This is a short blog post about my thoughts on using Go in anger through several workplaces, as a developer and an advocate. What is $GOPATH? Back when Go was first announced we used Makefiles to compile Go code. These Makefiles referenced some shared logic stored in the Go distribution. This is where $GOROOT comes from. […]
20 Dec 2016
How Shifter Introduced Serverless Hosting to WordPress Using AWS, DynamoDB & the Serverless Framework
ServerlessLearn how Shifter transforms WordPress blogs and websites into static sites to make them faster, more secure and scalable in this guest post.
What cascade detectors, sensors, and scanners can bring to Bahmni, an open source hospital information system for low-resource environments. Visiting a hospital is rarely a pleasant experience. Aside from the obvious trauma of needing to go to a hospital, there are other inconveniences such as long queues and having to carry physical documents and paper slips from one department to…
16 Dec 2016
Pattern libraries sometimes fall short of helping enterprise teams build different products the same way. These palettes of components (toolbars, pop-ins) and patterns (searching, navigating) can be assembled into any number of UIs, leading to too many right answers. While the public pattern libraries like Google Material must accommodate countless unimagined applications, our private libraries […]
Our guest author walks through 3 types of connected car security risks: indirect physical hacks, short-range wireless hacks, long-range hacks.
Our guest author walks through 3 types of connected car security risks: indirect physical hacks, short-range wireless hacks, long-range hacks.
15 Dec 2016
The next president of the United States showed a willingness to violate historical norms while campaigning, and there's little evidence that he has any moral compass - the examples of this are legion, one of the worst is him cutting off medical treatment to his sick nephew over a legal dispute. His kids are going […]
Today we are announcing the newest version of the Heroku CLI. We know how much time you spend in the CLI as developers and how much pride you take in being able to get things done quickly. Our new CLI has big improvements in performance as well as enhanced readability for humans and machines. Tuned […] The post Announcing the…
Trigger a transactional email to send to a user based on actions in a real-time app. Such as chat, IoT device or a multiplayer game.
Trigger a transactional email to send to a user based on actions in a real-time app. Such as chat, IoT device or a multiplayer game.
This is one of software engineering’s oldest battles. No, I’m not talking about where to put curly braces, or whether to use tabs or spaces. I mean the eternal battle between nominal typing and structural typing. This article is inspired by a very vocal blogger who eloquently reminds us to … […] Please Avoid Functional … Continue reading Do You…
This post is about declaration scopes and shadowing in Go. package main import "fmt" func f(x int) { for x := 0; x < 10; x++ { fmt.Println(x) } } var x int func main() { var x = 200 f(x) } This program declares x four times. All four are different variables because they exist […]
C# service template, Alexa event support, service-wide metrics in Serverless Framework v1.4
ServerlessIntroducing C# service template, Alexa event support, service-wide metrics & more in Serverless Framework v1.4
Talking re:Invent & the Latest Serverless Framework Features in the Dec. 8th Office Hours Live Video Recording
ServerlessDeveloper Evangelist David Wells & Core Framework Engineer Eslam Hefnawy recap Lambda announcements from re:Invent and answer questions in the 2nd edition of Serverless Office Hours.
14 Dec 2016
Today we’re excited to announce a new makeover for the Small Improvements application; a new font family! Please welcome “Avenir Next”! This is all part of our mission to create a more enjoyable, engaging and enticing experience for Small Improvements users. The Design Team @ Small Improvements has had a big year; going responsive, updating colours, icons […]
Recently, at Devoxx, I’ve seen this beautiful slide in a talk by Kevlin Henney In his talk, he was displaying a variety of approaches to solve the FizzBuzz “problem”, including a couple of very elegant solutions in completely declarative approaches and languages. In this particular slide, Kevlin used a notation that is derived from maths. … Continue reading SQL, Streams,…
The new MapTiler Desktop includes the Resume mode, sending maps to your phone or tablet, and many more useful features.
“It is no longer sufficient to do sampling for auditing, you have to boil the ocean," according to Joseph Lodato, global head of compliance technology and surveillance at Guggenheim Partners, in his keynote at the RegTech Summit US. Organizations are now required to trawl through the plethora of emails they send and receive each day to ensure they comply with…
13 Dec 2016
How to build an application that analyzes text for sentiment and scores it as positive, negative, or neutral.
How to build an application that analyzes text for sentiment and scores it as positive, negative, or neutral.
.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 1.x library. It helps you write…
12 Dec 2016
Technology is changing the relationship between customers and the utilities sector
10 Dec 2016
Background I’m in the privileged position of receiving more invitations to speak (at conferences, user groups and podcasts) than I can realistically agree to. I’ve decided to start applying some new criteria to how I pick which ones I go to1. However, over the last couple of years as feminism has become an increasingly important … Continue reading Diversity and…
Do libraries and frameworks prioritize components on boot? If so, how, and if not what can we do? And, in exploring that question, I discovered that Server-Side Rendering isn't a silver bullet!
9 Dec 2016
The SQL language is very intuitive. Until it isn’t. Over the years, a lot of people have criticised the SQL language for a variety of reasons. For instance: IDEs cannot easily guess what auto completion options to offer, because as long as you don’t specify the FROM clause, there are no tables in scope (yet): … Continue reading A Beginner’s…
How to build a real-time remote control for presentations, allowing you to change slides from a remote web or mobile app, using reveal.js.
How to build a real-time remote control for presentations, allowing you to change slides from a remote web or mobile app, using reveal.js.
Over the weekend of the 25th - 27th of November I took part in the Melbourne RetailTech Hackathon, as a judge, on behalf of Thoughtworks. This event was organised by York Butter Factory with the help of student volunteers and is an extension of the monthly RetailTech Melbourne Meetup they run. It was run as a time-limited activity, restricted to…
8 Dec 2016
Postgres is our favorite database—it’s reliable, powerful and secure. Here are a few essential tips learned from building, and helping our customers build, apps around Postgres. These tips will help ensure you get the most out of Postgres, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Postgres add-on. Use a Connection […] The post Making the…
It’s colo time baby! # So for a while now I have been toying with the idea of putting my own hardware up in ’the cloud’ but due to the enormous prices for a homelabber I decided against it many times but now, however, I found a deal that was too good to pass up (considering UK/EUR pricing) and pulled…
7 Dec 2016
How serverless used phenomic.io to create a fast, secure, and scalable open source blog powered by React & Markdown
Building and operating services distributed across a network is hard. Failures are inevitable. The way forward is having resiliency as a key part of design decisions. This post talks about two key aspects of resiliency when doing RPC at scale - the circuit breaker pattern, and its power combined with client-side load balancing.
I sometimes wonder if a robot could do my job. I’m a designer, and my role is to create digital products that humans want to use. Could a machine learn, faster than me, what humans want? Could it design better things than I could, in less time, with less cost and prettier to boot? I don’t think it’s too far-fetched,…
6 Dec 2016
Sunny shows you how to build a real-time translation app with PubNub BLOCKS and the SDL Language Cloud API
Sunny shows you how to build a real-time translation app with PubNub BLOCKS and the SDL Language Cloud API
This was one of those network bugs which took some time to fix. To give you a short background: In the last weeks we had random time NTP drifts in our Linux infrastructure, nothing serious but it was odd as they disappeared after restarting the ntpd or chrony service. During […] The post w32tm: “No valid response has been received…
A couple of weeks ago, I had a small computer chip implanted in my left hand, between my thumb and my finger. I ordered the chip from the website Dangerous Things.
5 Dec 2016
By Peter Crona and Michael Ruhwedel First of all, it was an amazing conference as always. None of us presented this year, but look for us in the future. Many of us at Small Improvements tend to go to more specific conferences, such as React Europe, DockerCon or JSUnconf. GOTO is more of a generic software engineering […]
As long as we allow ourselves to write string-based dynamic SQL embedded in other programming languages like Java, we will have a certain risk of being vulnerable to SQL injection. That’s a fact. Don’t believe it? Check out this website exposing all vulnerabilities on Stack Overflow for PHP questions: https://laurent22.github.io/so-injections In a previous blog post, … Continue reading Prevent SQL…
We’re releasing Universe, a software platform for measuring and training an AI’s general intelligence across the world’s supply of games, websites and other applications.
As a project evolves, does the new code just add on top of the old code? Or does it replace the old code slowly over time? In order to understand this, I built a little thing to analyze Git projects, with help from the formidable GitPython project. The idea is to go back in history historical and run a git…
A recap of serverless news from AWS re:Invent 2016 & why it matters.
4 Dec 2016
I have been playing with my stack of pizero a bunch lately and tonight I decided to put together a piZero OTG Ethernet gadget that runs Kali (Really KaToolin), XRDP and Mate in a computer on a stick configuration. This way I have a full (as I want it to be) Kali installation with me as long as I have…
3 Dec 2016
This is a short blog post to reference the slides from my builderscon 2016 presentation. I had a great time at buildercon, the talks were varied and engaging from a wide selection of Japanese makers. I’m grateful to the builderscon organisers for accepting my talk and inviting me to present at the inaugural builderscon conference in […]
2 Dec 2016
Function metrics, easier AWS credential setup, and Lambda versioning in Serverless Framework v1.3
ServerlessFunction metrics, easier AWS credential setup, and Lambda versioning now available in Serverless v1.3
1 Dec 2016
PostgreSQL 9.6 is now generally available for Heroku Postgres. The main focus of this release is centered around performance. PostgreSQL 9.6 includes enhanced parallelism for key capabilities that sets the stage for significant performance improvements for a variety of analytic and transactional workloads. With 9.6, certain actions, like individual queries, can be split up into […] The post PostgreSQL 9.6…
“Be not afraid of going slowly; be afraid only of standing still.” - Chinese proverb. Hello, and welcome back! Today we are going to take a few more baby steps and learn how to parse Pascal procedure declarations. What is a procedure declaration? A procedure declaration is a language construct that defines an identifier (a procedure name) and associates it…
A collection of speech recognition and voice activation tutorials for building speech and voice functionality into your web, mobile, and IoT apps.
A collection of speech recognition and voice activation tutorials for building speech and voice functionality into your web, mobile, and IoT apps.
30 Nov 2016
How to send and receive SMS alerts and notifications with the ClickSend SMS block.
How to send and receive SMS alerts and notifications with the ClickSend SMS block.
I have been playing with my stack of piZero’s recently and started to read about the kernel OTG gadgets and was intrigued by the OTG_HID gadget. So after doing some reading I found that someone had ported the USB Rubber Ducky platform to the piZero and called it rspiducky. Building it is fairly straight forward but if you if you…
A new application allowing drag&drop of data into your Google Drive folder.
Guest author Diego Zanon writes about building a serverless notification system for browsers using the Serverless Framework and AWS IoT.
29 Nov 2016
Heroku recently released [a managed Apache Kafka][1] offering. As a Node.js developer, I wanted to demystify Kafka by sharing a simple yet practical use case with the many Node.js developers who are curious how this technology might be useful. At Heroku we use Kafka internally for a number of uses including data pipelines. I thought […] The post Data Pipelines…
Results of the State of the Serverless Community survey and what we learned.
This is the fourth article in Technology Radar Echoes, a series where authors share their insights and experience on the technology problems and solutions driving business differentiation for enterprise leaders. Now in its seventh year, the Thoughtworks Technology Radar is an assessment of trends significantly impacting software development and business strategy created by an international advisory board of technologists. The…
28 Nov 2016
How to add image manipulation and image transformation to real-time applications like chat, retail, and collaboration apps with Cloudinary and PubNub BLOCKS.
How to add image manipulation and image transformation to real-time applications like chat, retail, and collaboration apps with Cloudinary and PubNub BLOCKS.
I have been reading a lot about Beacon Frames on my vacation this week (stop laughing) and I came across a tool in Kali called MDK3 that will allow you to send fake beacon frames. I couldnt pass up a chance to test this so I pulled out my trusty TL-WN722N and made a list of the 5,0000 most common…
27 Nov 2016
A while ago my friend Alan and I were discussing configuration management. In particular we wondered why every configuration management tool has to ship a DSL, or be loaded from YAML files. We wondered if it would be possible to just write code that deploys servers — it might let you describe what you want […]
26 Nov 2016
Thanks to PoisonTap I have finally had a reason to pull my PiZero out of the ever growing “Stuff to Hack” pile and start working on it. I have a couple of neat ideas that are coming down the pipeline but this weekend I built a VPN sidecar using a USB OTG Gadget. I wanted to be able to use…
This blog post summarizes a talk about building a Universal JavaScript application with React given at Codemotion Milan 2016. It includes commentary for each slide, photos from Twitter, and a video recording. The post explains what Universal JavaScript is, its benefits, challenges, and walks through demo code to add server-side rendering and routing to a React app.
25 Nov 2016
24 Nov 2016
Recently @ThePracticalDev asked people on Twitter for typical things programmers say: Request — what are some examples of funny idioms/phrases software devs use a lot? Things like "It works on my machine" etc. — DEV Community (@ThePracticalDev) November 16, 2016 … Continue reading →
Over the past few years we’ve heard more about smartphone encryption than, quite frankly, most of us expected to hear in a lifetime. We learned that proper encryption can slow down even sophisticated decryption attempts if done correctly. We’ve also learned that incorrect implementations can undo most of that security. In other words, phone encryption is an … Continue reading…
Guest author Nick den Engelsman writes about streamlining DevOps and why he and his team at BandLab decided on AWS Lambda + API Gateway and the Serverless Framework.
Currently, I'm working on a relatively small pet project. While setting it up, I decided to extract a webpack boilerplate from it. As whole JS community is moving really fast, I found very hard to set everything up using Webpack 1.x. One package would ask to update the other, that would break the third one, then that one... and so…
Part three - also the last part # Other parts: Part 1 - Webpack, Babel, React, Router, ESLint Part 2 - SASS, more ES6 goodness (Static props, decorators, deconstruction...) Part 3 - Where to go from here Where to go from here # I really wanted to continue this series, but unfortunately whole JavaScript / Node community is moving so…
23 Nov 2016
Severless Operations Manager, Casey Shultz, shares tips for building an engaged developer community from CMX Summit 2016.
Fundamental to the job of a user experience (UX) designer is a clear understanding of users, their needs, skills and priorities. As part of my experience on Bahmni's design team, our challenge was in building a feature-rich hospital management system for users unfamiliar with technology. The system needed to work for low-resource (including monetary, infrastructure, and human resources) environments.
It’s been a little over 2 years since I joined Thoughtworks as a recruiter. A lot has been said about Thoughtworks’ dauntingly different culture. I had heard about it as well. So when I first came here, I was unsure about what to expect and if I would gel with fellow Thoughtworkers.
22 Nov 2016
Environment variable support, optimized function packaging, per function IAM permissions, and new configuration options available in Serverless v1.2
21 Nov 2016
PubNub CEO Todd Greene discusses how real-time data streaming is changing everything, and the future of serverless architecture.
PubNub CEO Todd Greene discusses how real-time data streaming is changing everything, and the future of serverless architecture.
19 Nov 2016
This is a progress report on the Go toolchain improvements during the 1.8 development cycle. Now we’re well into November, the 1.8 development window is closing fast on the few remaining in fly change lists, with the remainder being told to wait until the 1.9 development season opens when Go 1.8 ships in February 2017. […]
18 Nov 2016
How to trigger an SMS alert to send to users who receive a chat message, but are offline, using RingCentral and PubNub BLOCKS.
How to trigger an SMS alert to send to users who receive a chat message, but are offline, using RingCentral and PubNub BLOCKS.
17 Nov 2016
With the Sightengine BLOCK, you can execute image moderation and analysis for real-time chat apps and collaborative apps.
With the Sightengine BLOCK, you can execute image moderation and analysis for real-time chat apps and collaborative apps.
We publish our Technology Radar twice a year: it’s a snapshot of current and future technologies that we think are important and relevant across the industry. In this piece, we highlight some of the macro trends that can’t be covered directly in the Radar.
16 Nov 2016
How to get started with AT&T IoT Starter Kit and PubNub, to connect your IoT application in real time with bidirectional communication.
How to get started with AT&T IoT Starter Kit and PubNub, to connect your IoT application in real time with bidirectional communication.
How to get started with AT&T Flow and PubNub, and build real-time data streams to power communication between IoT applications and devices.
How to get started with AT&T Flow and PubNub, and build real-time data streams to power communication between IoT applications and devices.
How to detect and filter profanity from a real-time chat app, and block a user's IP address when they break your custom rules.
How to detect and filter profanity from a real-time chat app, and block a user's IP address when they break your custom rules.
In the wake of Donald Trump's election, what can the banking industry expect in what is likely to be a dramatically different regulatory regime? As a businessman and candidate, Trump is not a supporter of the current regulatory environment. In campaign speeches and on his website, he has stated that he will reduce the regulatory burden on business, give a…
This interview was originally published in the August edition of Inside Retail, creators of Inside Retail Live, APAC's retail conference and expo. Do you have the right flavour of digital to enable modern retail? In the competitive and increasingly global retail market, retailers need to have a clear vision and understanding of their competitive advantage when forming their digital and…
Settings up and structuring AWS accounts in a secure way is no easy feat. Amazon provides facilities such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), password policies and cross-account credentials and role sharing, but setting all of those up correctly still is largely a task of combing through blog posts and best practice analysis.
15 Nov 2016
Today we are announcing a significant enhancement to Heroku External Objects: write support. Salesforce users can now create, read, update, and delete records that physically reside in any Heroku Postgres database from within their Salesforce deployment. Increasingly, developers need to build applications with the sophistication and user experience of the consumer Internet, coupled with the […] The post Now GA:…
How to build an app that analyzes images and tags them with relevant keywords using Clarifai and PubNub BLOCKS.