Coding Blocks

The world of computer programming is vast in scope. There are literally thousands of topics to cover and no one person could ever reach them all. One of the goals of the Coding Blocks podcast is to introduce a number of these topics to the audience so they can learn during their commute or while cutting the grass. We will cover topics such as best programming practices, design patterns, coding for performance, object oriented coding, database design and implementation, tips, tricks and a whole lot of other things. You'll be exposed to broad areas of information as well as deep dives into the guts of a programming language. While Microsoft.NET is the development platform we're using, most topics discussed are relevant in any number of Object Oriented programming languages. We are all web and database programmers and will be providing useful information on a full spectrum of technologies and are open to any suggestions anyone might have for a topic. So please join us, subscribe, and invite your computer programming friends to come along for the ride.

When to Log Out 10/07/2024

Things to Know when Considering Multi-Tenant or Multi-Threaded Applications 09/02/2024

Two Water Coolers Walk Into a Bar 08/18/2024

How did We Even Arrive Here? 08/04/2024

AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my! 07/07/2024

AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my! It's Water Cooler Time! We've got a variety of topics today, and also Outlaw's lawyering up, Allen can read QR codes now, and Joe is looking at second careers. View the full show notes here: News As always, thank you for leaving us a review – we really appreciate them! Almazkun, vassilbakalov, DzikijSver Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: Water Cooler How many programmers are there now? () Are we still growing? What will it be like when we stop growing? What will people be doing instead? AI music generators are being sued! () Curse of the Blank Page Naming things is important, gives them power…but also the power to defeat them! Don't make any one specific technology your hammer Client libraries that completely change with server upgrades What's the most important or relevant thing to learn as a developer now? Do you research or learn on vacation? Tip of the Week Curated, High-Quality Stories, Essays, Editorials, and Podcasts based around Software Engineering. It's more polished and less experimental than PagedOut () Also, there's a new Paged Out, complete with downloadable art. It's more avant-garde than GIthub's Readme project, featuring articles on Art, Cryptography, Demoscenes, and Reverse Engineering. () Travel Router - Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is used to pass the authentication information between the supplicant (the Wi-Fi workstation) and the authentication server (Microsoft IAS or other) () Comparison of Travel Routers () Carrying case for router () Travel power cube - 6 power outlets followed by 3 () Did you know you that Windows has a built in camera QR code reader? Guava caching libraries in Java () Caffiene is a more recent alternatitive () Generative AI for beginners - "Learn the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications with our 18-lesson comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates." Microsoft has a course for getting into generative AI! () Claude is better than Chat GPT? () How to Get the Most out of Postgres Memory Settings - thanks Mikerg! () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/32037912

Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka 06/23/2024

Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka View the show notes on the web: In the past couple of episodes, we'd gone over what Apache Kafka is and along the way we mentioned some of the pains of managing and running Kafka clusters on your own. In this episode, we discuss some of the ways you can offload those responsibilities and focus on writing streaming applications. Along the way, Joe does a mighty fine fill-in for proper noun pronunciation and Allen does a southern auctioneer-style speed talk. Reviews As always, thank you for leaving us a review - we really do appreciate them! From iTunes: Abucr7 Upcoming Events Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: Kafka Compatible and Kafka Functional Alternatives Why? Because running any type of infrastructure requires time, knowledge, and blood, sweat and tears Confluent We've personally had good experiences with their Kafka as a service WarpStream "WarpStream is an Apache Kafka® compatible data streaming platform built directly on top of object storage: no inter-AZ bandwidth costs, no disks to manage, and infinitely scalable, all within your VPC" ZERO disks to manage 10x cheaper than running Kafka Agents stream data directly to and from object storage with no buffering on local disks and no data tiering. Create new serverless “Virtual Clusters” in our control plane instantly Support different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructure Things you won't have to do with WarpStream Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of space Figure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus group Rebalance partitions in a cluster "WarpStream is protocol compatible with Apache Kafka®, so you can keep using all your favorite tools and software. No need to rewrite your application or use a proprietary SDK. Just change the URL in your favorite Kafka client library and start streaming!" Never again have to choose between reliability and your budget. WarpStream costs the same regardless of whether you run your workloads in a single availability zone, or distributed across multiple WarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storage WarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirely Can be run in BYOC (bring your own cloud) or in Serverless BYOC - you provide all the compute and storage - the only thing that WarpStream provides is the control plane Data never leaves your environment Serverless - fully managed by WarpStream in AWS - will automatically scale for you even down to nothing! Can run in AWS, GCP and Azure Agents are also S3 compatible so can run with S3 compatible storage such as Minio and others RedPanda Redpanda is a slimmed down native Kafka protocol compliant drop-in replacement for Kafka There's even a Redpanda Connect! It's main differentiator is performance, it's cheaper and faster Apache Pulsar Similar to Kafka, but changes the abstraction on storage to allow more flexibility on IO Has a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangability Simple data offload functionality to S3 or GCS Multi tenancy Geo replication Cloud alternatives Google Cloud - PubSub Azure - Event Hubs AWS - Kinesis Tip of the Week Chord AI is an Android/iOS app that uses AI to figure out the chords for a song. This is really useful if you just want to get the quick jist of a song to play along with. The base version is free, and has a few different integration options (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music Local Files for me) and it uses your phones microphone and a little AI magic to figure it out. It even shows you how to play the chords on guitar or piano. The free version gets you basic chords, but you can pay $8.99 a month to get more advanced/frequent chords. Pandas is nearly as good, if not better than SQL for exploring data Another tip for displaying in Jupyter notebooks - to HTML() your dataframes to show the full column data Take photos or video and convert them into 3d models /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/31853452

Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka 06/09/2024

Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka Topics, Partitions, and APIs oh my! This episode we're getting further into how Apache Kafka works and its use cases. Also, Allen is staying dry, Joe goes for broke, and Michael (eventually) gets on the right page. The full show notes are available on the website at News Thanks for the reviews! angingjellies and Nick Brooker Please leave us a review! () Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 () Kafka Topics They are partitioned - this means they are distributed (or can be) across multiple Kafka brokers into "buckets" New events written to Kafka are appended to partitions The distribution of data across brokers is what allows Kafka to scale so well as data can be written to and read from many brokers simultaneously Events with the same key are written to the same partition as the original event Kafka guarantees reads of events within a partition are always read in the order that they were written For fault tolerance and high availability, topics can be replicated…even across regions and data centers NOTE: If you're using a cloud provider, know that this can be very costly as you pay for inbound and outbound traffic across regions and availability zones Typical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas Kafka APIS Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects Producer API - used to write events to Kafka topics Consumer API - used to read data from Kafka topics Kafka Streams API - the ability to implement stream processing applications/microservices. Some of the key functionality includes functions for transformations, stateful operations like aggregations, joins, windowing, and more In the Kafka streams world, these transformations and aggregations are typically written to other topics (in from one topic, out to one or more other topics) Kafka Connect API - allows for the use of reusable import and export connectors that usually connect external systems. These connectors allow you to gather data from an external system (like a database using CDC) and write that data to Kafka. Then you could have another connector that could push that data to another system OR it could be used for transforming data in your streams application These connectors are referred to as Sources and Sinks in the connector portfolio () Source - gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topic Sink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic Use Cases Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ Message brokers are often used for responsive types of processing, decoupling systems, etc. - Kafka is usually a great alternative that scales, generally has faster throughput, and offers more functionality Website activity tracking - this was one of the very first use cases for Kafka - the ability to rebuild user actions by recording all the user activities as events How and why Kafka was developed () Typically different activity types would be written to different topics - like web page interactions to one topic and searches to another Metrics - aggregating statistics from distributed applications Log aggregation - some use Kafka for storage of event logs rather than using something like HDFS or a file server or cloud storage - but why? Because using Kafka for the event storage abstracts away the events from the files Stream processing - taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topics Event sourcing - using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or system Commit log - using Kafka as an external commit log is a way for synchronizing data between distributed systems, or help rebuild the state in a failed system https://youtu.be/IuUDRU9-HRk Tip of the Week Rémi Gallego is a music producer who makes music under a variety of names like The Algorithm and Boucle Infini, almost all of it is instrumental Synthwave with a hard-rock edge. They also make a lot of video game music, including 2 of my favorite game soundtracks of all time "The Last Spell" and "Hell is for Demons" () Did you know that the Kubernetes-focused TUI we've raved about before can be used to look up information about other things as well, like :helm and :events. Events is particularly useful for figuring out mysteries. You can see all the "resources" available to you with "?". You might be surprised at everything you see (pop-eye, x-ray, and monitoring) WarpStream is an S3 backed, API compliant Kafka Alternative. Thanks MikeRg! () Cloudflare's trillion message Kafka setup, thanks Mikerg! () Want the power and flexibility of jq, but for yaml? Try yq! () Zenith is terminal graphical metrics for your *nix system written in Rust, thanks MikeRg! () 8 Big (O)Notation Every Developer should Know () Another Git cheat sheet () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/31665102

Intro to Apache Kafka 05/26/2024

Intro to Apache Kafka We finally start talking about Apache Kafka! Also, Allen is getting acquainted with Aesop, Outlaw is killing clusters, and Joe is paying attention in drama class. The full show notes are available on the website at News Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 () Intro to Apache Kafka What is it? Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Core capabilities High throughput - Deliver messages at network-limited throughput using a cluster of machines with latencies as low as 2ms. Scalable - Scale production clusters up to a thousand brokers, trillions of messages per day, petabytes of data, and hundreds of thousands of partitions. Elastically expand and contract storage and processing Permanent storage - Store streams of data safely in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster. High availability - Stretch clusters efficiently over availability zones or connect separate clusters across geographic regions. Ecosystem Built-in stream processing - Process streams of events with joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and more, using event-time and exactly-once processing. Connect to almost anything - Kafka’s out-of-the-box Connect interface integrates with hundreds of event sources and event sinks including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, and more. Client libraries - Read, write, and process streams of events in a vast array of programming languages Large ecosystem of open source tools - Large ecosystem of open source tools: Leverage a vast array of community-driven tooling. Trust and Ease of Use Mission critical - Support mission-critical use cases with guaranteed ordering, zero message loss, and efficient exactly-once processing. Trusted by thousands of organizations - Thousands of organizations use Kafka, from internet giants to car manufacturers to stock exchanges. More than 5 million unique lifetime downloads. Vast user community - Kafka is one of the five most active projects of the Apache Software Foundation, with hundreds of meetups around the world. What is it? Getting data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, applications, etc. in the form of streams of events. Those events are stored "durably" (in Kafka) for processing, either in real-time or retrospectively, and then routed to various destinations depending on your needs. It's this continuous flow and processing of data that is known as "streaming data" How can it be used? (some examples) Processing payments and financial transactions in real-time Tracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposes Capture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipment To connect and share data from different divisions in a company Apache Kafka as an event streaming platform? It contains three key capabilities that make it a complete streaming platform Can publish and subscribe to streams of events Can store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as necessary (infinitely if you have the storage) To process streams of events in real-time or retrospectively Can be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines or to containers on-prem or in the cloud Can be run self-managed or via various cloud providers as a managed service How does Kafka work? A distributed system that's composed of servers and clients that communicate using a highly performant TCP protocol Servers Kafka runs as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple data centers or cloud regions Brokers - these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layer Kafka Connect - these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databases Kafka clusters are highly scalable and fault-tolerant Clients Allows you to write distributed applications that allow to read, write and process streams of events in parallel that are fault-tolerant and scale These clients are available in many programming languages - both the ones provided by the core platform as well as 3rd party clients Concepts Events It's a record of something that happened - also called a "record" in the documentation Has a key Has a value Has an event timestamp Can have additional metadata Producers and Consumers Producers - these are the client applications that publish/write events to Kafka Consumers - these are the client applications that read/subscribe to events from Kafka Producers and consumers are completely decoupled from each other Topics Events are stored in topics Topics are like folders on a file system - events would be the equivalent of files within that folder Topics are mutli-producer and multi-subscriber There can be zero, one or many producers or subscribers to a topic that write to or read from that topic respectively Unlike many message queuing systems, these events can be read from as many times as necessary because they are not deleted after being consumed Deleting of messages is handled on a per topic configuration that determines how long events are retained Kafka's performance is not dependent on the amount of data nor the duration of time data is stored, so storing for longer periods is not a problem Tip of the Week Flipper Zero is a multi-functional interaction device mixed with a Tamagotchi. It has a variety of IO options built in, RFID, NFC, GPIO, Bluetooth, USB, and a variety of low-voltage pins like you'd see on an Arduino. Using the device upgrades the dolphin, encouraging you to try new things…and it's all open-source with a vibrant community behind it. () Kafka Tui?! Kaskade is a cool-looking Kafka TUI that has got to be better than using the scripts in the build folder that comes with Kafka. () Microstudio is a web-based integrated development environment for making simple games and it's open source! () Bing Copilot has a number of useful prompts () Designer (photos) Vacation Planner Cooking assistant Fitness trainer Sharing metrics between projects in GCP, Azure, and maybe AWS??? GCP (projects): () Azure (resource groups or subscriptions): () AWS (multiple accounts): () Checking wifi in your home - Android Only () Powering POE without running cables () Omada specific - cloud vs local hardware () How to "shutdown" a Kafka cluster in Kubernetes: kubectl annotate kafka my-kafka-cluster strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation="true" --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace kubectl delete strimzipodsets my-kafka-cluster --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace Then to "restart" the cluster: kubectl annotate kafka my-kafka-cluster strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation- --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/31470887

StackOverflow AI Disagreements, Kotlin Coroutines and More 05/13/2024

Llama 3 is Here, Spending Time on Environmental Setup and More 04/28/2024

Ktor, Logging Ideas, and Plugin Safety 04/14/2024

Ktor, Logging Ideas, and Plugin Safety Picture, if you will, a nondescript office space, where time seems to stand still as programmers gather around a water cooler. Here, in the twilight of the workday, they exchange eerie tales of programming glitches, security breaches, and asynchronous calls. Welcome to the Programming Zone, where reality blurs and (silent) keystrokes echo in the depths of the unknown. Also, Allen is ready to boom, Outlaw is not happy about these category choices, and Joe takes the easy (but not longest) road. The full show notes are available on the website at News Thanks for the reviews! Want to help us out? Leave a review! () ivan.kuchin, Nick Brooker, Szymon, JT, Scott Harden Text replacements are tricky, replacing links to "twitter.com" with "x.com" enabled a wave of domain spoofing attacks. () Around the Water Cooler Ktor is an asynchronous web framework based on Kotlin, but can it compete with Spring? () docker init is a great tool for getting started, but how much can you expect from a scaffolding tool? () Logging, how much is too much? What if we could go back in time? Boomer Hour: Let's talk about GChat UX What do you know about browser extensions? ViolentMonkey is a modern remake of the infamous GreaseMonkey, but can you trust it? () Can you trust any extensions? XZ Tools backdown timeline, wow () Bookmarklets still rock! () Silent Key Tester for mechanical keyboards, you can specify a wide variety of switches () Joe's preferences: Durock Shrimp Silent T1 Tactile Gazzew Boba U4 Silent Liner Kailh Silent Brown Linear Lichicx Lucy Silent Linear WS Wuque Studio Gray Silent Tactile WS Wuque Studio White Silent - Linear Tactile Kailh Silent Pink Linear Cherry MX Silent Red Tip of the Week Feeling nostalgic for the original GameBoy or GameBoy Color? GBStudio is a one-stop shop for making games, it's open-source and fully featured. You can do the art, music, and programming all in one tool and it's thoughtfully laid out and well-documented. Bonus…you games will work in GameBoy emulators AND you can even produce your own working physical copies. (If you don't want the high-level tools you can go old skool with "GBDK" too) () If you're going to do something, why not script it? If you're going to script it, save it for next time! Dave's Garage is a YouTube channel that does deep dives into Windows internals, cool electronics projects, and everything in between! () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/30805653

Importance of Data Structures, Bad Documentation and Comments and More 04/01/2024

Decorating your Home Office 03/18/2024

Multi-Value, Spatial, and Event Store Databases 03/04/2024

Multi-Value, Spatial, and Event Store Databases We are mixing it up on you again, no Outlaw this week, but we can offer you some talk of exotic databases. Also, Joe pronounces everything correctly and Allen leaves you with a riddle. The full show notes are available on the website at News Thanks for the reviews! ivan.kuchin (has taken the lead!), Yoondoggy, cykoduck, nehoraigold Want to help us out? Leave a review! () Multivalue DBMS Popular: 86. Adabas, 87. UniData/UniVerse, 147. JBase Similar to RDBMS - store data in tables Store multiple values to a particular record's attribute Some RDBMS's can do this as well, BUT it's typically an exception to the rule when you'd store an array on an attribute In a MultiValue DBMS - that's how you SHOULD do it Part of the reason it's done this way is these database systems are not optimized for JOINS Looked at the Adabas and UniData sites - the primary selling points seem to be rapid application development / ease of learning and getting up to speed as well as data modeling that closely mirrors your application data structures I BELIEVE it's a schema on write () Supposed to be very performant as you access the data the way your application expects it Per the docs, it's easy to maintain () Spatial DBMS Popular: 29. PostGIS, 59. Aerospike, 136. SpatiaLite Provides the ability to efficiently store, modify, and query spatial data - data that appears in a geometrical space (maps, polygons, etc) Generally have custom data types for storing the spatial data Indices that allow for quick retrieval of spatial data about other spatial data Also allow for performing spatial-specific operations on data, such as computing distances, merging or intersecting objects or even calculating areas Geospatial data is a subset of spatial data - they represent places / spatial data on the Earth's surface Spatio-temporal data is another variation - spatial data combined with timestamps PostGIS - basically a plugin for PostgreSQL that allows for storing of spatial data Additionally supports raster data - data for things like weather and elevation If you want to learn how to use it and understand the data and what's stored () Spatial data types are: point, line, polygon, and more…basically shapes Rather than using b-tree indexes for sorting data for fast retrieval, spatial indexes that are bounding boxes - rectangles that identify what is contained within them Typically accomplished with R-Tree and Quadtree implementations RedFin - a real estate competitor to realtor.com and others, uses PostgreSQL / PostGIS Quite a bit of software that supports OpenGIS so may be a good place to start if you're interested in storing/querying spatial data Event Stores Popular: 178. EventStoreDB, 336. IBM DB2 Event Store, 338. NEventStore Used for implementing the concept of Event Sourcing Event Sourcing - an application/data store where the current state of an object is obtained by "replaying" all the events that got it to its current state This contrasts with RDBMS's in that relational typically store the current state of an object - historical state CAN be stored, but that's an implementation detail that has to be implemented, such as temporal tables in SQL Server or "history tables" Only support adding new events and querying the order of events Not allowed to update or delete an event For performance reasons, many Event Store databases support snapshots for holding materialized states at points in time EventStoreDB - https://www.eventstore.com/eventstoredb Defined as an "immutable log" Features: guaranteed writes, concurrency model, granulated stream and stream APIs Many client interfaces: .NET, Java, Go, Node, Rust, and Python Runs on just about all OSes - Windows, Mac, Linux Highly available - can run in a cluster Optimistic concurrency checks that will return an error if a check fails "Projections" allow you to generate new events based off "interesting" occurrences in your existing data For example. You are looking for how many Twitter users said "happy" within 5 minutes of the word "foo coffee shop" and within 2 minutes of saying "London". Highly performant - 15k writes and 50k reads per second Resources we like Database Rankings () Tip of the Week If your internet connection is good, but your cell phone service is bad then you might want to consider Ooma. Ooma sells devices that plug into your network or connect wireless and provide a phone number, and a phone jack so you can hook up an an old school home telephone. We've using it for about a week now with no problems and it's been a breeze to set up. The devices range from $99 to $129 and there's a monthly "premier" plan you can buy with nifty features like a secondary phone line, advanced call blocking, and call forwarding. () Why use "git reset --hard" when you can "git stash -u" instead? Reset is destructive, but stashing keeps your changes just in case you need them. Because sometimes, your "sometimes" is now! 🚫 "git reset --hard". ✅ "git stash -u" /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/30212798

Overview of Object Oriented, Wide Column, and Vector Databases 02/19/2024

Picking the Right Database Type - Tougher than You Think 02/04/2024

There is still cool stuff on the internet 01/21/2024

There is still cool stuff on the internet This episode we are talking about keeping the internet interesting and making cool things by looking at PagedOut and Itch.io. Also, Allen won't ever mark you down, Outlaw won't ever give you up, and Joe took a note to say something about Barbie here but he can't remember what it was. The full show notes are available on the website at Reviews Thanks for the reviews! ineverwritereviews1337, ivan.kuchin Want to leave us a review? . News Orlando Code Camp Conference is February 24th () Wireless mic kit mentioned by Outlaw regarding the Shure system () New video from Allen: JZ's tip from last episode - Obsidian Tips for Staying Organized () Is Cat 8 Overkill? No way! Check out AliExpress to save some money () Note for NAS building / Plex - 11 gen and newer Intels are your friend for transcoding () Merge commits Thanks for the tip mikerg! Some orgs are banning merge commits on larger repositories Should you? () Git Rebase Visualized () Merge Commit Visualized () Paged Out - E-Zine Paged Out is a free e-zine of interesting and important articles () Thanks for the tip mikerg! Some samples AIleister Cryptley, a GPT-fueled sock puppeteer A fake online persona that will generate content for you using ChatGPT Beyond The Illusion - Breaking RSA Encryption Encryption is basically just math - it's not some magical black box "Never roll your own crypto – it’s a recipe for problems!" Keyboard hacking with QMK Hardware Serial Cheat Sheet BSOD colour change trick Cold boot attack on Raspberry Pi Can we get some love for the demoscene? Best part…each issue comes with a wallpaper! Fun Project Ideas Want to get into gamedev or 3d modeling, or just like making cool stuff with your skills? Why not use itch.io as inspiration? See other cool games and tools that people make: https://itch.io/tools A couple noteworthy tools Kenney shape () Turn 2d images into 3d by adding depth Export to several different formats $3.99 Asset Forge () Assemble simple shapes into more complex ones Stretch and rotate $19.95 US ($39.95 deluxe) Tiled Sprite Map Editor () Rich feature set, nice integration with Game Dev Tools Bfxr is a popular tool (which was an elaboration of another tool Sfxr) for generating sound effects () Somebody made a js version too, if you can believe that! () Beeps, boops, blorps, flames Rexpaint () An ASCII Art Editor…you just have to see it Layers, Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, Palette swaps, Zoom Who needs pixels!? Resources We Like Kenney's Game Dev Resources () What is the demoscene? () Tip of the Week If you subscribe to Audible, don't forget that they have a lot of "free" content available, such as dramatic space operas and the "Great Courses" For example. "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" is similar to a "Music Appreciation Course" you might take at uni. The author works through history, talking about the evolution of music and culture. It's 36 hours, and that's just ONE of the music courses available to you for "free" (once you subscribe) () Visualize Git is an excellent tool for seeing what really happens when you run git commands () It's easy to work with checkboxes in Markdown and Obsidian, it's just - [ ] Don't forget the dash or spaces! Did you know there is a Visual Studio Code plugin for converting Markdown to Jira markup syntax? () Apple, Google, and the major password manager vendors have ways to set up emergency contacts. It's very important that you have this setup for yourself, and your loved ones. When you need it, you really need it. () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/29580743

Reflecting on 2023 and Looking Forward to 2024 01/07/2024

Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 12/17/2023

Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 This episode we are talking about the future of tech with the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024. Also, Allen is looking into the crystal ball, Joe is getting lo, and Outlaw is getting into curling. The full show notes for this episode are available at . News Thank you for the reviews! justsomedudewritingareview, Stephan You can find links to leave us reviews on the website () Orlando Code Camp is coming up February 24th, woo! () Make sure you read up on your next MacBook pro, if you want to maximize the performance then you are going to need to pay for it! Reminder: Don't install packages from the internet in your CICD pipeline! You can find links to leave us reviews on the website () Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 No surprise, AI is a big topic - it looks like Gartner is suggesting the technologies and processes companies must follow to be successful using and incorporating AI In this overview, Gartner has grouped these technologies into three different sections Protect Your Investment Rise of the Builders Deliver the Value Protect Your Investment Be deliberate Ensure that you've secured appropriate rights for deploying AI driven solutions AI Trism - AI Trust, Risk and Security Management AI model governance Trustworthiness Fairness Reliability Robustness Transparency Data protection Gartner Prediction - By 2026, companies that incorporate AI Trism controls will improve decision-making by reducing faulty and invalid information by 80% Why is AI Trism Trending? Largely, those who have AI Trism controls in place move more to production, achieve more value, and have higher precision in their modeling Enhance bias control decisions Model explainability How to get started with AI Trism? Set up a task force to manage the efforts Work across the organization to share tools and best practices Define acceptable use policies and set up a system to review and approve access to AI models Continuous Threat Exposure Management - CTEM Systemic approach to continuously adjust cybersecurity priorities Gartner prediction - By 2026, companies invested in CTEM will reduce security breaches by 2/3 () Aligns exposure assessment with specific projects or critical threat vectors () Both patchable and unpatchable exposures will be addressed Business can test the effectiveness of their security controls against the attacker's view "Expected outcomes from tactical and technical response are shifted to evidence-based security optimizations supported by improved cross-team mobilization." How to get started? Integrate CTEM with risk awareness and management programs Improve the prioritization of finding vulnerabilities through validation techniques Embrace cybersecurity validation technologies () "security validation is a process or a technology that validates assumptions made about the actual security posture of a given environment, structure, or infrastructure" Sustainable Technology Framework Solutions for enabling social, environmental and governance outcomes for long term ecological balance and human rights Gartner prediction - by 2027, 25% of CIO's will have compensation that's linked to their sustainable technology impact Why trending? Environmental technologies help deal with risks in the natural world Social technologies help with human rights Governance technologies strengthen business conduct Sustainable technologies provide insights for improving overall performance How to get started? Select technologies that help drive sustainability Have an ethics board involved when developing the roadmap () Use the Gartner "Hype Cycle for Sustainability 2023" - helps identify well-established vs leading-edge technologies for enterprise sustainability () Resources We Like "Where Online Returns Really End Up And What Amazon Is Doing About It" () Tip of the Week Lofi Girl is a youtube channel that plays lo-fi hip hop beats, with a relaxing minimalistic animations. The people behind Lo-Fi Girl also released a new channel featuring a Synthwave (80's influenced mid-tempo electro music) Boy. Same type thing, but Synthwave music. () If you are interested in streaming technologies and/or Apache Pinot then you should check out the Real-Time Analytics podcast by Tim Berglund () Are you having runtime issues with your Docker container? Why not run it, and poke around? () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/29119563

2023 Holiday Season Developer Shopping List 11/25/2023

Gartner and your Life Partners 11/13/2023

Gartner and your Life Partners News Thanks for the reviews! Debug Dugg myotherproglangisjava Daniel Kastinen The call for speakers is open till December 15th for Sony announces a9 III: World's first full-frame global shutter camera () Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024 Gartner Report Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024More than 400 MSE's interviewed () 53 technologies were mapped to adoption stage (pilot, deployed 2022, deploy in 2023), value and risk Value was determined by looking at the following factors Increasing cost efficiency Improving speed and agility Enabling resilience Enhancing employee productivity Deployment risk Cybersecurity risks Implementation cost Talent availability Vendor supply chain disruption Geopolitical risks Key Takeaways Cybersecurity Investments prioritized in (M)anaged (D)etection and (R)response - this to deal with the growing threat of digital risks including things like ransomware (S)ecure (A)ccess (S)ervice (E)dge is gaining traction for moving away from hardware based security solutions to cloud based security services (Z)ero (T)rust (N)etwork (A)ccess is being evaluated to replace VPNs Future work environments Investments are being made in hybrid and remote work environments over collaboration and productivity tools Deployment of cloud security tools being prioritized to enable more security hybrid and remote work environments DIstributed cloud systems and cloud storage are also being prioritized (C)itizen (A)utomation and (D)evelopment (P)latforms are also being investigated to allow business users to leverage low-code services to help speed business decisions NLP - Natural Language Processing appears to be something that businesses want to adopt but are falling behind on plans to deploy due to some challenges Accuracy in language translation Even though NLP has come a LONG way in the past couple years, the human language is still a very challenging problem to solve Productivity and Operation Efficiency Experimenting with Enhanced Internet () Investing in AI and Data Science and Machine Learning to help observe infrastructure across on-prem, cloud and edge computing Comes with high deployment risks but still very highly adopted Investments in 5g for larger demand of networking Investments in API management PaaS One of the problems here is talent shortages in this area of expertise () Some of the high-value low-risk items being piloted Cloud Data Warehousing High-value low-risk items deployed or being deployed Security Orchestration Automation and Response Digital Experience Monitoring Robotic Process Automation Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery Integration Platform as a Service SD-WAN (software-defined WAN) Network Detection and Response High-value high risk Zero Trust Network Access Artificial Intelligence IT Operations - AIOps Cloud Application Discovery Hybrid Cloud Computing AI Cloud Services Cloud Managed Networks - CMNs Who have you partnered with? Email Addresses Registrar Cloud Storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc) Backups (Do you still need them!?) Contacts Passwords Photos Tip of the Week Have a presentation to do? Slidev is a VueJs and markdown-based way to create slides. Because it's web based you can do cool interactive type stuff, and it's portable. Bonus: recording and camera view support built in. Thanks Dave! () There are a lot of great resources for Kubernetes on the official Kubernetes Certifications and Training page () Notes in iOS are pretty good now! Did you know you can use it for inline images, videos, along with note taking…. () Use Docker? Check out dive, it's a tool for exploring a docker image, layer contents, and discovering ways to shrink the size of your Docker/OCI image. () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/28597228

Open Telemetry - Instrumentation and Metrics 10/29/2023

Keyboards, Cloud Costs, Static Analysis, and Philosophy 10/15/2023

Keyboards, Cloud Costs, Static Analysis, and Philosophy We've got a smorgasbord of delights for you this week, ranging from mechanical switches to the cloud and beyond. Also, Michael's cosplaying as Megaman, Joe learns the difference between Clicks and Clacks, and Allen takes no prisoners. See the full show notes a News Thanks for the reviews! Meskell, itsmatt Leave us a review if you have a chance! ( The Show Why are mechanical keyboards so popular with programmers? Is it the sound? Is it the feel? What are silent switches? Are they missing the point? You can buy key switches for good prices () Cloud Costs Every Programmer should know () (Thanks Mikerg!) List of static analysis tools, so you can get with the times! () (Thanks Mikerg!) From itsmatt: "I’d love a breakdown of what each of you think are your key differences in philosophies or approaches to software development. Could be from arguments or debates on older episodes, whether on coding, leadership, startups, AI, whatever - just curious about how best to tell everyone’s voices apart based on what they’re saying. I know one of you is Jay Z (JZ?), but slow to pick up on which host is which based on accents alone." Resources We Like 8Bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard () Hot Swap vs Solderable Keyboard PCBs () Cherry MX Switch Tester () Keyboard Switch Sample Pack () Tip of the Week How do you center a div? Within a div? With right-align text? What about centering 3 divs? What if you want to space them out evenly? If you've been away from CSS for a while, you may be a bit rusty on the best ways to do this. Not sure if it's "the best" but an easy solution to these problems is to use Flexbox, and lucky for you there is a fun little game designed to teach you how to use it. () Drop.com is a website focused on computer gear, headphones, keyboards, desk accessories etc. It's got a lot of cool stuff! () Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? Recovering files in git doesn't have to be hard with the "restore" command () Have trouble with your hands and want to limber up? Also doubles as a cool retro Capcom Halloween costume. It's a LifePro Hand Massager! () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/28320923

Code Confidence using NASA's Ten Simple Rules 10/01/2023

GitHub Actions 09/17/2023

GitHub Actions In this episode, we are talking all about GitHub Actions. What are they, and why should you consider learning more about them? Also, Allen terminates the terminators, Outlaw remembers the good ol' days, and Joe tries his hand at sales. See the full show notes at News Thanks for the reviews! iTunes: nononeveragain, JoeRecursionjoe, Viv-or-vyv, theoriginalniklas Leave us a review if you have a chance! ( Allen did some work on his computer: DeepCool LT720 Liquid Cooler () Noctua Dual-Tower CPU Cooler () What are GitHub Actions? GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform launched in 2018 that lets you define and automate workflows It's well integrated into Github.com and fits nicely with git paradigms - repository, branches, tags, pull requests, hashes, immutability () The workflows can run on GitHub-hosted virtual machines, or on your own servers GitHub Actions are free for standard Github runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners, private repositories get a certain amount of "free" minutes and any overages are controlled by your spending limits 2000 minutes and 500MB for free, 3000 minutes and 1Gb for Pro, etc () Examples of things you can do Automate builds and releases whenever a branch is changed Run tests or linters automatically on pull requests Automatically create or assign Issues, or labels to issues Publish changes to your gh-pages, wiki, releases, Check out the "Actions" tab on any github repository to check if a repository has anything setup () The "Actions" in GitHub Actions refers to the most atomic action that takes place - and we'll get there, but let us start from the top Workflows Workflow is the highest level concept, you see any workflows that a repository has set up () A workflow is triggered by an event: push, pull request, issue being opened, manual action, api call, scheduled event, etc () TypeScript examples: CI - Runs linting, checking, builds, and publishes changes for all supported versions of Node on pull request or push to main or release-* branches Close Issues - Looks for stale issues and closes them with a message (using gh!) Code Scanning - Runs CodeQL checks on pull request, push, and on a weekly schedule Publish Nightly - Publishes the last set of successful builds every night Workflows can call other workflows in your repository, or in a repository you have access to Special note about calling other workflows - when embedding other workflows you can specify a specific version with either a tag or a commit # to make sure you're running exactly what you expect In the UI you'll see a filterable history of workflow runs on the right The workflow is associated with a yaml file located in ./github/workflows Clicking on a workflow in the left will show you a history of that workflow and a link to that file () Jobs Workflows are made up of jobs, which are associated with a "runner" (machine) () Jobs are mainly just a container for "Steps" which are up next, but the important bit is that they are associated with a machine (virtual or you can provide your own either via network or container) Jobs can also be dependent on other jobs in the workflow - Github will figure out how to run things in the required order and parallelize anything it can You're minutes are counted by machine time, so if you have 2 jobs that run in parallel that each take 5 minutes…you're getting "charged" for 10 minutes Steps Jobs are a group of steps that are executed in order on the same runner Data can easily be shared between steps by echoing output, setting environment variables or mutating files Each step runs an action Actions GitHub Enterprise Onboarding Guide - GitHub Resources An action is a custom application written for the GitHub Actions platform GitHub provides a lot of actions and other 3p (verified or not) providers do as well in the "Marketplace", you can use other people's actions (as long as they don't delete it!), and you can write your own Marketplace Examples () Github Checkout - provides options for things like repository, fetch-depth, lfs () Setup .NET Core SDK - Sets up a .NET CLI environment for doing dotnet builds () Upload Artifact - Uploads data for sharing between jobs (90-day retention by default) () Docker Build Push - Has support for building a Docker container and pushing it to a repository (Note: ghrc is a valid repository and even free tiers have some free storage) () Custom Examples "run" command lets you run shell commands (docker builds, curl, echo, etc) Totally Custom () Other things to mention We glossed over a lot of the details about how things work - such as various contexts where data is available and how it's shared, how inputs and outputs are handled…just know that it's there! () You grant job permissions, default is content-read-only but you must give fine-grained permissions to the jobs you run - write content, gh-pages, repository, issues, packages, etc There is a section under settings for setting secrets (unretrievable and masked in output) and variables for your jobs. You have to explicitly share secrets with other jobs you call There is support for "expressions" which are common programming constructions such as conditionals and string helper functions you can run to save you some scripting () Verdict Pros: GitHub Actions is amazing because it's built around git! Great features comparable (or much better) than other CI/CD providers Great integration with a popular tool you might already be using () Works well w/ the concepts of Git By default, workflows cannot use actions from GitHub.com and GitHub Marketplace. You can restrict your developers to using actions that are stored on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, which includes most official GitHub-authored actions, as well as any actions your developers create. Alternatively, to allow your developers to benefit from the full ecosystem of actions built by industry leaders and the open-source community, you can configure access to other actions from GitHub.com. Great free tier Great documentation https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-containerized-services/creating-postgresql-service-containers Hosted/Enterprise version Cons: Working via commits can get ugly…make your changes in a branch and rebase when you're done! Next Steps If you are interested in getting started with DevOps, or just learning a bit more about it, then this is a great way to go! It's a great investment in your skillset as a developer in any case. Examples: Build your project on every pull request or push to trunk Run your tests, output the results from a test coverage tool Run a linter or static analysis tool Post to X, Update LinkedIn whenever you create a new release Auto-tag issues that you haven't triaged yet Resources We Like GitHub Actions () GitHub Actions Documentation () Learn GitHub Actions () Actions on the GitHub marketplace () Tip of the Week There is a GitHub Actions plugin for VSCode that provides a similar UI to the website. This is much easier than trying to make all your changes in Github.com or bouncing between VSCode and the website to see how your changes worked. It also offers some integrated documentation and code completion! It's definitely my preferred way of working with actions. () Did you know that you can cancel terminating a terminating persistent volume in Kubernetes? Hopefully you never need to, but you can do it! () How are the Framework Wars going? Check out Google trends for one point of view. () Rebasing is great, don't be afraid of it! A nice way to get started is to rebase while you are pulling to keep your commits on top. git pull origin main --rebase=i There's a Dockerfile Linter written in Haskell that will help you keep your Docker files in great shape. () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/28058874

Tracing Specifics - Know your System with OpenTelmetry 09/05/2023

What is OpenTelemetry? 08/20/2023

What is OpenTelemetry? In this episode, we're talking all about OpenTelemetry. Also, Allen lays down some knowledge, Joe plays director and Outlaw stumps the chumps. See the full show notes at News Thanks for the reviews Lanjunnn and scott339! Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT () https://youtu.be/i6jSeLvoFmM Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT What is OpenTelemetry? An incubating project on the CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation () What does incubating mean? Projects used in production by a small number of users with a good pool of contributors Basically you shouldn't be left out to dry here So what is Open Telemetry? A collection of APIs, SDKs and Tools that's used to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data This helps you analyze your software's performance and behavior It's available across multiple languages and frameworks It's all about Observability Understanding a system "from the outside" Doesn't require you to understand the inner workings of the system The goal is to be able to troubleshoot difficult problems and answer the "Why is this happening?" Question To answer those questions, the application must be properly "Instrumented" This means the application must emit signals like metrics, traces, and logs The application is properly instrumented when you can completely troubleshoot an issue with the instrumentation available That is the job of OpenTelemetry - to be the mechanism to instrument applications so they become observable List of vendors that support OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/vendors/ Reliability and Metrics Telemetry - refers to the data emitted from a system about its behavior in the form of metrics, traces and logs Reliability - is the system behaving the way it's supposed to? Not just, is it up and running, but also is it doing what it is expected to do Metrics - numeric aggregations over a period of time about your application or infrastructure CPU Utilization Application error rates Number of requests per second SLI - Service Level Indicator - a measurement of a service's behavior - this should be in the perspective of a user / customer Example - how fast a webpage loads SLO - Service Level Objective - the means of communicating reliability to an organization or team Accomplished by attaching SLI's to business value Distributed Tracing To truly understand what distributed tracing is, there's a few parts we have to put together first Logs - a timestamped message emitted by applications Different than a trace - a trace is associated with a request or a transaction Heavily used in all applications to help people observe the behavior of a system Unfortunately, as you probably know, they aren't completely helpful in understanding the full context of the message - for instance, where was that particular code called from? Logs become much more useful when they become part of a span or when they are correlated with a trace and a span Span - represents a unit of work or operation Tracks the operations that a request makes - meaning it helps to paint a picture of what all happened during the "span" of that request/operation Contains a name, time-related data, structured log messages, and other metadata/attributes to provide information about that operation it's tracking Some example metadata/attributes are: http.method=GET, http.target=/urlpath, http.server_name=codingblocks.net Distributed trace is also known simply as a trace - record the paths taken for a user or system request as it passes through various services in a distributed, multi-service architecture, like micro-services or serverless applications (AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions, etc) Tracing is ESSENTIAL for distributed systems because of the non-deterministic nature of the application or the fact that many things are incredibly difficult to reproduce in a local environment Tracing makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot problems because they break down what happens in a request as it flows through the distributed system A trace is made of one or more spans The first span is the "root span" - this will represent a request from start to finish The child spans will just add more context to what happened during different steps of the request Some observability backends will visualize traces as waterfall diagrams where the root span is at the top and branching steps show as separate chains below - diagram linked below () To be continued… Resources We Like OpenTelemetry Website () Tip of the Week Attention Windows users, did you know you can hold the control key to prevent the tasks from moving around in the TaskManager. It makes it much easier to shut down those misbehaving key loggers! () Does your JetBrains IDE feel sluggish? You can adjust the heap space to give it more juice! () Beware of string interpolation in logging statements in Kotlin, you can end up performing the interpolation even if you're not configured to output the statement types! IntelliJ will show you some squiggles to warn you. Use string templates instead. Also, Kotlin has "use" statements to avoid unnecessary processing, and only executes when it's necessary. () Thanks to Tom for the tip on tldr pages, they are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples. () Looking for some new coding music? Check out these albums from popular guitar heroes! Portals from Kirk Hammett () Terminal Velocity from John Petrucci () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/27800862

Software in Audio and How to Lead 08/06/2023

Team Leadership, TUIs, and AI Lawsuits 07/23/2023

Team Leadership, TUIs, and AI Lawsuits In this episode, we're talking about the history of "man" pages, console apps, team leadership, and Artificial Intelligence liability. Also, Allen's downloading the internet, Outlaw has fallen in love with the sound of a morrvair, and Joe says TUI like two hundred times as if it were a real word. See all the show notes at News Thanks for the reviews! itunes: michael_mancuso DevFest Florida is a community-run one-day conference aimed to bring technologists, developers, students, tech companies, and speakers together in one location to learn, discuss and experiment with technology. () What are (were?) man pages? "man" is a command-line "pager" similar to "more" or "less" that was designed specifically to display documentation - ahem, "manuals" "man" pages would show you documentation for many apps in a (mostly) consistent manner that was available offline Do people still use them? People would print these out in the 70's and beyond! How do you create a man page? () Uses an old markup language named "roff" Install to the proper location, typically /usr/man/man: () Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time () How to Lead a Team (Anti-Patterns edition) Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time () Hire Pushovers Ignore Low Performers Ignore Human Issues Be Everyone's Friend Compromise the Hiring Bar Treat Your Team Like Children Terminal UIs A new frontier in programming? The Good: Keep your hands on the keyboard! Easily install on remote servers Often built by devs for devs Low overhead Purpose-built for their purposes (as opposed to IDE extensions) Looks ancient The Bad: Looks ancient Scriptability Each has it's own learning curve Examples: K9s () Lazygit () Lazydocker () Spotify TUI:() Meta AI Meta has been making serious strides in AI with LLAMA and...it's open source! Does that make them any more or less liable for the information? Does "publically available information" change things Resources we like Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time () List of awesome TUIs () AI at Meta Download the AI Model Tip of the Week Want to learn something new while also making your life easier? Why not try writing a TUI!? Here's an article that will kindly introduce you to terminal user interfaces, libraries like "Clap", "TUI", and "Crossterm" that people are using to write them, and…you can get some XP with Rust while you're at it! () Are you looking to upgrade your Kubernetes cluster? Check for API problems first! Are you a browser tab fiend? Did you know you can reload all your tabs simultaneously with a simple shortcut? () No more nasty wiring jobs, get yourself to the hardware store website and pick up some wire and splicing connectors. Keep things nice, tidy, and organized. () Similar but not as good (no lever) () Matt’s Off-road recovery channel is amazing if you're into cars or... beautiful-sounding things. Are you tired of manually correlating logs and events? No more! Check out the Open Telemetry project for your distributed tracing and analytics needs! () /episode/index/show/codingblocks/id/27516786

Better Application Management with Custom Apps 07/09/2023

Coding Blocks

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