Due to the advancements in technology, teens and adults alike can now partake in virtual worlds thanks to video games. Video games are enjoyed as a hobby all over the globe, but some gamers have made it their career with help from the ever-growing e-sport community. This is an inside look at the professional level of gaming from an ex-MLG participant, and what I remember going through when starting to play video games at an elite level.

One of the premiere and most popular leagues within the United States happens to be Major League Gaming or MLG for short. This is a league that usually involves more of the most recent games out, and they create circuits for each major title and its subsequent releases. Two of the most major game circuits within the MLG league were the Halo series and the Call of Duty series, both which happened to be first person shooters (FPS). There were a potential hundred or so teams within each circuit, but much like other competitions, the circuits were ran with winner’s brackets and losers brackets. This means that out of all the teams that would show up to MLG events, about the top eight of each bracket would really be known as the "elite" players. I personally played in the Gears of War circuit at venues like MLG Raleigh and MLG Toronto, and we had very few teams compared to Call of Duty and Halo. The amount of participants at each event usually varies in each circuit based on the popularity of the game being played.

When you win tournaments, the payouts are split between the team members. This means that looking at playing in the MLG for a life career is an ill-advised move. The cost to get to events and buy team passes usually negates the prizes you win most of the time, considering by the time that the prize money is split you are left with about $800 in a popular circuit (Like Call of Duty). The payouts are usually only high in special and certain occasions, one for example being the million dollar showdown that Infinity Ward hosted for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 a couple years back. The way that players that make professional gaming their career get the big money now is by being sponsored by the big companies that back the league like Red Bull and Hot Pockets. MLG players like "Walshy" and "FeaR Moho" were sponsored early on in the league and were able to make a living off of the games they played. I would imagine them getting around $60K in a good year off of sponsors alone. I would go even as far as to say that if you do not have a sponsor in e-sports, you will not be financially successful in the career.

Being an MLG gamer requires passion and understanding for the games. If you just want to make money, then you are better off working at McDonalds.

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I will begin our blog on Java Tutorial with an incredibly important aspect of java development:  memory management.  The importance of this topic should not be minimized as an application's performance and footprint size are at stake.

From the outset, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) manages memory via a mechanism known as Garbage Collection (GC).  The Garbage collector

• Manages the heap memory.   All obects are stored on the heap; therefore, all objects are managed.  The keyword, new, allocates the requisite memory to instantiate an object and places the newly allocated memory on the heap.  This object is marked as live until it is no longer being reference.
• Deallocates or reclaims those objects that are no longer being referened. 
• Traditionally, employs a Mark and Sweep algorithm.  In the mark phase, the collector identifies which objects are still alive.  The sweep phase identifies objects that are no longer alive.
• Deallocates the memory of objects that are not marked as live.
• Is automatically run by the JVM and not explicitely called by the Java developer.  Unlike languages such as C++, the Java developer has no explict control over memory management.
• Does not manage the stack.  Local primitive types and local object references are not managed by the GC.

So if the Java developer has no control over memory management, why even worry about the GC?  It turns out that memory management is an integral part of an application's performance, all things being equal.  The more memory that is required for the application to run, the greater the likelihood that computational efficiency suffers. To that end, the developer has to take into account the amount of memory being allocated when writing code.  This translates into the amount of heap memory being consumed.

Memory is split into two types:  stack and heap.  Stack memory is memory set aside for a thread of execution e.g. a function.  When a function is called, a block of memory is reserved for those variables local to the function, provided that they are either a type of Java primitive or an object reference.  Upon runtime completion of the function call, the reserved memory block is now available for the next thread of execution.  Heap memory, on the otherhand, is dynamically allocated.  That is, there is no set pattern for allocating or deallocating this memory.  Therefore, keeping track or managing this type of memory is a complicated process. In Java, such memory is allocated when instantiating an object:

String s = new String();  // new operator being employed
String m = "A String";    /* object instantiated by the JVM and then being set to a value.  The JVM
calls the new operator */

Once again Java tops C as the number one sought after programming language on the internet.  According TIOBE Programming Community Index for February 2013 and five search engines: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu, Java regained its position after being bumped by C in May 2012.

Despite the recent urging by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security of computer users to disable or uninstall Java due to a flaw in Runtime Environment (JRE) 7, Java, has increased its market share of all languages by (+2.03%) in the past six months. The jump in Java’s popularity does not come as a surprise as the Android OS claims massive success in the mobile space.  The top twelve programming languages listed in the index are:

1.  Java
2.  C
3.  Objective-C 
4.  C++
5.  C#
6.  PHP
7.  Python
8.  (Visual) Basic
9.  Perl
10.  Ruby
11. Java Script
12. Visual Basic.NET

Also rising, Python and PHP which are competing to becoming the most popular interpreted language.

Python programming language is general purpose open source programming language. One of its main features is flexibility and ease of use. Python has a variety of useful set of utilities and libraries for data processing and analytical tasks. Currently due to the rise in demand of big data processing python has grown in popularity because its features are easy to use which are core to the processing of huge chunks of information.

Guido Van Rossum, the pioneer of python, introduced python in the year 1980 and then implemented it in 1989. The intention behind the development of python was to make it open source language that can also be used for commercial projects. The fundamental principle of python is to write the code that is easy to use, highly readable and embrace writing fewer lines of code for achieving a particular task. One of the most popular standard libraries which have ready to use tools for performing a various work is Python Package Index. It was introduced in January 2016 and contains more than 72,000 packages for third-party software usage.

Python plays a critical role in linking data to customers. Recently python has found few entry barriers and many people have had access to have experienced the power of python in the past. So, what makes python the best language for big data analytics?

One of the reasons to choose python is that python ecosystem is very vibrant, the ratings at Redmonk are a proof of the strength python community. The Redmonk ranking is based on StackOverflow discussions and contribution made in Github to determine the popularity of programming language on the method used by users to ask questions about Python and the number of the open source projects contributions.