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Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems. Everyone seems to hate regular expressions. I hated them for years. When I needed to get a phone number out of a string, or an attribute of an HTML element, I’d Google it and copy and paste the first StackOverflow results together into my language of choice. In a university level compilers course, I learned how to appreciate regular expressions for the beautiful thing they are....

Note: This was originally written by me & submitted to the Technical University of Munich as an entrance essay. Motivation The election of American president Donald J. Trump in 2016 propelled misinformation, often called “fake news”, into the mainstream discourse. The revelation that Russian troll farms and media outlets produced misinformation that supported Trump and undermined his opponents shocked American voters [1], [2]. This example demonstrates the the need for effective, preventive means to avoid misinformation....

As part of a course on Information Security, part of the course assesment came from a semester project. We had to exploit an application, preferably a web application, of our choice. Given that our university uses the Moodle platform for the course web pages, Moodle became an obvious first choice. Moodle is an excellent target because it is an old project, written in PHP, full of obscure features that are questionably maintained....

Visual Studio Code is a powerful editor right out the box, but some extensions can provide nice additions to your workflow, or at the very least make your code easier to read and work with. I won’t delve too much into language specific extensions such as the plenty of C, Ruby, etc. specific extensions. In reality, the most useful extensions for your workflow will be language specific, and there are too many out there to list the best ones here....

Note: Programmers generally spend way too much time messing around with tools and tweaking aesthetics than being productive with the tools that should be making them more productive. Here is a small selection of my favourite color schemes. I almost exclusively use dark themes, and I appreciate contrast and colourfulness. The font is Fira Code iScript. This gives you the hipster cursive look. 1. September Steel 2. One Dark Pro 3....