Coding Blocks

By Allen Underwood, Michael Outlaw, Joe Zack

Become the best software developer you can be... more

4.9

926926 ratings

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FAQs about Coding Blocks:

How many episodes does Coding Blocks have?

The podcast currently has 292 episodes available.

Coding Blocks episodes:

July 07, 2024AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries…oh my!
It’s Water Cooler Time! We’ve got a variety of topics today, and also Outlaw’s lawyering up, Allen can read QR codes now, and Joe is looking at second careers.
View the full show notes here:
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 hammer
Client libraries that completely change with server upgrades
What’s the most important or relevant thing to learn as a developer now?
Do you research or learn on vacation?
Tip of the Week
Curated, High-Quality Stories, Essays, Editorials, and Podcasts based around Software Engineering. It’s more polished and less experimental than PagedOut (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)
...more
1h 48min
June 23, 2024Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka
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.
View the full show notes here:
https://www.codingblocks.net/episode237
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 manage
10x cheaper than running Kafka
Agents stream data directly to and from object storage with no buffering on local disks and no data tiering.
Create new serverless “Virtual Clusters” in our control plane instantly
Support different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructure
Things you won’t have to do with WarpStream
Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of space
Figure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus group
Rebalance partitions in a cluster
“WarpStream is protocol compatible with Apache Kafka®, so you can keep using all your favorite tools and software. No need to rewrite your application or use a proprietary SDK. Just change the URL in your favorite Kafka client library and start streaming!”
Never again have to choose between reliability and your budget. WarpStream costs the same regardless of whether you run your workloads in a single availability zone, or distributed across multiple
WarpStream’s unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storage
WarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirely
Can be run in BYOC (bring your own cloud) or in Serverless
BYOC – you provide all the compute and storage – the only thing that WarpStream provides is the control plane
Data never leaves your environment
Serverless – fully managed by WarpStream in AWS – will automatically scale for you even down to nothing!
Can run in AWS, GCP and Azure
Agents are also S3 compatible so can run with S3 compatible storage such as Minio and others
RedPanda
Redpanda is a slimmed down native Kafka protocol compliant drop-in replacement for Kafka
There’s even a Redpanda Connect!
It’s main differentiator is performance, it’s cheaper and faster
Apache Pulsar
Similar to Kafka, but changes the abstraction on storage to allow more flexibility on IO
Has a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangability
Simple data offload functionality to S3 or GCS
Multi tenancy
Geo replication
Cloud alternatives
Google Cloud – PubSub
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
...more
1h 6min
June 09, 2024Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka
Topics, Partitions, and APIs oh my! This episode we’re getting further into how Apache Kafka works and its use cases. Also, Allen is staying dry, Joe goes for broke, and Michael (eventually) gets on the right page.
The full show notes are available on the website at 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 zones
Typical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas
Kafka APIS
Admin API – used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects
Producer API – used to write events to Kafka topics
Consumer API – used to read data from Kafka topics
Kafka Streams API – the ability to implement stream processing applications/microservices. Some of the key functionality includes functions for transformations, stateful operations like aggregations, joins, windowing, and more
In the Kafka streams world, these transformations and aggregations are typically written to other topics (in from one topic, out to one or more other topics)
Kafka Connect API – allows for the use of reusable import and export connectors that usually connect external systems. These connectors allow you to gather data from an external system (like a database using CDC) and write that data to Kafka. Then you could have another connector that could push that data to another system OR it could be used for transforming data in your streams application
These connectors are referred to as Sources and Sinks in the connector portfolio (confluent.io)
Source – gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topic
Sink – pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic
Use Cases
Message queue – usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ
** Message brokers are often used for responsive types of processing, decoupling systems, etc. – Kafka is usually a great alternative that scales, generally has faster throughput, and offers more functionality
Website activity tracking – this was one of the very first use cases for Kafka – the ability to rebuild user actions by recording all the user activities as events
How and why Kafka was developed (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 applications
Log aggregation – some use Kafka for storage of event logs rather than using something like HDFS or a file server or cloud storage – but why? Because using Kafka for the event storage abstracts away the events from the files
Stream processing – taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topics
Event sourcing – using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or system
Commit log – using Kafka as an external commit log is a way for synchronizing data between distributed systems, or help rebuild the state in a failed system
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)
...more
1h 38min
May 26, 2024Intro to Apache Kafka
We finally start talking about Apache Kafka! Also, Allen is getting acquainted with Aesop, Outlaw is killing clusters, and Joe was 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 processing
Permanent storage – Store streams of data safely in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster.
High availability – Stretch clusters efficiently over availability zones or connect separate clusters across geographic regions.
Ecosystem
Built-in stream processing – Process streams of events with joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and more, using event-time and exactly-once processing.
Connect to almost anything – Kafka’s out-of-the-box Connect interface integrates with hundreds of event sources and event sinks including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, and more.
Client libraries – Read, write, and process streams of events in a vast array of programming languages
Large ecosystem of open source tools – Large ecosystem of open source tools: Leverage a vast array of community-driven tooling.
Trust and Ease of Use
Mission critical – Support mission-critical use cases with guaranteed ordering, zero message loss, and efficient exactly-once processing.
Trusted by thousands of organizations – Thousands of organizations use Kafka, from internet giants to car manufacturers to stock exchanges. More than 5 million unique lifetime downloads.
Vast user community – Kafka is one of the five most active projects of the Apache Software Foundation, with hundreds of meetups around the world.
What is it?
Getting data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, applications, etc. in the form of streams of events. Those events are stored “durably” (in Kafka) for processing, either in real-time or retrospectively, and then routed to various destinations depending on your needs. It’s this continuous flow and processing of data that is known as “streaming data”
How can it be used? (some examples)
Processing payments and financial transactions in real-time
Tracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposes
Capture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipment
To connect and share data from different divisions in a company
Apache Kafka as an event streaming platform?
It contains three key capabilities that make it a complete streaming platform
Can publish and subscribe to streams of events
Can store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as necessary (infinitely if you have the storage)
To process streams of events in real-time or retrospectively
Can be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines or to containers on-prem or in the cloud
Can be run self-managed or via various cloud providers as a managed service
How does Kafka work?
A distributed system that’s composed of servers and clients that communicate using a highly performant TCP protocol
Servers
Kafka runs as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple data centers or cloud regions
Brokers – these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layer
Kafka Connect – these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databases
Kafka clusters are highly scalable and fault-tolerant
Clients
Allows you to write distributed applications that allow to read, write and process streams of events in parallel that are fault-tolerant and scale
These clients are available in many programming languages – both the ones provided by the core platform as well as 3rd party clients
Concepts
Events
It’s a record of something that happened – also called a “record” in the documentation
Has a key
Has a value
Has an event timestamp
Can have additional metadata
Producers and Consumers
Producers – these are the client applications that publish/write events to Kafka
Consumers – these are the client applications that read/subscribe to events from Kafka
Producers and consumers are completely decoupled from each other
Topics
Events are stored in topics
Topics are like folders on a file system – events would be the equivalent of files within that folder
Topics are mutli-producer and multi-subscriber
There can be zero, one or many producers or subscribers to a topic that write to or read from that topic respectively
Unlike many message queuing systems, these events can be read from as many times as necessary because they are not deleted after being consumed
Deleting of messages is handled on a per topic configuration that determines how long events are retained
Kafka’s performance is not dependent on the amount of data nor the duration of time data is stored, so storing for longer periods is not a problem
Resources we Like
Why Strimzi moved away from statefulsets (github.com)
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 Planner
Cooking assistant
Fitness 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-namespace
kubectl delete strimzipodsets my-kafka-cluster --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace
Then to “restart” the cluster: kubectl annotate kafka my-kafka-cluster strimzi.io/pause-reconciliation- --context=my-context --namespace=my-namespace
https://github.com/strimzi/proposals/blob/main/031-statefulset-removal.md
...more
2h 5min
May 13, 2024StackOverflow AI Disagreements, Kotlin Coroutines and More
Joe Zack was on a brief holiday so Allen and Michael took over the helm for an episode. What would a new episode be without a little something regarding AI, some more love for Kotlin, and a number of excellent tips throughout (as well as at the end of) the episode.
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
...more
1h 42min
April 28, 2024Llama 3 is Here, Spending Time on Environmental Setup and More
In this episode Joe introduces us to more security items you should be aware of in the world of CWE’s, Michael bends to the will of Joe and Allen in his favorite portion of the show, and Allen pontificates on the time spent setting up IDE’s and environments.
Reviews – Thank You!
iTunes: Vlad Bezden, Mom in VA, Make1977
Spotify: chutney3000, Xuraith
Upcoming Events
Atlanta Dev Con
September 7th, 2024
https://www.atldevcon.com/
Topics
Open Telemetry
The backend matters
https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/integrations/
Some backends are more fully featured than others
Splunk Trace Analyzer
https://docs.splunk.com/observability/en/apm/apm-spans-traces/trace-analyzer.html
Google Trace Explorer
https://cloud.google.com/trace/docs/finding-traces
Azure OTel Guide
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-monitor/app/opentelemetry-enable?tabs=aspnetcore
AWS OTel Information
https://aws.amazon.com/otel/
The processor can decouple you
https://opentelemetry.io/docs/collector/configuration/#processors
CNCF – Cloud Native Computing Foundation
If you’re working in a cloud environment, you should know the projects here
https://www.cncf.io/projects/
Super cool visualization tool for the projects
https://landscape.cncf.io/
Llama 3 – the next version of Meta’s AI engine
“Now available with both 8B and 70B pretrained and instruction-tuned versions to support a wide range of applications”
https://llama.meta.com/llama3/
Environmental concerns over the processing required for AI
Power requirements for processing some of the LLM’s
https://www.nnlabs.org/power-requirements-of-large-language-models/
The Microsoft underwater datacenter
https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/sustainability/project-natick-underwater-datacenter/
Setting up IDE’s and environments
IDE vs old school debugging
Setup can require a significant amount of time
Is it worth it?
What if you’re just working on a bug?
Security Resources
What’s the difference between CWE and OWASP?
CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) is a community-developed list of common software and hardware weaknesses.
It’s similar to OWASP, but older (1999 vs 2001) and more general – including non web apps and (more recently) hardware
The infamous “NVD” database links CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) to CWE
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-44228
https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2023/2023_trends.html
Tips
Pre-warning – probably wouldn’t recommend installing this!
Saw a cool Windows utility called “Windrecorder” that records video and text from your desktop, and lets you rewind and search.
Uses ffmpeg to record screen into small 15-minute fragment files
Search(by window titles, text keywords, or descriptions of images)
Everything happens should only on your computer
Cons: No instant rewind (have to be out of the window), Storage is unencrypted, Not much LLM / ML fancy stuff…and security
https://tonoko.notion.site/I-made-an-open-source-app-to-rewind-search-everything-happened-on-your-screen-on-Windows-184d1a9d5edb494dba0c2f46d311ec5c
https://github.com/yuka-friends/Windrecorder
MacOS’s Spotlight is more powerful than you maybe knew
https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/spotlight-secrets-15-ways-to-use-spotlight-on-your-mac/
https://beebom.com/spotlight-tips-tricks/
If you’re grep command isn’t working like you thought it should, you might be a victim of content getting kicked out of the buffer
grep --line-buffered
iOS – get text from images
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-live-text-iphcf0b71b0e/ios
...more
1h 34min
April 14, 2024Ktor, Logging Ideas, and Plugin Safety
Picture, if you will, a nondescript office space, where time seems to stand still as programmers gather around a water cooler. Here, in the twilight of the workday, they exchange eerie tales of programming glitches, security breaches, and asynchronous calls. Welcome to the Programming Zone, where reality blurs and (silent) keystrokes echo in the depths of the unknown. Also, Allen is ready to boom, Outlaw is not happy about these category choices, and Joe takes the easy (but not longest) road.
The full show notes are available on the website at 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 UX
What 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 T1
Tactile Gazzew Boba U4 Silent
Liner Kailh Silent Brown
Linear Lichicx Lucy Silent
Linear WS Wuque Studio Gray Silent
Tactile WS Wuque Studio
White Silent – Linear
Tactile Kailh Silent Pink
Linear Cherry MX Silent Red
Tip of the Week
Feeling nostalgic for the original GameBoy or GameBoy Color? GBStudio is a one-stop shop for making games, it’s open-source and fully featured. You can do the art, music, and programming all in one tool and it’s thoughtfully laid out and well-documented. Bonus…you games will work in GameBoy emulators AND you can even produce your own working physical copies. (If you don’t want the high-level tools you can go old skool with “GBDK” too) (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)
...more
1h 39min
April 01, 2024Importance of Data Structures, Bad Documentation and Comments and More
In this episode, Allen, Joe and Michael finally make it back to record together! Allen revisits the basics, Michael kicks off boomer hour nicely, and JZ let’s us know that the dream of an 8-bit looking keyboard is not dead.
News
An update on the networking redo at Allen’s house
The access panel that was mentioned
https://amzn.to/49lAXOq
Topics
Data structures are still incredibly important in your day to day software development
Changing “lookup table” type of data when your data stores are document databases or search engine type of storage
A newly found 8-bit looking keyboard that may just be the ticket to Joe’s happiness
https://amzn.to/3J15ir2
Code comments that are…not…great
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/15qskcc/juniordevs/
Frustrating code documentation that doesn’t really tell you anything
https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/docs/reference/container/latest/container/protos.google.container.v1.getoperationrequest
https://cloud.google.com/nodejs/docs/reference/container/latest/container/v1.clustermanagerclient#google_cloud_container_v1_ClusterManagerClient_getOperation_member_1
A resource from the past has come back to our attention – thanks Mikerg
https://devhints.io/
What determines how much a data scientist earns?
https://jobs-in-data.com/salary/data-scientist-salary
Based on a 2022 Kaggle Machine Learning and Data Science survey
Country
Industry
Job title
Years coding experience
Years ML experience
Tips
Remember Carl Schweitzer from MS Dev Show? He’s got a new pod cast, The “Cloud Chat”, talking about cloud everything…like episode 1 about the aas’ of cloud computing!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cloudchat/id1734938265
Joe has another music suggestion for you, this time it’s a new album by Four Tet. If you’re not familiar with Four Tet, it’s often described as “IDM” or intelligent dance music. It’s slower and more experimental than what you’d hear in a club though it still has those steady beats to help you get in the zone.
https://open.spotify.com/album/7mpTSR6E855VhdCeoPgpCF
https://music.apple.com/us/album/three/1729585296
Sometimes Google’s GCP API’s don’t seem to tell the truth
See what your helm-templates will render using this online tool
https://helm-playground.com
Some useful Java JVM settings when working with containers
XX:+UseContainerSupport this one tells the container to use all the available resources – this way the JVM benefits from the CPU / Memory allocated to the container
XX:InitialRAMPercentage=80.0 this one tells the JVM to use 80% of the RAM for the initial heap size – this is based off the container memory LIMIT
XX:MaxRAMPercentage=80.0 this one tells the JVM to use 80% of the RAM for the MAX heap size – this is based off the container memory LIMIT
XX:MaxDirectMemorySize based off reading, if NOT SET, this should default to the same as the Max Heap Size – which is better than what we were doing previously – previously we had this set to 256m which is smaller than some of the larger files we get from the CDS and was causing OOM issues.
...more
1h 41min
March 18, 2024Decorating your Home Office
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 Review
Mounting monitors, is there any other way?
To grommet or not to grommet?
How many keys do you want on your keyboard?
Wired vs Wireless
About that “fn” key…
Reddit for inspiration?
Office-Appropriate Art
Paintings
Prints / Silk Screens / Photography
Sculptures
Book Cases
There’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 )
The Cloud Nine Ergonomics Keyboard looks pretty nice…
John Dyer Baizley does some really cool stuff, including artwork for some of our favorite bands
...more
1h 22min
March 04, 2024Multi-Value, Spatial, and Event Store Databases
We are mixing it up on you again, no Outlaw this week, but we can offer you some talk of exotic databases. Also, Joe pronounces everything correctly and Allen leaves you with a riddle.
The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode229
News
Thanks for the reviews!
ivan.kuchin (has taken the lead!), Yoondoggy, cykoduck, nehoraigold
Want to help us out? Leave a review! (reviews)
Multivalue DBMS
Popular: 86. Adabas, 87. UniData/UniVerse, 147. JBase
Similar to RDBMS – store data in tables
Store multiple values to a particular record’s attribute
Some RDBMS’s can do this as well, BUT it’s typically an exception to the rule when you’d store an array on an attribute
In a MultiValue DBMS – that’s how you SHOULD do it
Part of the reason it’s done this way is these database systems are not optimized for JOINS
Looked at the Adabas and UniData sites – the primary selling points seem to be rapid application development / ease of learning and getting up to speed as well as data modeling that closely mirrors your application data structures
I BELIEVE it’s a schema on write (docs.rocketsoftware.com)
Supposed to be very performant as you access the data the way your application expects it
Per the docs, it’s easy to maintain (Wikipedia)
Spatial DBMS
Popular: 29. PostGIS, 59. Aerospike, 136. SpatiaLite
Provides the ability to efficiently store, modify, and query spatial data – data that appears in a geometrical space (maps, polygons, etc)
Generally have custom data types for storing the spatial data
Indices that allow for quick retrieval of spatial data about other spatial data
Also allow for performing spatial-specific operations on data, such as computing distances, merging or intersecting objects or even calculating areas
Geospatial data is a subset of spatial data – they represent places / spatial data on the Earth’s surface
Spatio-temporal data is another variation – spatial data combined with timestamps
PostGIS – basically a plugin for PostgreSQL that allows for storing of spatial data
Additionally supports raster data – data for things like weather and elevation
If you want to learn how to use it and understand the data and what’s stored (postgis.net)
Spatial data types are: point, line, polygon, and more…basically shapes
Rather than using b-tree indexes for sorting data for fast retrieval, spatial indexes that are bounding boxes – rectangles that identify what is contained within them
Typically accomplished with R-Tree and Quadtree implementations
RedFin – a real estate competitor to realtor.com and others, uses PostgreSQL / PostGIS
Quite a bit of software that supports OpenGIS so may be a good place to start if you’re interested in storing/querying spatial data
Event Stores
Popular: 178. EventStoreDB, 336. IBM DB2 Event Store, 338. NEventStore
Used for implementing the concept of Event Sourcing
Event Sourcing – an application/data store where the current state of an object is obtained by “replaying” all the events that got it to its current state
This contrasts with RDBMS’s in that relational typically store the current state of an object – historical state CAN be stored, but that’s an implementation detail that has to be implemented, such as temporal tables in SQL Server or “history tables”
Only support adding new events and querying the order of events
Not allowed to update or delete an event
For performance reasons, many Event Store databases support snapshots for holding materialized states at points in time
EventStoreDB – https://www.eventstore.com/eventstoredb
Defined as an “immutable log”
Features: guaranteed writes, concurrency model, granulated stream and stream APIs
Many client interfaces: .NET, Java, Go, Node, Rust, and Python
Runs on just about all OSes – Windows, Mac, Linux
Highly available – can run in a cluster
Optimistic concurrency checks that will return an error if a check fails
“Projections” allow you to generate new events based off “interesting” occurrences in your existing data
For example. You are looking for how many Twitter users said “happy” within 5 minutes of the word “foo coffee shop” and within 2 minutes of saying “London”.
Highly performant – 15k writes and 50k reads per second
Resources we like
Database Rankings (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”
...more
1h 8min

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