The URL was invented in 1994 as a solution to the problem of identifying resources on a networked system. It merged some standards already in place, including the pre-existing path syntax still in use today. I never showed you what the structure of a URL is in general. Here it is: scheme:[//authority]path[?query][#fragment] The brackets are a common syntax to denote optional parts, which fits with what we said in the main post. Read more

In case you don’t know it, Slitherlink is a puzzle in which you must divine the path of a line around a grid based only on numbers within that grid. The numbers tell you how many edges of their square are occupied by a segment of that line. The only other rules are that there is one single line, which connects to itself, and cannot intersect itself at any point. Read more

There’s a lot of FUD1 regarding rebasing in git. People have very strong opinions against using it because they fear that it will completely ruin their codebase. And in fairness to them, this used to be the case. Rebasing code in git used to be a great way to stomp all over your history and lose changes. What is rebasing? So why the FUD? OK so what is the FUD? Read more

I don’t tend to really bother with the Perl/Raku weekly challenges, but I do occasionally come across blog posts by others who have solved them. This particular one intrigued me, however, to the point where I was still thinking it through when I woke up in the morning. Specifically, the first task: You are given a positive number $N. Write a script to count the total number of set bits of the binary representations of all numbers from 1 to $N and return $total_count_set_bit % 1000000007. Read more

This post is the first in a series on web fundamentals. The series was inspired by a perpetual amazement at the amateurish output of professionals working at large internet companies. In this post we will look at the URL, which we have all seen in our browsers’ address bars, and plastered all over social media. Hopefully, by the end of the article, you will understand the structure of the URL, and have enough of an understanding to be rightly appalled at some of the ones you see in the future. Read more