Diary of an insane lead dev: day 447

pdf thumbnails that the app generates are now in S3 instead of saved on disk.

when they were on disk, we would read them from disk into a stream and then create a stream response to the client that would then render the stream in the UI (hey, I didn't write it, I just had to support it)

one of my lazy ass junior devs jumps on modifying it before I can; his solution is to retrieve the file from the cloud now, convert the stream into a base64 encoded string, and then shove that string into an already bloated viewmodel coming from the server to be rendered in the UI.

i'm like "why on earth are you doing that? did you even test the result of this and notice that rendering those thumbnails now takes 3 times as long???"

jr: "I mean, it works doesn't it?"

seriously, if the image file is already hosted on the cloud, and you can programmatically determine its URL, why wouldn't you just throw that in the src attribute in your html tag and call it a day? why would you possibly think that the extra overhead of retrieving and converting the file before passing it off to the UI in an even larger payload than before would result in a good user experience for the client???

it took me all of 30 seconds to google and find out that AWS SDK has a method to GetPreSignedURL on a private file uploaded to s3 and you can set when it expires, and the application is dead at the end of the year.

JFC. I hate trying to reason with these fuckheads by saying "you are paid for you brain, fucking USE IT" because, clearly these code monkeys do not have brains.

which software/research/project you created in your free time as a hobby recently?

I personally created a small widget app that would allow users to create widgets of PDF files on their mobiles.

i have noticed a personal trend : i tend to spend my free time on language/tools/framework that are somewhat different than my daily job. I am a software engineer building sdks in my job that provide a very commercial set of features for android apps, but ended up creating an hobby app that would utilise android's other cool APIs ( storage, file, permission etc) .

before this project too i was exploring backend and web development, creating small react websites in my past time.

do you also spend time exploring outside yhe frameworks/tools used in your work life? or if not, how do you keep yourself motivated? the lateral part os important for me as i am soon going to a job where i might be exploring android APIs in daily work life and therby making android apps will become boring for me .

i remember before joining an SDK making company, i was trying to come up with an SDK myself lol, which at that time was opposite yo rhe work i was doing in the day

ComPDFKit Solutions

For text extraction technology, ComPDFKit offers the following two solutions that effectively address text extraction for all types of PDF files. For documents containing only text information, our non-intelligent solution can suffice. But for more complex documents and image-based ones, ComPDFKit Document AI offers higher accuracy in text extraction. To learn about the accuracy of ComPDFKit's information extraction, see this article.

1. Algorithm: X-Y Cut Recursion Projection Method

The X-Y Cut Recursion Projection Method is a top-down page segmentation technique that decomposes a document image into rectangular blocks. It employs a recursive approach by projecting along both the X and Y axes to segment a PDF into independent rectangles, facilitating the extraction of textual components. ComPDFKit utilizes this method for efficient text separation and structural organization, including rows, paragraphs, and columns, to retrieve characters, words, lines, and paragraphs from the document.

The advantage of the X-Y Cut Recursion Projection Method is its speed, making it suitable for simple, structured, non-image-based PDF documents. However, for complex, unstructured PDFs, there might be recognition errors or omissions.

2. ComPDFKit Document AI

Document AI is an intelligent text extraction solution supporting all types of PDF files, including image-based. It uses artificial intelligence-based methods for document recognition and analysis to extract textual information from PDF documents (as well as images, tables, etc.).

- PDF Recognition and Analysis: This involves using deep learning models to recognize and analyze PDF documents, extracting elements like text, images, and tables while retaining their position, size, style, etc. ComPDFKit owns well-trained AI models to accomplish this process.

- Image Pre-processing: This process involves improving the quality and clarity of low-quality images in PDF documents, enhancing subsequent recognition and analysis. ComPDFKit employs multiple image processing techniques, such as image sharpening enhancement, noise reduction, document trimming and straightening, and stamp detection.

- OCR (Optical Character Recognition): OCR technology has a wide range of application scenarios such as license plate recognition, bank card information extraction, identity document (ID card) information recognition, train ticket information detection, etc. ComPDFKit supports recognition in dozens of languages. With extensively trained model zoo, it can accurately detect and recognize text in documents and analyze document structure.