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Ultimate Hacking Keyboard Review – Worth the Wait?

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Ultimate Hacking Keyboard Review – Worth the Wait?

In early December, 2015 I came across a Crowd Supply campaign for the Ultimate Hacking Keyboard. Like many professional programmers, I have a mild obsession with mechanical keyboards and ergonomics. It didn’t take too much convincing for me to pull the trigger on my first (and still, only) crowd funding campaign.

ultimate hacking keyboard review

I certainly wasn’t alone as the company raised ~$691,000 to build out this promising programmer’s dream keyboard. It took 48 project updates and nearly 3 years (they had originally planned on shipping in about 1 year, hah) but finally my package arrived in late July of 2018.

Was it worth the wait? Is it worth the estimated retail price of $275?

Here are my thoughts.

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What’s the difference between PL/SQL and SQL?

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What’s the difference between PL/SQL and SQL?

If you’ve been doing some work on Oracle databases or just learning more about the RDMS, at some point you’re going to stumble across PL/SQL, or “Procedural Language/SQL“. Most programming curriculum I have seen never touches on anything like PL/SQL so it often comes as a complete surprise – so what exactly is PL/SQL, and how does it differ from SQL?

A Straight Forward Explanation of PL/SQL for Beginners

PL/SQL is basically a programming language that exists on Oracle SQL Servers. It can be viewed as an extension of SQL, offering much greater control over the data in the database and how you interact with it. Other RDMS tend to have their own, similar but very different procedural programming languages like Microsoft SQL Server’s T-SQL and Posgres’ PL/pgSQL.

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Learn Simple Encryption in Ruby

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Learn Simple Encryption in Ruby

As long as there has been civilization and written language, there has been a need for encryption. Encryption is basically the act of disguising your message so that (hopefully) only the intended recipient can read it.

While you likely associate encryption with internet protocols and WiFi passwords today, there’s a very long and interesting history of encryption dating back to ancient times. I recently read a fascinating history of cryptography called The Code Book by Simon Singh.

While the book is a bit dated in terms of modern cryptography (it was published in 2000, so don’t expect anything about blockchain), it’s still a fantastic read that I would recommend to any programmer.

Coding a Caesar Shift

The most basic and ancient example of cryptography is the “Caesar Cipher“, or “Caesar Shift”. You’ve probably created your own Caesar Cipher as a kid without even knowing the name or history of it. The basics of it are this

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