Nitin Nain

Category: Software Development

  • PostgreSQL or Postgres?

    I usually use “Postgres” when speaking to other developers and PostgreSQL in documents. Here’s how the PostgreSQL name came up: PostgreSQL evolved from the Ingres project at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1982, the leader of the Ingres team, Michael Stonebraker, left Berkeley to make a proprietary version of Ingres. He returned to Berkeley in 1985, and began…

  • Signal App’s awkward copy-paste gesture

    The “Copy message” button in the Signal App on iPhone doesn’t show up when you long press the text (on the pop-up ribbon like other messaging apps). The copy icon is placed in the bottom Tab Bar. That seems like an awkward UX error for such a mature app! Or is it just me wondering…

  • Setting up Django on Windows IIS Server

    This post is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

  • Why, When, and How to use Celery with Python

    What is Celery? “Celery is an asynchronous task queue based on distributed message passing.” Let’s break that down:

  • Setting up a Python Virtual Environment for Web Development

    Virtual Environments are helpful in keeping all the dependencies (packages), required for a Python project, in one place. So you can avoid issues with conflicting dependencies when working on different projects simultaneously. For instance, one major use case is when you want to run different Python versions like 2.7, 3.5, and 3.6 on the same…

  • Reading and Writing Excel (xlsx) files with Python

    Jan 2021 Update For Writing: use xlsxwriter (don’t use xlwt, it doesn’t support xlsx format.)For Reading: use openpyxl (xlrd removed the support for xlsx in Dec 2020 due to security concerns.)

  • Django’s Request-Response Cycle

    Understanding the Request-Response Cycle is a crucial step in setting up for any WebServer. An example of the request-response cycle is when you “request” a web page by entering a URL in your browser and a web server sends a web page as ‘response’ to your browser. Of course, there’re usually several HTTP requests that…

  • Designing the Apple Watch UI – a quick guide

    Designing the Apple Watch UI – a quick guide

    The Apple Watch is releasing in a month! Here’s a list of important things you need to know, if you’re interested in designing or developing an Apple Watch App: 1. Layout and Screen Sizes 38mm: 340 pixels x 272 pixels 42mm: 390 pixels x 312 pixels That’s an aspect ratio of 4:5.   2. Icon…

  • Php’s performance improvements — HHVM, JIT, and ‘Hack’

    Facebook deprecated HipHop for PHP, a PHP to C++ translator (trans-compiler) which they had been using since Feb 2010 in favour of HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), in 2013. HHVM is a PHP interpreter that uses just-in-time(JIT) compilation techniques. Or to put it another way, HHVM is a virtual machine that compiles PHP bytecode to native instructions at runtime. HHVM now…