I ran into this exact expression while solving a palindrome problem on a coding challenge platform. The line int(a[::-1]) looked cryptic at first glance — three colons, a negative step, wrapped in int(). But once I broke it down, it turned out to be one of the cleanest one-liners in Python for reversing and converting in a single shot. This article covers how slice notation [::-1] reverses any sequence, how int() converts strings to integers, why combining them works, and where this idiom shows up in real code. By the end you’ll understand exactly what every character in that expression…
Author: drweb
LocalStack today announced it has extended its ability to simulate Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments to provide an ability to debug applications before deploying them. Company CEO Colin Neagle said App Inspector makes it possible for developers to debug their applications running in a simulated AWS environment inside a container on a local server. Simulating the full application stack within a local sandbox container makes it possible to better understand application behavior such as data flows between AWS services, event execution paths and resource dependencies that may have been inadvertently misconfigured, noted Neagle. Once discovered, App Inspector then generates a…
Security tools promise to help developers. In practice, many of them just relocate the burden. The vulnerability still needs to be understood, researched, and fixed, only now the developer is doing it across two or three tools instead of one, hours or days after they wrote the code in question. The real test of an IDE security tool isn’t whether it finds issues. It’s whether a developer’s day actually gets better because of it. Fewer interruptions, fewer broken builds, fewer cycles spent fixing the fix. Here’s what that looks like with Checkmarx Developer Assist across a typical working session. Morning:…
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep things clean and smooth in case I need to rebuild things, I’ve gone with containers. I can easily copy a folder with all my docker compose files and data to another machine and be up and running.One other benefit is upgrades. This post looks at the process of upgrading/patching SQL Server on my laptop.Getting the Latest VersionA normal process for me in the past (and on my desktop) is to download a patch, run the installer, and then have SQL Server upgraded. Sometimes there’s a reboot…
Software developers, CI/CD pipelines, and the tools they rely on are increasingly becoming attractive targets for threat groups. The number of cyberattacks on code repositories like npm and GitHub continues to mount as threat actors push their supply chain attacks. Compromising open source packages, fake development tools, and social engineering are among the tactics bad actors use against developers. Researchers with Kaspersky Lab this month wrote that a combination of programmers’ unfounded belief that they are good at spotting threats and jobs that require them to often download and run third-party code “makes them sitting ducks for cyberattackers.” GitProtect.io analyst…
Ctrl+R and fc let you find, recall, and edit any command from your bash history in seconds, and here’s how to stop retyping the same long commands from scratch with bash history and terminal shortcuts you already have. Most Linux users know their shell saves command history, but the way they use it isn’t very efficient. You type a long command, memorize flags, re-enter file paths, and sometimes forget small details like a trailing slash, then you have to fix it and try again. When you want to reuse a command, you keep pressing the up arrow until you find…
AI coding agents are becoming more capable, but evaluating them is harder than it looks. Most benchmarks focus on a single dimension of agent capabilities; for instance, the popular SWE-Bench benchmark only focuses on fixing issues on open source Python repositories. Real-world software engineering involves fixing bugs of course, but it is a lot more multifaceted: in any single week a software developer may also debug complex issues, building a new greenfield script or app, improving test coverage, fix bugs on a frontend repo, research unfamiliar APIs – the list goes on. The OpenHands Index addresses this by building a…
I have seen the knapsack problem show up in quite a few technical interviews. It is one of those problems that feels tricky at first but becomes much clearer once you see the recursive pattern underneath. In this tutorial, I will walk through the 0-1 knapsack problem, show you how to think about it recursively, and get a working Python implementation that you can actually use. The core idea is this: you have a set of items, each with a weight and a value. You have a knapsack that can hold only so much weight. Your goal is to pick…
Use with open(file, “r”) as f to guarantee files close properly Iterate directly over the file object with for line in f for memory-efficient line-by-line reading Use path.read_text() from pathlib for a concise single-call read Pass encoding explicitly to open() to avoid encoding mismatches Build lists of dictionaries for structured text files you need to query How to Read and Parse a Text File in Python The standard way to read a file in Python is with the built-in open() function. You pass in the file path and a mode, where “r” means read. Then you call read() on the…
You can’t make this crap up. You just wish you could. Jer Crane, founder of the small vertical software company, PocketOS, reported on X that the AI Cursor coding agent and a Railway backup misconfiguration combined to briefly wipe out the company’s car‑rental customer production data. Not some of the data. All of it. That’s a company killer. Fortunately for PocketOS and its customers, Crane later reported that Railway had managed to “recover the data (thank God!).” Thanks to that miracle save of reconstructing the missing data from earlier backups, PocketOS and its customers are back in business. But how…