSPlot, a package that draws beautiful graphs for you. It was a hot summer morning. I was grinding LeetCode problems in preparation for possible upcoming internship interviews in software engineering when I bumped into a problem that looks like this:

Spoiler alert: No, it’s not. — Token-based Authentication Have you ever wondered what happens behind the scene when you log into a web app (Facebook, Twitter, …) using your username and password? After verifying your username and password, the server will issue you a string-based token, which you can use to fetch other web resources without having to…

How I passed the AWS SAA-C02 exam in less than 2 months — What is the AWS Certified Certified Solutions Architect — Associate exam? The AWS Certified Certified Solutions Architect — Associate (AWSSA-A) is one of 3 certificates corresponding to 3 career paths for personnels working with the AWS platform, including Solutions Architect, Developer, and SysOps Administrator. Each career path has 2 levels of profession: Associate and Professional.

Key takeaways, both technical and non-technical — How my 4-month summer internship turned into a 1-year full-time job It was a cool spring afternoon in New London, CT, mid-March. I was sitting in my bedroom, trying to make sense of why my changes in the CSS file did not take effect on my personal website when I had this notification, the one that drifted my next year toward…

Use cache to reduce resource access time — Caching is the operation of storing known data somewhere for reduced retrieval time in possible future usage. In this article, let’s familiarize ourselves with Memcached, a high-performance, distributed caching system currently used to speed up distributed web applications. I. Caching in Distributed Systems Caching is a pivotal aspect to consider when writing applications, especially large-scale…

Cache through the lens of history — Imagine you are in the middle of a Math exam where, to your surprise, you come across a really familiar question, which you think you have seen in the practice test. “Can’t be that easy,” you think; checking the question data and numbers, you find out that it’s exactly the…

What you need to know about the architecture behind the World Wide Web — If you ever wander around the web development community, you might have encountered the term REST sometime. In this article, let’s demystify the concept and see how this architecture has been getting more and more popular in recent years! 1. REST

Convert custom objects into JSON and vice versa — Problem Imagine you are working as a backend developer. After a bunch of logic operations and database queries, you get an object type Person, which you want to return to frontend. However, you have to return it as a JSON object instead of a Person object, since it is the standardized…

Abstract database interactions with ORM — You are a backend developer having to deal with bulky databases on a daily basis? You find yourself fed up with writing lengthy and sophisticated SQL queries every time you work with your databases? To solve these problems and inconvenience when working with databases, ORM was created. Note: as this…