Random Bits of Wisdom

Poor man’s Kubernetes

This post is a sort of a time capsule. An attempt to journal my thoughts at this particular point in time. Despite the seemingly rough first part, I want it to have a hopeful message. I think that now is the time to re-align our principles, and set new trajectories. Everywhere around the world, things are still developing faster than anyone had expected. More and more people getting infected, sick, and some, eventually dying.

Yes, the current situation sucks. Big time. It’s not good for anyone. Least of all, for the ones fighting for their lives, and those, doing their best to bring things back to normal. It needs patience and coordinated effort, but we’ll make it through, sooner or later. Patience and perseverance are hard, I know, but those are what has kept humanity moving forward. They would do so, for generations to come.

Imagine a programming language with the ergonomic syntax of Ruby, the speed of execution of C, the concurrency model of Go, and last but not least, a compiler that performs null checks at compile time. Sounds like a dream? Well, this language exists, but chances are, you haven’t heard of it so far. Meet Crystal! Crystal is all of the above, plus it has types, outstanding documentation, and a strong community, delivering a steady stream of new libraries (a.

Here are a few lines from Manual Work is a Bug that I firmly stand by: The successful engineer has a quick way to create documents for new procedures and to find existing procedures. People with this mindset avoid the cognitive load of deciding whether or not a task is worth documenting, because they document everything. On finding a potential improvement, they are not slowed by the speed bump of switching from a document viewer to a document editor because they work from the editor at the start.

In my little more than a year day-to-day developer experience with Go, I have so far learned three things: I can change my entire view of how programming works, even after 12+ years of doing it in one form or another. People are blaming Java for all the wrong reasons People are praising Go for all the wrong reasons Let me explain. This post is not about saying that “language A is better than language B”, or vice versa.

My wife and I spent the last two days in beautiful Vienna. This trip changed quite a few of the prejudices and assumptions I had previously had about the Austrian capital. There is no doubt that Vienna is a world city, both historically, geographically, and culturally. For years in a row, the city has been named the world’s best place to live in, and as much as Munich is trying to steal the title, it’s not come close yet.

Buying the wrong product happens all the time, and apps make no exception to that. Although it does not apply to every country, if you live within the EU, you have the right to ask for a full refund of your purchases, no strings attached. You can do that with apps you have bought from the App Store too, without having to provide an explanation. It is actually very easy, though providers try to put a few stones on the way.

Note: What follows is my answer to question on Quora. I thought it might be worth sharing with my readers too. This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but for whatever it is worth, I am going to let my mind speak. I would like to emphasize on the fact that I am, and will always be a Bulgarian, despite my conscious choice to live and have business somewhere else. The reason why Bulgaria is so poor has nothing to do with its nature and geographic location.

In the Go community, there is some kind of paranoia around panicking, as if it’s the worst thing that can happen to your application. In fact, it often is the better option. Think about Go programs as CLI applications. Would you rather crash right away and let the user react, or hang, trying to recover? The same applies to applications running as services. Modern tooling makes it easy to automatically restart a crashing service within seconds.

You need to explicitly set the beta version of Xcode as your default one via the command line: sudo xcode-select -s /Applications/Xcode-beta.app/Contents/Developer/ Afterwards, getting your app to run via flutter run should work as it used to before. Related Resources select - Managing Multiple Versions Of Xcode It's not uncommon developers to have multiple versions of Xcode installed. For example, I typically have the latest beta as well as the most current http://iosdevelopertips.

Note: Unlike my usual posts, this is a very basic, non-technical explanation. A friend asked me this question, and I thought I might share the answer here. You can use it on your next cocktail party 🍻 It mainly boils down to how memory garbage gets collected on each platform. iOS applications rely on an approach called Automatic Reference Counting (ARC). Every piece of memory that gets assigned some value gets tracked and released, as soon as the number of its accessors reaches zero.

Even in a simple language like Go, concurrently updating mutable state is like playing with fire. Take this piece of code, for example: l := content.NewLoader() l.PageCount = 5 c := l.Load(bytes) Can you be sure that what you are loading is actually going to contain five pages? What if another goroutine having access to l, interjects and sets PageCount to 1000? Or worse, updates the state of l such that a panic is inevitable?

Mixtape A homemade music compilation (usually on cassette or CD-R) that contains all your favourite tracks. Often you give such a compilation to the guy or gal of your fancy in hopes that it will help you win their heart. – Urban Dictionary A budding search and discovery engine for podcasts built by yours truly. The 20th century marked a giant leap forward in music production and distribution.

You have seen them many times. Small snippets of code and the question “What would the the following piece of code print” beneath. You might have tried taking a guess, and perhaps, even failed. #golang pop quiz: what will this print? https://t.co/99xR8wybpp pic.twitter.com/Q7YpJbYr8c — ✕✕✕✕✕ (@peterbourgon) May 18, 2017 I find those kinds of questions utterly pointless. They not only teach you nothing about real-world programming, but might also lead many newcomers to long-term frustration with programming.

NOTE: This is not a paid product endorsement. I’m just a happy customer. I have recently bought a full license of GoLand for a year. The trial served me well for a few months, but the IDE shutting down automatically after every 30 minutes of work, became way too annoying. I know, I shouldn’t rely on an IDE for writing Go, when VS Code or Vim would have worked just fine.

Many thanks to @themaour for sharing this tip on Twitter TIL that in Go, struct size depends on how underlying types were defined. struct { a bool b int32 c string d string } The size of the struct above is is different from the one down below struct { b int32 c string d string a bool } Why is that? Well, think of memory as consisting of segments of certain size, where, if the amount of data you fill the segment with is bigger than the current remainder of the segment, the data will get written onto the next segment.

If you put a frog in a frying pan, it will quickly jump out. Yet, if you put the frog in cold water and slowly heat, the frog will enjoy the warmth until it’s too late to escape. We have all heard that story, but how many of us can admit that we play the frog on a daily basis? Especially at work, people tend to put a lot more focus on what they are working on and rather, avoid having a say on how the rest of the organization moves forward.

I have recently made my project Mixtape open to the world. Mixtape is a search and discovery platform for podcasts, built exclusively using Go. I decided to use Go primarily because of its compiler’s ability to deliver small, self-contained executables with close-to-metal native performance and extremely low memory footprint. It was also a way to battle-test the stack and figure out where and how it will benefit future projects in my portfolio.

Go is definitely not the first language on my mind, when I hear the term “Functional Programming”. Yet, functions are first-class citizens in Go, and one can achieve a lot using higher-order functions (those that can receive and/or return other functions) alone. In this post, I want to demonstrate the use of functional constructs for implementing the well-known Builder pattern. Please, note that there are many ways to implement a Builder, and I don’t claim that mine is certainly the best.

One of the things I often hear from other developers, along with the usual “Python is slow”, is that “multithreading in Python sucks”. The sad reality is that I hear those from Python developers too. While I will pretend I have not heard the former accusation (hoping you’ve already heard how well Python integrates with C), I will try to bring up some light on the latter. When I ask the same guys about why they think that multithreading in Python sucks, some of them mention the GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) as the root cause.

Today, I took part in the Sixtus Half-Marathon near lake Schliersee for the third time in a row. Unlike last year, this time I started with a completely different strategy - keep it cool and let everyone else pass by me during the first third of the race. Seeing everyone else’s backs can be demotivating and requires a lot of patience and training. After the first 5-6K, having realized that I was really the last of the HM group, I started slowly picking up the pace.

I hate listicles, and I am highly hoping that this doesn’t become one of them. Yet, I somehow felt the need to write down the reasons why I am giving Go a second (or maybe, third 🤔) chance. To the Java developers out there, searching for a new weapon of choice, I am hoping that this will give you a bit of perspective. This is not a description of Go-specific features.

Here is a handy developer tool tip for today: DevDocs As developers, we spend a large portion of our time, searching for the “name of the function abc that did thing xyz”. Not surprisingly, sites like StackOverflow have become so popular. Yet, SO answers are often full of additional information, and what we need most of the time is a simple search on top of the docs themselves. Years ago, I used a tool for macOS, called Dash.

My company, KI labs recently held its first hackathon in our Munich office. My team and I went for a very cool mobile app idea that promotes healthy walking competitions among colleagues and friends. Though the app itself deserves a proper introduction, I will talk about it in a separate post. This time I will focus on one problem I experienced while working on the app’s backend part, written in Go.

Give me back my monolith It feels like we’re starting to pass the peak of the hype cycle of microservices. It’s no longer multiple times a week we now see a blog … http://www.craigkerstiens.com | Created with Linqable Give Me Back My Monolith by Craig Kerstiens is something I have been ranting about for quite some time. It is thus good to see other people standing on the same side of the bridge:

Docker containers have proven themselves extremely useful in allowing developers to sandbox environments and ease the deployment of services. Have a complicated service setup? No worries. Simply, describe the steps in a Dockerfile and you should be able to replicate the process on every host OS that has Docker support. When I said services, I bet that the first thing you thought about was HTTP servers, or some sort of persistent, always running processes that send or accept requests to such services.

With a few short micro-post exceptions, my blog has been relatively quiet over the past month. The reason for this is simple. I have devoted much of my writing resources of the past weeks into a new site. A wiki called DevNotes. That is right, I have started a separate writing project, parallel to my blog. Yet, before you start thinking that this is the end of the blog, don't worry.

Last week, I made my first tentative foray into Go programming. My company uses Go in a couple of projects, but although I have heard many positive things about the language, so far I have tried to stay away from it. The mere thought that Go is a 21st Century version of C and has been explicitly designed from the start to not try to be much more than that, can make everyone coming from Kotlin and Swift pull a few hairs at first.

A few days ago, I was invited to give a talk at the Munich Kotlin Users Group meetup (check out my slides here) For quite some time, I have had an idea to promote Kotlin as the missing link between software engineering and Data Science. DuringKotlinConf 2018, I had the chance and the privilege to meet a couple of amazing people, whose talks only helped confirm my thoughts. Mathematical Modeling with Kotlin | Thomas Nield

Hard-coding configuration is bad. This is one of the things that newbie programmers learn quickly after they realize that have committed sensitive information to a public GitHub repository. And it happens so easily. Often, you are in the spur of the moment, wanting to test something locally, when you figure out that you need some API key in order for your app to work. Adding the key to the code takes a second, and is just as easy to forget when committing.

It’s that time of the year again. The time when you make yourself a cup of coffee, and go through the events of the past years, searching for a sign that it has been worth it. And judging by the numbers alone, it seems like a very eventful year: In 2018, I: Got engaged Changed my job Started new new side projects Attended 4 conferences and countless meetups Had my own chance to present in front of an audience (twice) Visited 5 countries and met many new people Read 15 books Wrote nearly 30 blog posts Ran 626 km, and finished 4 half-marathons Made between 5,500 and 6,000 push-ups Wow, quite a year, heh?

Often, the seemingly simple things can make you spend hours chasing around your tail. Like trying to connect to a MongoDB instance using KMongo. Basically, if you have checked out the KMongo quick start, setting up a client and fetching some data should be extremely easy: val client = KMongo.createClient() //get com.mongodb.MongoClient new instance val database = client.getDatabase("test") //normal java driver usage val col = database.getCollection<Jedi>() //KMongo extension method The quick start tutorial assumes that your DB resides on mongodb://localhost:27017, but in reality, your MongoDB connection string looks more like this:

NOTE: This post was originally intended to provoke a discussion, and despite its length, the original goal is still the same. Please, share your feedback on Twitter, Reddit, or Dev.to. My experience with the JVM dates back from around 2010. Java in those days was a bit different from todays’ standpoint. Java 6 was the current standard at the time, but most projects I got to work on, were stuck between Java 4 and 5.

Dependency Injection (DI) in Python? Seriously? 🤔 At this point, I am expecting people to yell at me for thinking like a Java guy, but just bear with me for a moment, will you? Spoiler: I am going to mention Spring only once in this post, I promise. NOTE: If you are already familiar with Dependency Injection and want to see it in action, you might want to jump right to the example at the end.

This is the first part of a two-part series. In this post, I will introduce Flask-RestPlus and demonstrate how to start organising APIs around its simple REST-based conventions. Next time, I will address the topic of request/response marshalling (serialisation) and validation. A seasoned Spring developer, I felt a bit uneasy when designing and future-proofing a Flask-based API for the first time. I have recently started using Python way beyond my original intention to just play with data, and found Flask to be a super-easy micro-service alternative to Spring Boot or Ktor.

So, you might have heard about Mastodon. A micro-blogging alternative to Twitter, boasting itself for being 100% open-source, and for its decentralised nature. Unlike traditional social networks like Twitter and Facebook, Mastodon is not driven by a single company profiting by selling your identity to others, but by a network of instance maintainers and supporters who put their own money on the line. Ensuring that Mastodon is going to live in the long term sounds easy…on paper.

This article is a follow-up transcription to a talk I recently gave at a local Munich machine learning meetup. Unlike my previous talk, this time I wanted to convey the idea of using an iPad for actively running data science experiments, as opposed to passively consuming information. I illustrated my point with a few example iOS applications I personally use on a daily basis, which I hope would be good starting points to get the audience interested in the idea.

Often, I would work on a Python module and add changes to it live, which I would then want to test immediately. Piece of cake! Add the changes and execute the script again. Well, that’s certainly a way, but as modules get bigger, they tend to import other modules, or do some preliminary setup work. With time, I have developed this practice of opening up a Python REPL (though I recommend IPython or the Jupyter Console for that), importing my in-progress module and singling out separate functions I would like to test.

Often, we will want to get to get a specific row, which marks the minimum or maximum of one of its columns. Let’s suppose we have the SF Salaries dataset from Kaggle. We want to find the employee name, with the largest total pay benefits. The experience with writing NumPy/Pandas filter conditions will quickly let us produce the following version: sal[sal['TotalPayBenefits'] == sal['TotalPayBenefits'].max()]['EmployeeName'] which is absolutely valid, but is it the only option?

TL;DR! Just give me the code In your index.js file (or your platform-specific index file for that matter), simply add the following line to the top, directly after the import statements: XMLHttpRequest = GLOBAL.originalXMLHttpRequest ? GLOBAL.originalXMLHttpRequest : GLOBAL.XMLHttpRequest; You will also need a Chrome plugin that overrides CORS. I use CORS Toggle. You may also decide to skip the plugin and start Chrome with CORS disabled: chrome --disable-web-security then, as usually, start remote debugging from your app, and open: http://localhost:8081/debugger-ui on your computer.

Securing your ElasticSearch instances and keeping all the fun Often, we choose convenience over security. Many modern tools such as MongoDB and ElasticSearch, have grown in popularity, partly because of their easy-to-set-up-and-tinker-with nature. Just spin off an instance, point your browser to the right URL and you’re ready to start sending queries. Unfortunately, one thing comes for another, and as we have recently seen, ElasticSearch left in the open can be a vulnerable target, same as MongoDB was in its heyday.

Without any doubt, Java is a verbose language. This verbosity of the language makes it easy to understand Java code by new programmers. It is though one of the reasons, why many Java programmers find writing Java code tedious. Kotlin brings a touch of succinctness in places, where even programmers new to Java, may find code unnecessarily over-bloated. How many times have you had to do the same thing over and over again:

It is part of common sense to assume that the worthiest commit messages lie far from any extremes. Years ago, I often fell in the trap of hastily sending a commit after commit, annoyed by the fact that I have to add a summary to it (let alone a description). I’ve seen many projects whose commit summaries consist primarily of one-word verbs like [FIX], [CLEAN], [TEST], etc. They don’t tell much do they?

So you’ve been trying to wrap your heads around and decide between Grunt and Gulp? Yeah, me too, been there, done that. In my case, the decision wasn’t really hard. I’ve never had strong feelings for Grunt, and for a long time, I used a custom made ANT script. I used to copy it over to every new project, and it helped me with basic tasks — moving, copying, cleaning, linting, minifying, etc.