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: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode238 News As always, thank you for leaving us a review – we really appreciate them! Almazkun, vassilbakalov, DzikijSver Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/ Water Cooler How many programmers are there now? (statista.com) 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! (msn.com)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 hammerClient libraries that completely change with server upgradesWhat'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 (Github) 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. (pagedout.institute)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) (Amazon) Comparison of Travel Routers (gi.inet.com)Carrying case for router (Amazon)Travel power cube - 6 power outlets followed by 3 (Amazon) Did you know you that Windows has a built in camera QR code reader?Guava caching libraries in Java (Github) Caffiene is a more recent alternatitive (Github) 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! (microsoft.github.io)Claude is better than Chat GPT? (claude.ai)How to Get the Most out of Postgres Memory Settings - thanks Mikerg! (temb.io)

View the show notes on the web: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode237 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 https://www.atldevcon.com/ DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/ Kafka Compatible and Kafka Functional Alternatives Why? Because running any type of infrastructure requires time, knowledge, and blood, sweat and tears Confluent https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/We've personally had good experiences with their Kafka as a service WarpStream https://www.warpstream.com/"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 manage10x cheaper than running KafkaAgents 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 instantlySupport different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructureThings you won't have to do with WarpStream Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of spaceFigure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus groupRebalance 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 multipleWarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storageWarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirelyCan 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 AzureAgents 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 KafkaThere'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 IOHas a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangabilitySimple data offload functionality to S3 or GCSMulti tenancyGeo replication Cloud alternatives Google Cloud - PubSub https://cloud.google.com/pubsub Azure - Event Hubs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/event-hubs AWS - Kinesis https://aws.amazon.com/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. https://www.chordai.net/Pandas is nearly as good, if not better than SQL for exploring data https://pandas.pydata.org/Another tip for displaying in Jupyter notebooks - to HTML() your dataframes to show the full column data https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-render-pandas-dataframe-as-html-table/Take photos or video and convert them into 3d models https://lumalabs.ai/luma-api

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode236 News Thanks for the reviews! angingjellies and Nick Brooker Please leave us a review! (/review) Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) 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 zonesTypical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas Kafka APIS Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objectsProducer API - used to write events to Kafka topicsConsumer API - used to read data from Kafka topicsKafka 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 (confluent.io)Source - gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topicSink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic Use Cases Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQMessage 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 functionalityWebsite 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 eventsHow and why Kafka was developed (LinkedIn) 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 applicationsLog 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 filesStream processing - taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topicsEvent sourcing - using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or systemCommit 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" (YouTube)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! (warpstream.com)Cloudflare's trillion message Kafka setup, thanks Mikerg! (blog.bytebytego.com)Want the power and flexibility of jq, but for yaml? Try yq! (gitbook.io)Zenith is terminal graphical metrics for your *nix system written in Rust, thanks MikeRg! (github.com)8 Big (O)Notation Every Developer should Know (medium.com)Another Git cheat sheet (wizardzines.com)

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode235 News Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) 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 processingPermanent 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 languagesLarge 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-timeTracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposesCapture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipmentTo 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 eventsCan 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 cloudCan 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 regionsBrokers - these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layerKafka Connect - these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databasesKafka 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 keyHas a valueHas an event timestampCan have additional metadata Producers and Consumers Producers - these are the client applications that publish/write events to KafkaConsumers - these are the client applications that read/subscribe to events from KafkaProducers and consumers are completely decoupled from each other Topics Events are stored in topicsTopics are like folders on a file system - events would be the equivalent of files within that folderTopics 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 retainedKafka'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. (shop.flipperzero.one) 7 cool and useful things to do with your Flipper Zero 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. (github.com/sauljabin/kaskade)Microstudio is a web-based integrated development environment for making simple games and it's open source! (microstudio.dev)Bing Copilot has a number of useful prompts (bing.com) Designer (photos)Vacation PlannerCooking assistantFitness trainer Sharing metrics between projects in GCP, Azure, and maybe AWS??? GCP (projects): (cloud.google.com)Azure (resource groups or subscriptions): (learn.microsoft.com)AWS (multiple accounts): (docs.aws.amazon.com) Checking wifi in your home - Android Only (play.google.com)Powering POE without running cables (Amazon)Omada specific - cloud vs local hardware (Amazon)How to "shutdown" a Kafka cluster in Kubernetes: kubectl annotate kafka my-kafka-cluster strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation="true" --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespacekubectl delete strimzipodsets my-kafka-cluster --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespaceThen to "restart" the cluster: kubectl annotate kafka my-kafka-cluster strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation- --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace

https://www.codingblocks.net/episode234 Reviews iTunes: ivan.kuchin News Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ Topics People trying to remove their answers from StackOverflow to not allow OpenAI to use their answers without permission/recognition? https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt Obfuscate data dumps with PostgreSQL https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/greenmask/ Kotlin Coroutines https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coroutines-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coroutine-context-and-dispatchers.html#dispatchers-and-threads Reminded Outlaw of the Cloudflare Workers we mentioned a while back https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/ Please leave us a review! https://www.codingblocks.net/review You can control if YouTube keeps track of your history (at least that you can see) 100 Things You Didn't Know About Kubernetes https://www.devopsinside.com/100-things-you-didnt-know-about-kubernetes-part-1/ Do the IDE AI's really make you more productive? Random Bits Tesla Las Vegas Loop https://www.lvcva.com/vegas-loop/ What actually happens when you overfill the oil in a vehicle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTbfvzNbxQ Fisker Ocean totalled after a $900 door ding...really https://jalopnik.com/fisker-ocean-totaled-over-910-door-ding-after-insurer-1851451187 A Ford Mustang painted with the blackest black paint available https://youtu.be/Ll27OkWuE1g Tip of the Week Docker Blog is pretty excellent https://www.docker.com/blog/ Car Research Car reliability information https://www.truedelta.com/ Actual problems logged with car models by year https://www.carcomplaints.com/ Great search engine for finding cars and more metadata about the listing like how long the car has been listed https://caredge.com/ Utilizing wood sheet goods by utilizing cut lists https://www.opticutter.com/cut-list-optimizer Docker's chicken-n-egg problem Use a multi-stage Dockerfile where an earlier stage has the tools you need Manually dearmor a PGP public key (Hint: it's the opposite of: https://superuser.com/questions/764465/how-to-ascii-armor-my-public-key-without-installing-gpg) Download the file using the server suggested name With wget ... --content-disposition https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/wget.1.html Wth curl ... -JO -J, --remote-header-name -O, --remote-name https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-J

Full episode show notes can be found at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode233

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode232 News Thanks for the reviews! Want to help us out? Leave a review! (/reviews) 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. (arstechnica.com) Around the Water Cooler Ktor is an asynchronous web framework based on Kotlin, but can it compete with Spring? (ktor.io)docker init is a great tool for getting started, but how much can you expect from a scaffolding tool? (docs.docker.com)Logging, how much is too much? What if we could go back in time?Boomer Hour: Let's talk about GChat UXWhat do you know about browser extensions? ViolentMonkey is a modern remake of the infamous GreaseMonkey, but can you trust it? (chromewebstore.google.com) Can you trust any extensions? XZ Tools backdown timeline, wow (arstechnica.com) Bookmarklets still rock! (freecodecamp.org)Silent Key Tester for mechanical keyboards, you can specify a wide variety of switches (thockking.com) Joe's preferences: Durock Shrimp Silent T1Tactile Gazzew Boba U4 SilentLiner Kailh Silent BrownLinear Lichicx Lucy SilentLinear WS Wuque Studio Gray SilentTactile WS Wuque StudioWhite Silent - LinearTactile Kailh Silent PinkLinear 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) (gbstudio.dev)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! (YouTube)

Full show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode231

This time we are missing the "ocks", but we hope you enjoy this off...ice topic chat about personalizing our workspaces. Also, Joe had to put a quarter in the jar, and Outlaw needs a cookie. The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode230 News Thank you for the review Szymon! Want to leave us a review? Decorating your Home Office Joe's Uplift Desk ReviewMounting monitors, is there any other way?To grommet or not to grommet?How many keys do you want on your keyboard?Wired vs WirelessAbout that "fn" key…Reddit for inspiration?Office-Appropriate Art PaintingsPrints / Silk Screens / PhotographySculpturesBook CasesThere's a story for Outlaw about this print: https://www.johndyerbaizley.com/product/four-horsemen-full-color-ap Tip of the Week If you have a car, you should consider getting a Mirror Dash Cam. It's a front and rear camera system that replaces your rearview mirror with a touchscreen. Impress all your friends with your recording, zoom, night vision, parking assistance, GPS, and 24/7 recording and monitoring. (Amazon)Be careful about exercising after you give blood, else you might end up needing it back! (redcrossblood.org )

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode229 News Thanks for the reviews! ivan.kuchin (has taken the lead!), Yoondoggy, cykoduck, nehoraigoldWant to help us out? Leave a review! (reviews) Multivalue DBMS Popular: 86. Adabas, 87. UniData/UniVerse, 147. JBaseSimilar 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 attributeIn a MultiValue DBMS - that's how you SHOULD do itPart 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 (docs.rocketsoftware.com)Supposed to be very performant as you access the data the way your application expects itPer the docs, it's easy to maintain (Wikipedia) Spatial DBMS Popular: 29. PostGIS, 59. Aerospike, 136. SpatiaLiteProvides 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 dataIndices that allow for quick retrieval of spatial data about other spatial dataAlso allow for performing spatial-specific operations on data, such as computing distances, merging or intersecting objects or even calculating areasGeospatial data is a subset of spatial data - they represent places / spatial data on the Earth's surfaceSpatio-temporal data is another variation - spatial data combined with timestampsPostGIS - basically a plugin for PostgreSQL that allows for storing of spatial data Additionally supports raster data - data for things like weather and elevationIf you want to learn how to use it and understand the data and what's stored (postgis.net) Spatial data types are: point, line, polygon, and more…basically shapesRather 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 implementationsRedFin - a real estate competitor to realtor.com and others, uses PostgreSQL / PostGISQuite 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. NEventStoreUsed 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 APIsMany client interfaces: .NET, Java, Go, Node, Rust, and PythonRuns on just about all OSes - Windows, Mac, LinuxHighly available - can run in a clusterOptimistic 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 dataFor 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 (db-engines.com) 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. (ooma.com)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"

Show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode228

For the full show notes, head to: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode227

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode226 Reviews Thanks for the reviews! ineverwritereviews1337, ivan.kuchin Want to leave us a review? https://www.codingblocks.net/review . News Orlando Code Camp Conference is February 24th (orlandocodecamp.com)Wireless mic kit mentioned by Outlaw regarding the Shure system (shure.com)New video from Allen: JZ's tip from last episode - Obsidian Tips for Staying Organized (youtube) Is Cat 8 Overkill? No way!Check out AliExpress to save some money (aliexpress.com)Note for NAS building / Plex - 11 gen and newer Intels are your friend for transcoding (intel.com) Merge commits Thanks for the tip mikerg!Some orgs are banning merge commits on larger repositoriesShould you? (graphite.dev)Git Rebase Visualized (atlassian.com)Merge Commit Visualized (atlassian.com) Paged Out - E-Zine Paged Out is a free e-zine of interesting and important articles (pagedout.institute)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 QMKHardware Serial Cheat SheetBSOD colour change trickCold boot attack on Raspberry PiCan 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/toolsA couple noteworthy tools Kenney shape (itch.io) Turn 2d images into 3d by adding depthExport to several different formats$3.99 Asset Forge (itch.io) Assemble simple shapes into more complex onesStretch and rotate$19.95 US ($39.95 deluxe) Tiled Sprite Map Editor (itch.io) 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 (itch.io) Somebody made a js version too, if you can believe that! (jsfxr.me)Beeps, boops, blorps, flames Rexpaint (itch.io) An ASCII Art Editor…you just have to see itLayers, Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, Palette swaps, ZoomWho needs pixels!? Resources We Like Kenney's Game Dev Resources (kenney.nl)What is the demoscene? (YouTube) 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) (audible.com)Visualize Git is an excellent tool for seeing what really happens when you run git commands (git-school.github.io)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? (Code)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. (google.com)

For the full show notes head over to https://www.codingblocks.net/episode225

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode224. News Thank you for the reviews! justsomedudewritingareview, Stephan You can find links to leave us reviews on the website (/reviews) Orlando Code Camp is coming up February 24th, woo! (orlandocodecamp.com)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 (/reviews) 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 InvestmentRise of the BuildersDeliver the Value Protect Your Investment Be deliberateEnsure that you've secured appropriate rights for deploying AI driven solutions AI Trism - AI Trust, Risk and Security Management AI model governance TrustworthinessFairnessReliabilityRobustnessTransparencyData 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 modelingEnhance bias control decisionsModel explainability How to get started with AI Trism? Set up a task force to manage the effortsWork across the organization to share tools and best practicesDefine 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 prioritiesGartner prediction - By 2026, companies invested in CTEM will reduce security breaches by 2/3 (statista.com)Aligns exposure assessment with specific projects or critical threat vectors (fortinet.com)Both patchable and unpatchable exposures will be addressedBusiness 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 programsImprove the prioritization of finding vulnerabilities through validation techniquesEmbrace cybersecurity validation technologies (cybersecurityvalidation.com) "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 FrameworkSolutions for enabling social, environmental and governance outcomes for long term ecological balance and human rightsGartner prediction - by 2027, 25% of CIO's will have compensation that's linked to their sustainable technology impactWhy trending?Environmental technologies help deal with risks in the natural worldSocial technologies help with human rightsGovernance technologies strengthen business conductSustainable technologies provide insights for improving overall performanceHow to get started?Select technologies that help drive sustainabilityHave an ethics board involved when developing the roadmap (gartner.com)Use the Gartner "Hype Cycle for Sustainability 2023" - helps identify well-established vs leading-edge technologies for enterprise sustainability (gartner.com) Resources We Like "Where Online Returns Really End Up And What Amazon Is Doing About It" (YouTube) 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. (youtube.com)If you are interested in streaming technologies and/or Apache Pinot then you should check out the Real-Time Analytics podcast by Tim Berglund (rta.buzzsprout.com)Are you having runtime issues with your Docker container? Why not run it, and poke around? (curl.se)

To see all the items on 2023's holiday shopping list, head over to  https://www.codingblocks.net/episode223

News Thanks for the reviews! Debug DuggmyotherproglangisjavaDaniel Kastinen The call for speakers is open till December 15th for Orlando Code CampSony announces a9 III: World's first full-frame global shutter camera (dpreview.com) Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024 Gartner Report Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024More than 400 MSE's interviewed (gartner.com)53 technologies were mapped to adoption stage (pilot, deployed 2022, deploy in 2023), value and riskValue was determined by looking at the following factors Increasing cost efficiencyImproving speed and agilityEnabling resilienceEnhancing employee productivity Deployment risk Cybersecurity risksImplementation costTalent availabilityVendor supply chain disruptionGeopolitical 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 environmentsDIstributed 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 decisionsNLP - 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 translationEven 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 (cdsglobalcloud.com) 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 networkingInvestments in API management PaaS One of the problems here is talent shortages in this area of expertise (azure.microsoft.com) 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 ResponseDigital Experience MonitoringRobotic Process AutomationVirtual Machine Backup and RecoveryIntegration Platform as a ServiceSD-WAN (software-defined WAN)Network Detection and Response High-value high risk Zero Trust Network AccessArtificial Intelligence IT Operations - AIOpsCloud Application DiscoveryHybrid Cloud ComputingAI Cloud ServicesCloud Managed Networks - CMNs Who have you partnered with? Email AddressesRegistrarCloud Storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc)Backups (Do you still need them!?) ContactsPasswordsPhotos 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! (sli.dev)There are a lot of great resources for Kubernetes on the official Kubernetes Certifications and Training page (kubernetes.io)Notes in iOS are pretty good now! Did you know you can use it for inline images, videos, along with note taking…. (youtube.com)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. (github.com)

https://www.codingblocks.net/episode221

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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode220   News Thanks for the reviews! Meskell, itsmattLeave us a review if you have a chance! (/reviews) 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 (drop.com)Cloud Costs Every Programmer should know (vantage.sh) (Thanks Mikerg!)List of static analysis tools, so you can get with the times! (GitHub) (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 (amazon)Hot Swap vs Solderable Keyboard PCBs (kineticlabs.com)Cherry MX Switch Tester (amazon)Keyboard Switch Sample Pack (amazon) 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. (flexboxfroggy.com)Drop.com is a website focused on computer gear, headphones, keyboards, desk accessories etc. It's got a lot of cool stuff! (drop.com)Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? Recovering files in git doesn't have to be hard with the "restore" command (rewind.com)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! (amazon)

See the full episode's show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode219