Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people who think that using the keyboard is faster…
13 Jun 2017
12 Jun 2017
Often while doing research I need temporary access to a bunch of different virtual machines. While it is possible to do this on my Macbook using VMWare Fusion or Virtualbox the overhead seems unnecessary for something I will delete in under a week. My goto solution is a virtualization stack of: 16GB DigitalOcean Droplet + Wok + Kimchi Here is…
This post is a sequel to Formulating the Support Vector Machine Optimization Problem. The Karush-Kuhn-Tucker theorem Generic optimization problems are hard to solve efficiently. However, optimization problems whose objective and constraints have special structure often succumb to analytic simplifications. For example, if you want to optimize a linear function subject to linear equality constraints, one can compute the Lagrangian of…
Working with serverless is great when you find the right tools that work for you. Check out these tools to take your lambdas to the next level!
Interacting with computers and other devices to get things done has become part of daily life—we search for information on food, clothes and new jobs; we tell our phones to find directions for us; and we no longer need to speak to a human to book a trip. These functions continue to become easier thanks to Natural Language Interfaces.
11 Jun 2017
Back when I was an undergraduate, as part of a class called “Computer Systems Engineering”, we read numerous classic papers of systems design. I enjoyed and learned a great deal from many of these papers, but one that paper that has stuck with me in particular was Saltzer et al’s “End-to-End Arguments in Systems Design”. The paper is a very…
I love OWASP (I wanted to get that out of the way) but they let their TLS certificate expire yesterday: Should it have happened to an organization whose whole goal is to secure web applications? No. There are a million reasons why their TLS certificate could have expired and plenty of reasons it shouldn’t have (OWASP uses letsencrypt for their…
This is a thought experiment, what would Go look like if we could no longer declare variables at the package level? What would be the impact of removing package scoped variable declarations, and what could we learn about the design of Go programs? I’m only talking about expunging var, the other five top level declarations would […]
9 Jun 2017
It was hard to limit ourselves to 10 Nice Examples of Writing SQL in Kotlin With jOOQ, recently, because the Kotlin language has many nice little features that really help a lot when working with Java libraries. We’ve talked about the nice with() stdlib function, which allows to “import” a namespace for a local scope … Continue reading Using Kotlin’s…
Remember when everyone had a really ugly blog with a blogroll? Anyway, just think the word is funny. I follow a few hundred blogs using Feedly and Reeder and have been reading a few hundred thousand blog posts over the last 10 years. Here’s some stuff I think everyone should follow. Not going to share a million blogs, just a…
CLI autocomplete, Cognito User Pool Trigger event source, KMS Key support and more in the Serverless Framework v1.15 release.
8 Jun 2017
You’re using a continuous delivery pipeline because it takes the manual steps out of code deployment. But when a release includes updates to a database schema, the deployment requires manual intervention and team coordination. Typically, someone on the team will log into the database and run the migration, then quickly deploy the new code to […] The post Release Phase:…
How to build a home automation virtual agent that takes commands and carries out actions using Bluemix and IBM Watson Conversation
How to build a home automation virtual agent that takes commands and carries out actions using Bluemix and IBM Watson Conversation
Multiagent environments where agents compete for resources are stepping stones on the path to AGI. Multiagent environments have two useful properties: first, there is a natural curriculum—the difficulty of the environment is determined by the skill of your competitors (and if you’re competing against clones of yourself, the environment exactly matches your skill level). Second, a multiagent environment has no…
Recently we extended the Datadog Agent to support extracting additional metrics from Kubernetes using the kube-state-metrics via protobufs.
With the speed of technological development these days, business agility - the ability to adapt quickly to a changing competitive landscape - is a term that has been repeated often by executives and in company boards. However, when going from XX to XXI century speed is not trivial, leading to innumerous organization transformation initiatives. So much so that many organizations…
7 Jun 2017
I often talk to startups that claim that their compensation package has a higher expected value than the equivalent package at a place like Facebook, Google, Twitter, or Snapchat. One thing I don’t understand about this claim is, if the claim is true, why shouldn’t the startup go to an investor, sell their options for what they claim their options…
6 Jun 2017
Today we are happy to announce Heroku Shield, a new addition to our Heroku Enterprise line of products. Heroku Shield introduces new capabilities to Dynos, Postgres databases and Private Spaces that make Heroku suitable for high compliance environments such as healthcare apps regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). With Heroku Shield, […] The post Introducing Heroku…
The primary job of a CTO is to leverage technology to empower the business and the team. Sometimes that means making boring but safe choices, sometimes that means more risky or controversial choices. I am starting a new series to discuss some of the bets we are making at Splice and the thinking behind those choices. Realizing that some of…
img.otter { max-height: 220px !important; } iframe.otter { height: 250px; width: 100%; margin: 0 auto; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; } iframe.otter-two { width: 100%; height: 320px; border: 5px solid #E0F7FA; border-radius: 3px; padding: 0px 10px; } I work on a library called Polymer, which helps you write web components faster and easier. This is awesome, but it’s only…
5 Jun 2017
A while ago, I published a blog post that presented a tutorial overview of how to use Jmeter for load testing a typical RESTful API. This post builds upon that original post with handy information on some updated reporting features of Jmeter as well a quick dive into how you can better propagate your load […]
Announcing our new PubNub Best Practices Playbook for JavaScript, iOS, and Android, on how to build apps with PubNub correctly.
Announcing our new PubNub Best Practices Playbook for JavaScript, iOS, and Android, on how to build apps with PubNub correctly.
The hypothesis and the setup This blog post has an interactive demo (mostly used toward the end of the post). The source for this demo is available in a Github repository. Last time we saw how the inner product of two vectors gives rise to a decision rule: if $ w$ is the normal to a line (or hyperplane) $…
Payment processing presents many obstacles for the modern SaaS company. From managing failed transactions effectively to handling payments smoothly across different devices --there’s no shortage of challenges to deal with..
Serverless Framework Engineer Eslam Hefnawy explores creative use cases for using Serverless Variables to optimize and automate operations.
This is the first of a five-part ‘short story’ series regarding the RAID log. Meet the RAID log “Well, if it is not in her RAID log, I am 99.99% sure it is not happening.” So said one exec to the rest of the executive steering committee. That is the power of a well-maintained RAID log. It brings confidence to…
Leveraging CSS Variable scope improves the size, specificity, and semantics of our stylesheets. This article talks all about what CSS Variables are and how we can leverage scope to improve our styling.
2 Jun 2017
ANOTHER SQL Post this week? I got nerd-sniped: Lazy Internet: In Oracle, how do i query for where (A, B, C) in (('a', 'b', null), 'a', null, 'c') considering Oracle's null handling? — Rafael Winterhalter (@rafaelcodes) June 2, 2017 Oooooh, challenge accepted! So, let’s assume we have a table T with columns (A, B, C) … Continue reading How to…
1 Jun 2017
The following two indexes are redundant in most SQL databases: It is usually safe to drop the first index, because all queries that query the LAST_NAME column only can still profit from the second index I_ACTOR_2. The reason being that LAST_NAME is the first column of the composite index I_ACTOR_2 (it would be a different … Continue reading How to…
31 May 2017
Today, we are excited to announce DNS Service Discovery for Heroku Private Spaces, an easy way to find and coordinate services for microservice-style deployments. As applications grow in sophistication and scale, developers often organize their applications into small, purpose-built “microservices”. These microservice systems act in unison to achieve what otherwise would be handled by a […] The post Announcing DNS…
Modern web development architecture: Static site generators + JavaScript + Serverless = JAMstack This blog post covers: Hugo + jQuery + Azure Functions = JAMstack This blog post is part of a series: Building a JAMstack site with Hugo and Azure Functions (this post) Managing content for a JAMstack site with Netlify CMS The example used in this blog post…
How to execute XSS protection and HTML5 cleanup on real-time messages and data to counter harmful XSS attacks and malicious inputs.
How to execute XSS protection and HTML5 cleanup on real-time messages and data to counter harmful XSS attacks and malicious inputs.
I stumbled upon an interesting question on Stack Overflow recently. A user wanted to query a table for a given predicate. If that predicate returns no rows, they wanted to run another query using a different predicate. Preferably in a single query. Challenge accepted! Canonical Idea: Use a Common Table Expression We’re querying the Sakila … Continue reading How to…
.highlight .err { color: inherit; background-color: inherit; } .highlight .s1, .highlight .s { color: #336699; background: inherit; } pre { margin-bottom: 30px; } pre, code { background: #f4f6f8; } p > code, li > code { font-weight: bold; } pre { border-bottom: solid 1px #CFD8DC; } This is a cheat sheet for the Polymer 2.x library. If you’re looking for…
This is the first in a 2 part series. You can read the second part here. "Our intuition about the future is linear. But the reality of information technology is exponential, and that makes a profound difference. If I take 30 steps linearly, I get to 30. If I take 30 steps exponentially, I get to a billion." – Ray…
The British Retail Consortium (BRC) and ITN Productions have created a 16 part current affairs programme exploring the transformation of the retail industry, and the implications for retailers. “The Changing Face of Retail" premiered at the BRC’s Retail 2020 event in London and featured opinions and examples from retail leaders across the UK. Thoughtworks is proud to have been involved…
30 May 2017
Recently three of our developers attended the CSSconf 2017 in Berlin. The talks have been inspiring for us and once again we got clear about what a mature language CSS has become by now. The steady addition of new features continue to amaze and the enthusiasm of the community is infectious. The conference itself was […]
How to use the XHR module with Functions to trigger webhooks and integrate 3rd party webservices directly into your data streams.
How to use the XHR module with Functions to trigger webhooks and integrate 3rd party webservices directly into your data streams.
Users of jOOQ, PL/SQL, T-SQL are spoiled as they hardly ever need to worry about bind values. Consider the following statements: Using jOOQ The method parameters firstName and lastName will be automatically mapped to bind values in the generated SQL statement. Here’s the debug log output when running the above, where the first statement is … Continue reading When to…
29 May 2017
Have you ever wanted to control a vast medium small network of Honeypots but only had an hour and about $40 a month to spend on your project? So did I! So with the help of Digital Ocean and Anomali‘s Modern Honey Network we can now do it! For a basic distributed Cowrie network you will need: 1 – $20…
Something that’s been clear as day from my first week here at Thoughtworks is the distinct lack of clones in the company. I've found that Thoughtworkers come from really diverse backgrounds from across the world. And that is one of our inherent strengths. I'm Jonathan and I'm in my eighth month of being a Thoughtworker. As a member of the…
28 May 2017
Many software developers have a tendency to avoid talking to people. They would rather just rely on written communication in chats, email or issue tracker tickets. However, talking to people more can make them more effective as software developers. Here … Continue reading →
Intro, A look back into the past # So a while ago, I posted this rundown of my Plex server and storage setup for media, and it got some traction, which is nice. In that post I mentioned that my storage setup left a lot to be desired and I had issues with it, let me explain.
26 May 2017
Customer churn has a major impact on the bottom line for any company using a subscription billing model.
25 May 2017
Heroku has always made it easy for you to extend your apps with add-ons. Starting today, partners can access the Platform API to build a more secure and cohesive developer experience between add-ons and Heroku. Advancing the Add-on User Experience Several add-ons are already using the new Platform API for Partners. Adept Scale, a long-time […] The post Announcing Platform…
How to stream live weather data into a real-time chat app whenever requested.
How to stream live weather data into a real-time chat app whenever requested.
I'm happy to announce Marvin, boilerplate for kicking off React/Redux applications. Basically my boilerplate became Work & Co's internal project. It is meant to be a starting point for our React projects. This way faster development is assured along with higher quality code. It is open source, and external contributions are welcome. Name comes from a fictional character Marvin, android…
It feels like everyone is talking about platforms. Platform Thinking, Platform Strategies even the Platform Revolution. Platforms, it is argued, are the disruptive secret upon which a digital business is formed.
24 May 2017
(Always One More Thing…) Who Are We? The Ad Management team here at Bazaarvoice grew out of an incubator team. The goal of our incubator is to quickly iterate on ideas, producing prototypes and “proof of concept” projects to be iterated on if they validate a customer need. The project of interest here generates reports […]
A walkthrough of the 3 different Functions event handler types, and when to use them.
A walkthrough of the 3 different Functions event handler types, and when to use them.
We’re open-sourcing OpenAI Baselines, our internal effort to reproduce reinforcement learning algorithms with performance on par with published results. We’ll release the algorithms over upcoming months; today’s release includes DQN and three of its variants.
Google Cloud Functions, Rollback function, DeadLetterConfig, Login command and more in the Serverless Framework v1.14 release.
Are you a recent adopter of Agile Methodologies or maybe you’ve been a practitioner for a while and wondering why some of the practices don’t make sense all the time? Maybe you’ve developed fatigue over various ceremonies involved in Agile or Scrum environments or are frustrated by an inability to define what valuable functionality will be delivered within a fixed…
23 May 2017
How hard can it be to compute conversion rate? Take the total number of users that converted and divide them with the total number of users. Done. Except… it’s a lot more complicated when you have any sort of significant time lag. Prelude – a story Fresh out of school I joined Spotify as the first data analyst. One of…
22 May 2017
There are some situations where you would like to have at least one (empty) row in your result set in SQL. Imagine the following situation. We’re querying the Sakila database for actors and their films: yielding something like: +------------+-----------+---------------------+ | FIRST_NAME | LAST_NAME | TITLE | +------------+-----------+---------------------+ | ... | ... | ... | | … Continue reading How to…
The standard inner product of two vectors has some nice geometric properties. Given two vectors $ x, y \in \mathbb{R}^n$, where by $ x_i$ I mean the $ i$-th coordinate of $ x$, the standard inner product (which I will interchangeably call the dot product) is defined by the formula $$\displaystyle \langle x, y \rangle = x_1 y_1 + \dots…
Unlock your learning potential: Practical tips for mastering any skill.
19 May 2017
The importance of full integration for payments, cash flow and practice efficiency
Serverless lead front-end engineer Nik Graf demonstrates how to build a Serverless REST API with Lambda and DynamoDB.
18 May 2017
Today we are proud to announce that Heroku CI, a low-configuration test runner for unit and browser testing that is tightly integrated with Heroku Pipelines, is now in General Availability. To build software with optimal feature release speed and quality, continuous integration (CI) is a popular and best practice, and is an essential part of […] The post Heroku CI…
Kotlin is the next big thing. With Google announcing official support for Kotlin on Android, we’ll see a lot more traction for this lovely language. After today's #kotlin announcement, we're betting this tag will blow up just like Swift did. #io17. https://t.co/whOcJlJfWe pic.twitter.com/2QKEJIRYVi — Stack Overflow (@StackOverflow) May 17, 2017 We’ve already blogged about the … Continue reading 10 Nice…
Serverless lead front-end engineer Nik Graf shows you how to get started writing and deploying functions with the Serverless Framework.
17 May 2017
How to build a collaborative, multi-user real-time Android todo list using IBM Bluemix and PubNub.
How to build a collaborative, multi-user real-time Android todo list using IBM Bluemix and PubNub.
Solutions Engineers at Datadog have to stay on top of what’s going on within the company and outside.
Update, December 2017 # Check this post for updated, more performant version. I love JavaScript decorators. One that I copy to every React project is scroll decorator. It is fairly simple way of injecting scroll position to react components. This way you can handle scroll using react lifecycle. This decorator is not listening to a scroll event, as that is…
16 May 2017
Utilizing the PubNub Key-Value Store with Functions to store and retrieve data in the network, completely serverless.
Utilizing the PubNub Key-Value Store with Functions to store and retrieve data in the network, completely serverless.
In the last couple of years the Anti-Vaccination crowd in the United States has started to make inroads with more and more people deciding that the perceived risk of the vaccination outweighs the known risk of the disease. When you ask them why they dont vaccinatie they always have anecdotal evidence of how the vaccination could hurt them, how they…
We’ve created a robotics system, trained entirely in simulation and deployed on a physical robot, which can learn a new task after seeing it done once.
15 May 2017
We are releasing Roboschool: open-source software for robot simulation, integrated with OpenAI Gym.
14 May 2017
I’ve been using Jekyll on my blog since 2012. It is great! But, lately, its slow build times started to bother me.
Friends of mine from the band Time Pills opensourced bunch of their tracks. You can find them on GitHub. They are looking forward to having them remixed by creative people and sharing it with the world Repo contains all of the tracks, stems, presets, loops and even midi files. Be sure to check them on SoundCloud as well. Enjoy!
12 May 2017
How to build IoT-enabled smart parking meters with monitoring using IBM Bluemix, Android, PubNub, and Cordova.
How to build IoT-enabled smart parking meters with monitoring using IBM Bluemix, Android, PubNub, and Cordova.
A roundup of links and videos from the serverless ecosystem that caught our attention this week.
11 May 2017
This is the second of a two-part transcript from a recent interview with Tom Dale of Ember.js. In part one we discussed the history and direction of the Ember.js project. Continuing the discussion of the future for Ember.js, this post includes the rest of the interview, primarily focused on the Glimmer.js project. Some of the […] The post The Future…
Dive into an example of how to deploy highly-secure encrypted data streams with advanced serverless event handling, based on meta attributes.
Dive into an example of how to deploy highly-secure encrypted data streams with advanced serverless event handling, based on meta attributes.
About six months ago, we shared Why We Hackathon. At Bazaarvoice, we host a company-wide hackathon twice a year, and our next one kicks off this week. My previous post primarily focused on the people and company culture aspects of running a hackathon. In lieu of writing “Synergizing Innovation With Disruptive Hackathons”, this time around […]
There are abundant resources online trying to scare programmers away from using shell scripts. Most of them, if anything, succeed in convincing the reader to blindly put something that resembles
Geoeditor is a simple online app for collaborative creating and editing of basic geographical data - just draw points, polygons and lines on top of the maps directly in a web browser.
Serverless Product Manager Brian Neisler gives tips for overcoming provider lock-in to create more portability and freedom in your Serverless projects.
10 May 2017
Our new GeoEditor mobile app brings comfortable drawing tools, importing own maps into mobile devices, various base maps, standardized data formats, and much more!
Async variable support added in Serverless v1.13 for enhanced configuration & secret management
ServerlessAsync Serverless variables, Cross-Service communication, Lambda tags and more in the Serverless Framework v1.13 release.
9 May 2017
At EmberConf Terence Lee and I had a chance to sit down with Tom Dale and chat about the history of Ember.js and where it’s headed now, including some details on the newly extracted Glimmer.js rendering engine. This post details a lot of the history of Ember, including some of the motivation that led the […] The post The History…
I was recently asked in an interview about my opinion on how to be a great programmer. That’s an interesting question, and I think we can all be great programmers, regardless of our talent, if we follow a couple of rules that – I believe – should be common sense. In fact, these rules don’t … Continue reading 10 Tips…
Another tech meetup coming up. This time we have three great talks about engineering and project planning. We also have a special guest - IT girls team. The IT Girls team will share their advances in promoting the professional development of women in technology in Serbia. This one will be held on Tuesday, May 16th at Impact Hub Belgrade. See…