Many fundraising methods are old-fashioned, ignoring digital technology’s innovative methods of raising awareness and collecting cash. Greater use of tech-enhanced payment systems, including Direct Debit, could encourage more young people to donate.
30 Jan 2017
The OpenAI team is now 45 people. Together, we’re pushing the frontier of AI capabilities—whether by validating novel ideas, creating new software systems, or deploying machine learning on robots.
Launching multi-provider support with the OpenWhisk provider plugin, Python for invoke local in the Serverless Framework v1.6 release.
The new OpenWhisk provider plugin allows developers to build applications for the OpenWhisk cloud platform using the Serverless Framework.
27 Jan 2017
So many folks are wonder what they need to do to make a career of User Experience Design. As someone who interviewed many designers before, I’d say the only gate between you and a career in UX that really matters is your portfolio. Tech moves too fast and is too competitive to worry about tenure […]
26 Jan 2017
I recently added an option to save blog posts for offline reading. This post details how I did that and how you can too.
25 Jan 2017
In my previous post I suggested that the best way to break the compile time coupling between the logger and the loggee was passing in a logger interface when constructing each major type in your program. The suggestion has been floated several times that logging is context specific, so maybe a logger can be passed around via […]
Intro This is the first post of a series explaining the story and technical learnings we had from starting to migrate from AngularJS to React. Check out the github repo for examples and the full code. Our frontend story so far At Small Improvements we’re aiming to make meaningful feedback available for every employee in every […]
Until mid-2015, I wrote code for proprietary software.
24 Jan 2017
We’re excited to announce that Heroku Autoscaling is now generally available for apps using web dynos. We’ve always made it seamless and simple to scale apps on Heroku – just move the slider. But we want to go further, and help you in the face of unexpected demand spikes or intermittent activity. Part of our […] The post Announcing Heroku…
Stamplay is a service for chaining together and mashing up APIs, combining them into workflows to create new APIs or automate processes.
Stamplay is a service for chaining together and mashing up APIs, combining them into workflows to create new APIs or automate processes.
Tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and Heat are a great way to define server infrastructure for deploying software. The configuration to provision, modify, and rebuild an environment is captured in a way that is transparent, repeatable, and testable. Used right, these tools give us confidence to tweak, change, and refactor our infrastructure easily and comfortably.
23 Jan 2017
At Bazaarvoice, we’re big fans of cloud. Real big. We’re also fans of DevOps. There’s been a lot of discussion over the past several years about “What is DevOps?” Usually, this term is used to describe Systems Engineers and Site Reliability Engineers (sometimes called Infrastructure Engineers, Systems Engineers, Operations Engineers or, in the most unfortunate […]
Avoid late payments by leveraging the combined power of Direct Debit and your favourite accounting software, for better cash flow every time
This post is a spin-off from various conversations around improving (I’m trying not to say standardising, otherwise I’ll have to link to XKCD) the way logging is performed in Go projects. Consider this familiar pattern for establishing a package level log variable. package foo import “mylogger” var log = mylogger.GetLogger(“github.com/project/foo”) What’s wrong with this pattern? The first problem […]
When some of our customers reported that their agents were freezing, sometimes for hours at a time, we tracked down the issue to their disk mount options.
22 Jan 2017
These days it is common to hear arguments that software development is becoming gig based. In other words, companies will not hire programmers for permanent positions. Instead, they will put together temporary teams of independent contractors from anywhere in the world to complete … Continue reading →
21 Jan 2017
This post is the second in a two-part series on zero-knowledge proofs. Click here to read Part 1. In this post I’m going to continue the short, (relatively) non-technical overview of zero knowledge proofs that I started a couple of years ago. Yes, that was a very long time! If you didn’t catch the first post, now … Continue reading…
Update March 2019 # Check this fix too. It works really well in most cases. If you ever used vh units and tested your work on mobile Chrome (iOS and Android), you probably were annoyed by page jumping when you scroll. As you probably know vh units are based on the window height. When you scroll, Chrome's address bar disappears…
20 Jan 2017
I was lucky enough to get a hold of an Insta360 Nano this week and it is some of the most amazing technology I have seen recently. It allows for truly instant 360 photos, videos and timelapse captures. As one of the people I was showing it to this week said it is the “selfiestick of 2017”. Here are some…
Clever Doesn’t Cut It Customers are increasingly “opting out” of adworld. They skip, AdBlock and pay premiums for ad-free entertainment. The rise of adblockers and paid ad-free media platforms from Spotify to Netflix is testimony to consumer desire to opt-out. Even the New York Times announced they will explore a higher-priced, ad-free subscription option in 2017.
19 Jan 2017
I was at dinner on Tuesday with 6 security professionals and I proposed this hypothetical situation and I thought it was worth writing up and sharing. Background: Six identical safes with $1,000,000 inside are being built into the side of a public building and are being randomly assigned to everyone at the dinner. At the end of 90 days any…
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov website. But you might not realize that the US Digital Service has helped veterans get their health benefits, […]
Technology is leading a new wave of disruption in our society. While powerful governments are worried about the potential implications of “intelligent” systems and robots displacing jobs, we're seeing more examples of such systems enabling business transformations.
18 Jan 2017
This year's TechCrunch Disrupt London Hackathon around our Marauder's Map contest, where teams build real-time maps, inspired by Harry Potter.
This year's TechCrunch Disrupt London Hackathon around our Marauder's Map contest, where teams build real-time maps, inspired by Harry Potter.
A very interesting feature of the SQL Server and PostgreSQL databases (and some others, including SQLite) is the partial index (sometimes also called “filtered index”). That’s an index that contains only “parts” of the table data. For instance, we can write the following index in SQL Server and PostgreSQL: Let’s imagine you have a house … Continue reading How to…
May 2018 - Updated to match React Router v4 API. September 2019 - Updated to match React Router v5 API, added React Create App part. If you ever had to deploy React Router app to the subfolder on the server, you know what the problem is. Routes will get messed up once you upload it to the server. Here are…
17 Jan 2017
It might surprise you to learn who built most of the prototype of the newest Datadog feature. Read more about Marie-Laure and her internship at Datadog.
OpenMapTiles: new open-source project for generating map tiles.
This post illustrates how I use Serverless to update a `windclock` that shows me the wind speed and direction at my favorite kiteboarding spot.
16 Jan 2017
Typesafe embedded DSLs like jOOQ are extremely powerful for dynamic SQL, because the query you’re constructing with the jOOQ DSL is a dynamic query by nature. You’re constructing a query expression tree using a convenient API (the “DSL”), even if you think your SQL statement is static. For instance: The above query looks like a … Continue reading A Functional…
Before Trump takes office, I want to create a picture of the high-water mark, something I can point to and say “That was how it was” without the fog of time, or the distortions of propaganda and ideology. I was inspired by Sarah Kendzior: Fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you. Today is November 18, 2016. I want…
15 Jan 2017
Last month we finished reading “The Effective Engineer” by Edmond Lau in the book club at work. It is a great book full of practical advice on how to get more done as a software developer. In fact, it is one … Continue reading →
13 Jan 2017
Following our major update to our Android SDK, here's how to migrate your app from v3 to v4.
Following our major update to our Android SDK, here's how to migrate your app from v3 to v4.
12 Jan 2017
During Ship It Week, I took the opportunity to redesign our emails. The goal was to deliver a more modern and fluid layout in hopes of strengthening trust and creating a more pleasant user experience among our customers. Before and After Design According to research1, aesthetics play a big role on how people interact with things. And […]
Perhaps the most powerful SQL feature is the JOIN operation. It is the envy of all non-relational databases, because the concept is so simple, yet so universally applicable, when you want to “combine” two data sets. Put simply, when joining two tables, you’re combining every row from one table with every row from another table, … Continue reading A Probably…
Serverless CEO Austen Collins chats with Cloud Academy about new framework features and gives an overview of basic application lifecycle management with Serverless.
We prepared another tech meetup, this time with four presentations. There will be a break after the second one. This should be the biggest one so far, with two guest speakers. It will happen on February the 4th, at Belgrade Youth Centre. Hope to see you there! Visit Facebook event or meetup.com page. And apply here. Thanks to everyone who…
11 Jan 2017
At Heroku, we’re always working towards improving operational stability with the services we offer. As we recently launched Apache Kafka on Heroku, we’ve been increasingly focused on hardening Apache Kafka, as well as our automation around it. This particular improvement in stability concerns Kafka’s compacted topics, which we haven’t talked about before. Compacted topics are […] The post Pulling the…
UPDATE: We are full up. Tons of people signed up for the talk, and we’re now at the limit of what we feel like we can support in the space. Thanks for all the interest, and if you didn’t get into this one, don’t worry, we have more talks coming!
10 Jan 2017
The password is both a ubiquitous and brittle security mechanism. With the emergence of new security trends like post-quantum cryptography and IoT-botnet attacks, it’s easy to overlook attacks that exploit guessable, reused, or coerced passwords. But the wherewithal among users to use strong passwords and keep them safe is rare. Despite decades of practice, managing […] The post Securing Saved-password…
SQL Server has this nice feature called table-valued parameters (TVP), where users can pass table variables to a stored procedure for bulk data processing. This is particularly nice when the stored procedure is an inline table valued function, i.e. a function that returns a table as well. For instance: The above function creates a cross … Continue reading jOOQ 3.10…
This is a pretty dumb post, in which I argue that functional programming has a lot of the bad parts of libertarianism and a lot of the good parts: Both ideologies strive to eliminate [the] state. (ok, dumb dad joke) Both ideologies are driven by a set of dogmatic axioms rather than a practical goal: Libertarianism wants to reduce the…
9 Jan 2017
Get your business ready for the advent of the new all-digital tax age.
Spacetime is a new memory profiling facility for OCaml to help find space leaks and unwanted allocations. Whilst still a little rough around the edges, we’ve found it to be a very useful tool. Since there’s not much documentation for using spacetime beyond this readme, I’ve written a little intro to give people an idea of how to use it.
8 Jan 2017
(This post is cross-posted from Honeycomb’s instrumentation series). One of my favorite concepts when thinking about instrumenting a system to understand its overall performance and capacity is what I call “time utilization”. By this I mean: If you look at the behavior of a thread over some window of time, what fraction of its time is spent in each “kind”…
I finally got around to converting my avatar from a raster graphic to a vector format. I wanted to be able to animate the polygons using JavaScript and CSS. Another great advantage of a vector format is how the format lends itself to generate a PNG or JPG in any size. Massaging the SVG File Format First things first, I…
6 Jan 2017
Scanning a host with Nmap is a fairly routine act for some in security to do but you from time to time you want to either get a different view of a host or try to conceal your public IP. In this case I use this simple “trick” to run an nmap scan through TOR. To do so you need…
Our new v4 release of our Android SDK is packed full of new features for building powerful real-time mobile apps for Android.
Our new v4 release of our Android SDK is packed full of new features for building powerful real-time mobile apps for Android.
One of jOOQ‘s most powerful features is the capability of introducing custom data types, pretending the database actually understands them. For instance, when working with SQL TIMESTAMP types, users mostly want to use the new JSR-310 LocalDateTime, rather than the JDBC java.sql.Timestamp type. In jOOQ 3.9+, this is a no brainer, as we’ve finally introduced … Continue reading How to…
Efficient Parking Solution through Intelligent Parking System with Live Space Tracking
Efficient Parking Solution through Intelligent Parking System with Live Space Tracking
5 Jan 2017
In a recent consulting gig, I was analysing a client’s connection pool issue in a productive system, where during some peak loads, all the Java processes involving database interactions just started queueing up until nothing really worked anymore. No exceptions, though, and when the peak load was gone in the evening, everything returned back to … Continue reading How to…
IoT event support, Cognito user pool authorizer & install service with a name in Serverless Framework v1.5
ServerlessIoT event support, Cognito user pool authorizer and the ability to install your service with a name in the Serverless Framework v1.5 release.
Get a sneak peek at how MoonMail designed their serverless architecture for an infinitely scalable open source email marketing app in this guest post.
4 Jan 2017
Learn the basics of creating a Serverless plugin to extend the frameworks functionality
3 Jan 2017
This Bazaarvoice blog entry is co-authored by Tanvir Pathan as part of a Bazaarvoice internship project on the Bazaarvoice Mobile Team. Automated testing of native mobile applications has long been a pain point in the world of mobile app development. If you are creating and distributing apps or open source SDKs across two or more major platforms […]
You may have seen this on New Year's Eve: Another leap second, another slew of outages. Handling time correctly is hard!https://t.co/kJepOfsKkv pic.twitter.com/Fwz2Xtpzkd— Dan Luu (@danluu) January 1, 2017 I'd heard a little about this problem, but I didn't understand how it broke code, and what to do about it. So here is an explainer. Background […]
How to stream live-updating global currency exchange rates in real time using the Xignite block and PubNub.
How to stream live-updating global currency exchange rates in real time using the Xignite block and PubNub.
As we begin 2017, we want to thank you for supporting Heroku. Your creativity and innovation continues to inspire us, and pushed us to deliver even more new products and features in 2016. We especially want to thank everyone who helped us by beta testing, sharing Heroku with others, and providing feedback. Here are the […] The post The Heroku…
2 Jan 2017
I have some apps written in Go, which I deliver as binaries for each platform using GitHub releases. Until now, I was doing it with a very simple shell script.
30 Dec 2016
Yesterday US-Cert released information on GRIZZLY STEPPE the malware used in the DNC hack. The IP and hash information provided by the US-Cert was really lacking so I decided to dig through it and see if I could make more of it. The first thing I did was to run the IPs through an ipinfo2sheets spreadsheet I put together earlier…
As the year closes out, it’s time for our community to take the opportunity to reflect back on the past year and think about what we want to accomplish in the coming year. Today, we’re presenting the top articles over the past year, as chosen by both our readers (popularity) and our editors (our picks).
29 Dec 2016
In the first weeks of our company I made the mistake to set up the Active Directory domain with a .local suffix which caused a lot of problems with Windows and Linux-based clients in the longer run. Besides that after I have shifted back my work to my original tasks – I […] The post Cross-domain migration from Windows Server…
The longer I spend as a software engineer, the more obsessive I get about testing. I fully subscribe to the definition of legacy code as “code without an automated test suite.” I’m convinced that the best thing you can do to encourage fast progress in a test suite is to design for testing and have a fast, reliable, comprehensive test…
In November I saw this youtube video on turning a USB Air Purifier into a $75 USB Killer: My soldering skills are basically nonexistent so while I had some time off around the holidays I decided this would be a decent project to help improve them. So in early December I ordered 3 of these from Amazon: USB ionic Oxygen…
28 Dec 2016
Just something to cheer you up for the holidays :) I got this idea while I was sick in bed, and had nothing smarter to do. Pure CSS, no JavaScript at all. Hope you like it, I may add some more details. Check the code on codepen. Happy new year!
It's time for my annual reflection and goal resetting circa 2016
27 Dec 2016
Today, we’re excited to announce our newest addition to the PubNub BLOCKS Catalog – the Falkonry AI block for time series AI
Today, we’re excited to announce our newest addition to the PubNub BLOCKS Catalog – the Falkonry AI block for time series AI
My father, an industrial engineer with over 20 years od experience talks about interface design and the important of simplicity in programming.
26 Dec 2016
The Ruby maintainers continued their annual tradition by gifting us a new Ruby version to celebrate the holiday: Ruby 2.4 is now available and you can try it out on Heroku. Ruby 2.4 brings some impressive new features and performance improvements to the table, here are a few of the big ones: Binding#irb Have you ever used p or puts…
24 Dec 2016
A personal review of 2016 highlights career growth through a new job, open source contributions, conference talks, and co-authoring a Node.js book. The post also covers learning new technologies like Elixir and AWS, while noting failures like lack of focus on a side project.
22 Dec 2016
During the development of the recently released Heroku SSL feature, a lot of work was carried out to stabilize the system and improve its speed. In this post, I will explain how we managed to improve the speed of our TLS handshakes by 4-5x. The initial reports of speed issues were sent our way by […] The post How We…
I had a coach whose favorite quote was “Pain is the best teacher.” and that was the first thing that popped into my head this morning when I realized that I had left an $80 a month Digital Ocean Droplet running for an extra 3 weeks after I got done using it. To be honest $60 isn’t *that* painful but…
How to build incident management capabilities, like real-time alerts and notifications, into your real-time app with PagerDuty.
How to build incident management capabilities, like real-time alerts and notifications, into your real-time app with PagerDuty.
In Go, goroutines are cheap to create and efficient to schedule. The Go runtime has been written for programs with tens of thousands of goroutines as the norm, hundreds of thousands are not unexpected. But goroutines do have a finite cost in terms of memory footprint; you cannot create an infinite number of them. Every time you […]
21 Dec 2016
I am a huge fan of snow and hacky one line linux commands. Thanks to some amazing people on twitter and a little too much free time at the end of the year they have both combined to bring snow to your terminal window just in time for your winter based holiday. This command works on OSX out of the…
How to build a real-time application where users can ask any question, and receive a comprehensive answer in real time.
How to build a real-time application where users can ask any question, and receive a comprehensive answer in real time.
How to monitor, analyze, process, and visualize real-time data in a real-time application using the Librato block.
How to monitor, analyze, process, and visualize real-time data in a real-time application using the Librato block.
Reinforcement learning algorithms can break in surprising, counterintuitive ways. In this post we’ll explore one failure mode, which is where you misspecify your reward function.
This year was pretty shit, so I wasn’t very keen on doing one of these posts. So many of my favourite musicians died, so many of my favourite countries made mistakes, so many of my favourite people are worried and sad, and I am worried and sad with them. But this year was not the worst year we’ve ever had,…
2016 was quite a ride. I just want to write a couple of random things, to close this year with one last post. Work & Co # Big news here, my company became a part of Work & Co. We're really excited about that, and I'm looking forward to the great stuff we are going to build. Our collaboration goes…
20 Dec 2016
What will 2017 hold for the security industry? I sat down and looked into my crystal ball and came up with these 8 security predictions for 2017. A Fortune 500 Will Use “DDOS as a Service” To Attack A Competitor. A bored VP of Marketing with a paypal account, a six pack and a nephew who can get him on…
Welcome to the jOOQ Tuesdays series. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every other month where we interview someone we find exciting in our industry from a jOOQ perspective. This includes people who work with SQL, Java, Open Source, and a variety of other related topics. I’m very excited to … Continue reading jOOQ Tuesdays:…
If you’ve followed the recent (fake) news, you’ve probably already heard it. Oracle is “massively ramping up audits of Java customers it claims are in breach of its licences” After a quick check on the source (The Register), here’s a more realistic, probably more accurate version of that headline: Oracle is thinking about auditing 1-2 … Continue reading What we…