A Brief History of PHP

PHP was developed by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994. Lerdorf developed a bunch of scripts to track the visits to his online resume and named them “Personal Home Page Tools,” which then evolved into being called “PHP Tools.” He kept adding more tools to this suite and at some point pulled off a rewrite of the tools, including added functionality for database interactions and more — thus turning it into a more complete framework.

From that point on, the tools evolved into more complex primitives and kept gaining more users after it was open-sourced in 1995. …

A practical guide for setting up Pi-hole for a privacy-focused home network.

I need to start this article with some simple disclaimers: I love Raspberry Pi, I love Docker, I don’t love networking that much (spoiler alert: I suck at it).

• I love Raspberry Pi because it is a tiny, fully functioning computer that gives me goosebumps. It is one of those things that makes you feel like Mr. Robot. It is relatively cheap, it is accessible, and there are tons of guides online to do pretty much anything you can imagine.
• I love Docker because it is a simple…

Laravel has been my go-to framework for all of my side projects thanks to its ease of use, but while integrating Cashier into Nana recently, I have seen that there is no easy way of testing the subscription creation flows when using Cashier. The docs suggest that you do real calls against the Stripe’s test APIs:

When testing an application that uses Cashier, you may mock the actual HTTP requests to the Stripe API; however, this requires you to partially re-implement Cashier’s own behavior. Therefore, we recommend allowing your tests to hit the actual Stripe API.

This might be good…

The comparison of Python and R has been a hot topic in the industry circles for years. R has been around for more than two decades, specialized for statistical computing and graphics while Python is a general-purpose programming language that has many uses along with data science and statistics. Many of the beginners have the same question in mind: which of these two great languages should I pick for getting started with data science?

Python

Released in 1991, Python has built itself a strong reputation for being an incredibly simple language to get started with that allows you to do almost…

There is always a need for fast prototyping when it comes to data science solutions. Be it a sophisticated face recognition algorithm or a simple regression model, having a model that allows you to easily test and validate ideas is incredibly valuable.

Many data science problems out there require specially crafted solutions due to the nature of the problem. This means that the data scientists working on these problems will eventually need to improvise on the issue, which means not having to wait to calculate some additional feature column on the dataset every time you execute your script becomes a…

No servers to manage, no maintenance, deploy and forget. I think I found a valid use-case for Lambda.

Since its launch towards the end of 2014, Lambda has created a lot of hype, and more importantly, brought the term “serverless” into the industry. At its core, “serverless” does not mean that there are no servers or anything; there are servers, but you are not the one managing those servers. You don’t know where your code is running, you don’t SSH into a server, you don’t do anything that you’d do with regular servers or VMs. …

Alright, we get it, “cloud” is the future and we need to use containers with all the fancy tools it offers. We are going to containerize our app, use container orchestration tools for deployments, and we have to install Docker.

What is a container?

Remember the good old times where you used to SSH into the production server, go to the project directory, and run git pull to deploy your code? Before you deploy anything, in the very beginning of the life of your server, you’d install all the global dependencies for your app, curl most probably, then git, maybe the interpreter for the…

I thought I had a smart solution to an ancient problem, which turned out to be a stupid engineering quest.

I used to live in a not-so-nice neighborhood of Istanbul since I was born, and there would be burglary incidents every once in a while. Also, we were living in a family building where all 3 apartments of the building were occupied by us, my uncles, and their families. The thing is, our building had this old rusty external door which had a broken lock; therefore, we were not able to lock the door and we were only locking our…