Concurrency

Single-threaded, multi-threaded, concurrency, parallel tasks, async task… These words are used by programmers on daily basis and while most of us understands them (fingers crossed), I believe we are using this lingo in presence of non-technical people to confuse them? or to give them more detail, with little success. Let’s recapitulate what this all is, in very high level. So that next time my Product Owner or Scrum master understands what we talk about. Also the described concepts are language agnostic, meaning that they are same across all programming languages and independently of operating systems.

Create a link in Unix

A symbolic link is a special form of a file. Actually it is not a file just a pointer to a file. This link points to another file somewhere in the file system. You can create link to files and folders. By the look, feel and functionality it is same as Windows shortcut or alias on iOS systems. If the content of the original file changes, so does the content of symlink. If the original file is moved, renamed or deleted, then the symbolic link stops working correctly (called hanging link). Removing the link doesn’t affect the original file in any way. You can symlink files across network too. The symbolic link is often called a soft link or shortly symlink.

Manual deployments of yesterdays

We, developers, are producing websites or applications for many years now. What kinds of tasks needs to be done, before we see the changes live on web. This was a big unknown to me for a very long time. Is my process of deploying the code the best practice? Should I do it other way? When I started creating websites, there was only one task and it was to deliver updated files to web server. I usually used the FTP client with nice GUI (graphical user interface). I logged in to IP address using login and password and copied files from left to right. :) Then I went to website, refreshed the page and checked that the changes are live. Simple, or not?