Tabish Imran

Software Engineer @ Proofpoint

How John Snow saved London

Six Pandemics ago A little over 200 years ago, the world dealt with a different pandemic. The cholera pandemic is believed to have started in India in the year 1817. In 1832 the virus reached London and the death toll began rising. The virus disproportionately affected the poorest areas of London where sanitation was relatively bad. At the time, we were still a good 60 years away from discovering viruses, and in the absence of solid science-backed solutions, most of the precautionary measures were close to guesswork....

March 17, 2022 · 6 min

Money doesn't float

Today I learned why float or double data types should not be used for storing currency values. TLDR Floats and doubles don’t accurately represent base 10 values that we use for money. Floats are approximated, and if used for representing values that need to be exact, arithmetic operations can give results that are slightly off. These errors can compound over time and become significantly large. Number Systems The story starts at number systems and the basic differences between the human way of counting numbers (Base 10) and the machine way of counting numbers (Base 2)....

November 9, 2020 · 3 min