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Coding notes to self

I’m Elena Kolevska, a Software Engineer passionate about system architecture, software design, music and space exploration. I geek out over Redis and Go.

  • The logo of RedisBloom module

    Bloom Filters in Redis

    In an industry where “Choose the right tool for the right job” is a mantra, whoever has the richest toolset is king queen

    Sep 6, 2019 8 min read

    What are bloom filters Checking for presence of an element in a set is a task we, as programmers, do very often and in many different scenarios. As those sets grow bigger and the scenarios more complex, often we start noticing a performance decrease. If you’ve ever been in this position before - read on; we’re going to talk about a valuable tool you can add to your toolset.

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  • Image of a happy child with glasses

    Kids Corners Everywhere

    Why I believe every tech conference should have an area for kids and what does it take to make one

    Jan 25, 2018 4 min read

    This article was originally published as a guest post on 24daysindecember.net, a blog about the amazing PHP community. If I were to sit down and count how many meetups and conferences I missed in my life after I became a mother, I would probably end up crying. When those little guys are born we put all our passions on hold and they become the whole world to us. After a year or two when we snap out of it and start craving our life back we face the fact that it is gone.

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  • Two ants carrying a bug. Photo by Parvana Praveen on Unsplash

    Debugging Laravel Apps On Homestead

    Setting up XDebug with Laravel Homestead

    Jul 7, 2014 4 min read

    Some time ago I got a new job (conveniently starting the post with the excuse for not blogging anything for a long time) working on the architecture of a pretty complex software; the kind of beast I’ve never worked on in php, so after some time I felt the need of a good debugging setup. I wanted to be able to set a breakpoint, work normally in my app and be taken to it when the code execution hits that line.

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  • Laravel Validator For Alphabetic Characters And Spaces

    Custom validation rule for strings that might include spaces

    Jan 23, 2014 1 min read

    Note: (Written for Laravel version 4) This is just a short one.. Have you ever received an error back from your name validators, when you type in a name like “Ana Maria”? Laravel doesn’t have a built in validator for alphabetic characters and spaces, but it does give us everything we need to build one. This is how I do it: /* * app/validators.php */ Validator::extend('alpha_spaces', function($attribute, $value) { return preg_match('/^[\pL\s]+$/u', $value); }); It matches unicode characters, so poor João Gabriel won’t have his name marked as invalid anymore :)

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    Restful Deleting In Laravel

    A quick macro you can re-use in your Laravel apps to send DELETE requests with a CSRF token to a server

    Jan 7, 2014 2 min read

    Restful deleting in Laravel can make newcomers to RESTful APIs scratch their head a bit. I know, cause I’m one of them. We’re used to just have a simple link pointing to a certain URI where the magic happens, but how do we set the HTTP verb if we’re not submitting any forms? Well, Jeffrey Way created a nice javascript that creates a form for you and to use it you only need to add data-method="delete" to your delete links.

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  • Grunt Logo

    Using Grunt & Bower With Laravel And Bootstrap

    Setting up a faster front-end workflow

    Dec 9, 2013 9 min read

    One day I got fed up with the way I used to compile LESS and searched for a more automated way. As I use Laravel for most of my projects I tried Basset asset manager. It worked nicely for some time than it started to have a mind of it’s own. I switched from it, but took note of the concept to store “raw” assets in the app folder. I tried Guard next; couldn’t get the LESS compiler to work.

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