Domain Name System: traffic distribution on a budget

It’s not magic

What happens when you type leane.dev in your browser?

As a regular reader of this blog, I am allowing myself to take your everyday example.

You want to access the server hosting this blog, but how do you reach it? On the Internet, routing is done by finding the path to a given Internet Protocol - IP. Thing is: you don’t know my IP, not directly. It’s easier to remember the hostname: leane.dev. Yet, the browser manages to display the blog to you.

Typeahead System

A little background

An autocomplete system, also called typeahead, is a feature often experienced by users while typing in a search bar (or your IDE for that matter). The software suggests the rest of a word or word sequence based on what the user has already typed.

These suggestions can be ranked depending on how often/popular a search is. Remember that gorgeous Versace dress J-Lo wore for the Grammy Awards back in 2000? Everyone googled it - in fact it became the most popular search query at the time and - fun fact - prompted Google engineers to develop the image search! The objective is to make user searches more efficient and reduce the amount of typing required, while keeping the suggestions relevant with current search trends.

Encoding for Web apps internationalisation

Some theory about Information Content & Entropy

Encoding is the process of converting data from one form into another using an unambiguous mapping. It can refer to transforming human-readable characters into a machine-readable format. The main question it raises is: how many bits do I need to encode ‘a’ (and the rest of the characters)?

The Information Content (Shannon information) quantifies the amount of “uncertainty” associated with a particular piece of information.