Ever since I started working with NodeJS and NPM, the feeling of speed, convenience and easiness related to project dependencies was shadowed by the question we all got to embrace: if it’s so easy to install dependencies, when will this become a liability? Wouldn’t this turn the project into a…

We looked last time at the security troubles we face when we host services for our home network. It’s a simple trap we all fall into if we are not careful: we assume that all devices in our home network are safe, un-compromised, and always work as expected. We default…

We talked in the past about a few traps we can fall into while pursuing privacy, one of them being to consider Linux and open-source as a privacy magic bullet. You use Linux on all your home devices, host your files on a home server and you are done: privacy…

While converting our evolutionary algorithm into an Azure function, we conveniently skipped an important pain point: when we run our function, it maintains the same state as before, even though our intention may be to reset it and begin the process anew. In other words, our Azure function is not…

Writing an evolutionary algorithm is one of the best ways to write an artificial intelligence hello world program. Of course, we want to keep it short, clean and easy to understand. Lately I started translating the usual operators to functional code and I was surprised by how good the code…

We spent a bit of time to talk about async and threading, how they differ and how single threading limits the benefits of async, even though it’s designed to avoid main thread blocking. And we left the discussion at the usual conclusion: async cannot unblock the main thread if there…

This article is part of the async vs threading series and so far we built a long running evolutionary algorithm that does a lot of mathematical work, and we compared the sequential version with the async version. The result was that even though we carefully returned Promises everywhere and called…

Last time we tried to dissect the typical implementation of async and we predicted its inability to leave the main thread unblocked when performing complex calculations. We suggested a practical test to make this scenario obvious: an AI program, more specifically, an evolutionary algorithm. As seen before, evolutionary algorithms have…

We may all know the theoretical difference between async/await and threading. It’s a question we get or ask a lot in interviews because it’s such a good conversation starter. It spans many platform and hardware topics like task scheduling, processes and threads, event loops, single threaded flows and more. In…