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About – Mark Galea – (cloudmark)

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Mark Galea

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Lambda Calculus is Dead! Long live Lambda Calculus! – Mark Galea – (cloudmark)

Introduced by Alonzo Church in the 1930s, $lambda$-calculus can be considered as the smallest computation programming language of the world. Reading through the various tutorials one can find various examples which showcase its universality; addition, conditional operators, equality and inequality and recursion. One thing which always intrigued me is how applicable is $lambda$-calculus to everyday problems such as finding the set of URLs in a sitemap or a set of alternate language urls? The question is obviously rhetorical since we know that $lambda$-calculus is Turing complete! Can we model a “modern” problem in terms of $lambda$-calculus and will such a problem still feel natural? The answer is yes! In this post we are going to apply $lambda$-calculus in an SEO domain, specifically to construct a Sitemap and to find the hreflang for a language.

Mark Galea

Free and Bound Variables

Search including nothing

An efficient headless CMS on top of Wordpress - a.k.a the ACF Compiler! – Mark Galea – (cloudmark)

Headless CMSs are becoming quite popular and make up one of the important ingredients of a JAMstack site. At SuprNation we have been tinkering with headless CMSs for quite a while and we have succesfully implemented one using Wordpress (WP), Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and ACF-to-Rest API in one of our experiments. This trio can be used to implement a cheap and flexible headless CMS but as anyone who has worked with ACF knows, retrieving the underlying data can be slow if one relies on the current WP plugins. In this post I am going to describe how we have overcome this problem and introduce our open source initiative that drastically reduces the number of queries and round trips to the database.

Mark Galea

Data Creation

Akka Finite State Machine (FSM) and At Most Once Semantics – Mark Galea – (cloudmark)

The original definition of Actors by Hewitt, Bishop and Steiger stated that i) everything is an actor ii) actors have their own memory and iii) actors communicate by sending and receiving messages asynchronously. When responding to messages an actor can i) send a finite number of messages ii) create a finite number of actors, and iii) designate new behaviour. Designating behaviour in Akka is done through the become and unbecome primitives. Although these primitives are adequate for systems with a small number of states, state management in large systems requires a higher level of abstraction. One of the abstractions used to control states is the Akka FSM Mixin. In this post we will describe how to use the Akka FSM Mixin through a cl ic Akka example - the Wire Transfer example. We will also extend this example to show how one can implement At Most Once semantics.

Mark Galea

Bank Account

Angular 2 - Define Routes Dynamically using UIRouter – Mark Galea – (cloudmark)

A router is a software component responsible for creating, activating, deactivating and destroying component sub-trees. A specific subset of components selected at a certain point in time is called a router state and hence one can think of a router as a software component which synchronises the router state with what the user sees on screen (my hurts!). All possible router states are configured statically at configuration time. At this stage a URL pattern is supplied to the router together with a declaration of the desired router state. This approach works for the majority of cases however there are times when we would like to specify the URL pattern ociated with a state declaration at runtime rather than statically. Supporting multilingual routes is one such example.

Mark Galea