kaleidoscope

In the  previous post , we saw how ASCII evolved and how useful it was for communication among different devices. With ASCII, the same decimal numbers 0-127 were mapped to the same printable characters and control codes, across all computers and peripherals , creating uniformity. The Problem ASCII was powerful but it was limited to English. It would have worked, If Britain was the only colonial power in the world. Unfortunately, western greed was prevalent in early modern history. Many other European countries like France, Spain, Portugal, Netherland, Germany, and a few more, claimed many other parts of the world as colonies. This led to having,  French ,  Spanish ,  Portuguese,  and a few more European languages as the lingua franca in a large part of the world. On top of it, there were some countries like China, Japan, Iran, Russia & few more, which were either not colonized or not completely influenced by the west, and were still using their languages, li...

In software engineering, we often encounter the terms,  UNICODE ,  UTF-8 ,  Base64 ,  ISO-8859–1, and ASCII . Somehow its tough to find out a clear explanition about them.  In this 4 posts series, I’ll try to provide a “simplified” explanation of what these terms are and an over-simplified history of, how did we get where we are today. Background Humans, reply on graphical characters to represent  data & operations . For  example , language letters (A, a, B, b, C, c, etc.), numbers (1,2,3, etc), operations (+, -, ÷, etc), actions (carriage return, etc), and let's not forget the emojis (😀, 🥸, etc) and much more. However, computers can’t understand these characters. Computer processors are made up of logic gates having only two states, ON and OFF. Coincidentally ( not really ),  the binary number system  is comprised of only two symbols 1 and 0, those can be interpreted as ON and OFF state of logic gates in computers. Therefore, its easy ...

Since the dawn of software engineering, managing the source code had been a great challenge for engineers. A plethora of  Source code management (SCM) systems & Version Control Systems  ( VCS ) have been developed in the search for the best one. In my short career, I have used the useless  Microsoft VSS , the ubiquitous  CVS , the slightly better  SVN,  and the proprietary  IBM-ClearCase . But none provided as comprehensive a solution as the one and only  GIT . The Evolution The quest for the best SCM ended in  2005  when  Linus Torvalds  gave another opensource gift to the world. It was a source code management system (SCM) that he created to manage the  distributed development  of the Linux kernel's huge codebase .  He named the SCM  GIT . The industry embraced  GIT  with open arms. SAAS providers like  GitHub ,  BigBucket  &  GitLab  added more bells and whistles...