Coding Blocks

Well, this is awkward. Coding Blocks is signing out for now, in this episode we'll talk about what's happening and why. We have had an amazing run, far better than we ever expected. Also, Joe recommends 50 games, Allen goes for the gold, and Outlaw is totally normal. (And we're not crying you're crying!) Thank you for the support over the last 11 (!!!) years. It's been a wild ride, and the last thing we ever expected when starting a tech podcast was getting to meet so many fantastic people. View the full show notes here: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode242 Tip of the Week UFO 50 is an odd collection of 50 pseudo-retro video games made by a small group of game developers, most notably including Derek Yu of Spelunky. It's a unique and specific experience that reminds me of spending the night at your friend's house who had some console gaming system that you'd only ever heard rumors about. The games seem small and simple at first blush, but there is surprising depth. Favorites so far are Kick Club, Avianos, Attactics, and Mortol. (Steam) Use JSDoc annotations to make VSCode "understand" your data (jsdoc.app) Can you change your password without needing current password? (askubuntu.com) Did you know you can use VS Code for interactive rebasing? How to enable VS Code Interactive Editor (StackOverflow) GitLens (marketplace.visualstudio.com)

For the full show notes head over to: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode241

Grab your headphones because it's water cooler time! In this episode we're catching up on feedback, putting our skills to the test, and wondering what we're missing. Plus, Allen's telling it how it is, Outlaw is putting it all together and Joe is minding the gaps! View the full show notes here: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode240 Reviews Thank you again for taking the time to share your review with us! iTunes: Yesso95 Spotify: Auxk0rd, artonus News Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ DevFest Central Florida September 28th, 2024 https://devfestflorida.com/ Two water coolers walk into a bar... Several folks share their origin stories in the Coding Blocks slack - especially in episode-discussion Example of dealing with legacy code / hiring people that will work on it (Episode 239) Intentional architecture…what's the worst that could happen? What's the sentiment like on Hacker News? (outerbounds.com) Cat8 is not small! Why isn't anything easy? Kubernetes trivia, where are your blind spots? (proprofs.com) Ask Claude: Can you give me an example of the kinds of competitions that might exist in a humorous version of the Olympics for programmers? Data gathering and parsing - it doesn't seem to have gotten much better in decades…are we wrong? Tip of the Week 8 Top Docker Tips and Tricks for 2024 (docker.com) Have you tried Eartlhy, like Dockerfiles for all of your builds that you can run locally? (earthly.dev) Java's JavaAgent Explained (bito.ai) Mirrord is an alternative to Telepresence that makes working with Kubernetes easier (mirrord.dev) Kubernetes + Skaffold + Telepresence + K9s = Winning, it's a great combination of tools that work great together! https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine?hl=en https://skaffold.dev/ https://www.telepresence.io/ https://k9scli.io/

For the full show notes please visit: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode239

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)

View the show notes on the web: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode237 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. 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

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 https://youtu.be/IuUDRU9-HRk 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) Ano

We finally start talking about Apache Kafka! Also, Allen is getting acquainted with Aesop, Outlaw is killing clusters, and Joe is 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 respectiv

https://www.codingblocks.net/episode234 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

Full episode show notes can be found at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode233

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)

Full show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode231

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 )

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,

Show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode228

For the full show notes, head to: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode227

This episode we are talking about keeping the internet interesting and making cool things by looking at PagedOut and Itch.io. Also, Allen won't ever mark you down, Outlaw won't ever give you up, and Joe took a note to say something about Barbie here but he can't remember what it was. The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode226 Reviews Thanks for the reviews! ineverwritereviews1337, ivan.kuchin Want to leave us a review? https://www.codingblocks.net/review . News Orlando Code Camp Conference is February 24th (orlandocodecamp.com) Wireless mic kit mentioned by Outlaw regarding the Shure system (shure.com) New video from Allen: JZ's tip from last episode - Obsidian Tips for Staying Organized (youtube) Is Cat 8 Overkill? No way! Check out AliExpress to save some money (aliexpress.com) Note for NAS building / Plex - 11 gen and newer Intels are your friend for transcoding (intel.com) Merge commits Thanks for the tip mikerg! Some orgs are banning merge commits on larger repositories Should you? (graphite.dev) Git Rebase Visualized (atlassian.com) Merge Commit Visualized (atlassian.com) Paged Out - E-Zine Paged Out is a free e-zine of interesting and important articles (pagedout.institute) Thanks for the tip mikerg! Some samples AIleister Cryptley, a GPT-fueled sock puppeteer A fake online persona that will generate content for you using ChatGPT Beyond The Illusion - Breaking RSA Encryption Encryption is basically just math - it's not some magical black box "Never roll your own crypto – it's a recipe for problems!" Keyboard hacking with QMK Hardware Serial Cheat Sheet BSOD colour change trick Cold boot attack on Raspberry Pi Can we get some love for the demoscene? Best part…each issue comes with a wallpaper! Fun Project Ideas Want to get into gamedev or 3d modeling, or just like making cool stuff with your skills? Why not use itch.io as inspiration? See other cool games and tools that people make: https://itch.io/tools A couple noteworthy tools Kenney shape (itch.io) Turn 2d images into 3d by adding depth Export to several different formats $3.99 Asset Forge (itch.io) Assemble simple shapes into more complex ones Stretch and rotate $19.95 US ($39.95 deluxe) Tiled Sprite Map Editor (itch.io) Rich feature set, nice integration with Game Dev Tools Bfxr is a popular tool (which was an elaboration of another tool Sfxr) for generating sound effects (itch.io) Somebody made a js version too, if you can believe that! (jsfxr.me) Beeps, boops, blorps, flames Rexpaint (itch.io) An ASCII Art Editor…you just have to see it Layers, Copy/Paste, Undo/Redo, Palette swaps, Zoom Who needs pixels!? Resources We Like Kenney's Game Dev Resources (kenney.nl) What is the demoscene? (YouTube) Tip of the Week If you subscribe to Audible, don't forget that they have a lot of "free" content available, such as dramatic space operas and the "Great Courses" For example. "How to Listen to and Understand Great Music" is similar to a "Music Appreciation Course" you might take at uni. The author works through history, talking about the evolution of music and culture. It's 36 hours, and that's just ONE of the music courses available to you for "free" (once you subscribe) (audible.com) Visualize Git is an excellent tool for seeing what really happens when you run git commands (git-school.github.io) It's easy to work with checkboxes in Markdown and Obsidian, it's just - [ ] Don't forget the dash or spaces! Did you know there is a Visual Studio Code plugin for converting Markdown to Jira markup syntax? (Code) Apple, Google, and the major password manager vendors have ways to set up emergency contacts. It's very important that you have this setup for yourself, and your loved ones. When you need it, you really need it. (google.com)

For the full show notes head over to https://www.codingblocks.net/episode225

This episode we are talking about the future of tech with the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024. Also, Allen is looking into the crystal ball, Joe is getting lo, and Outlaw is getting into curling. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode224. News Thank you for the reviews! justsomedudewritingareview, Stephan You can find links to leave us reviews on the website (/reviews) Orlando Code Camp is coming up February 24th, woo! (orlandocodecamp.com) Make sure you read up on your next MacBook pro, if you want to maximize the performance then you are going to need to pay for it! Reminder: Don't install packages from the internet in your CICD pipeline! You can find links to leave us reviews on the website (/reviews) Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends 2024 No surprise, AI is a big topic - it looks like Gartner is suggesting the technologies and processes companies must follow to be successful using and incorporating AI In this overview, Gartner has grouped these technologies into three different sections Protect Your Investment Rise of the Builders Deliver the Value Protect Your Investment Be deliberate Ensure that you've secured appropriate rights for deploying AI driven solutions AI Trism - AI Trust, Risk and Security Management AI model governance Trustworthiness Fairness Reliability Robustness Transparency Data protection Gartner Prediction - By 2026, companies that incorporate AI Trism controls will improve decision-making by reducing faulty and invalid information by 80% Why is AI Trism Trending? Largely, those who have AI Trism controls in place move more to production, achieve more value, and have higher precision in their modeling Enhance bias control decisions Model explainability How to get started with AI Trism? Set up a task force to manage the efforts Work across the organization to share tools and best practices Define acceptable use policies and set up a system to review and approve access to AI models Continuous Threat Exposure Management - CTEM Systemic approach to continuously adjust cybersecurity priorities Gartner prediction - By 2026, companies invested in CTEM will reduce security breaches by 2/3 (statista.com) Aligns exposure assessment with specific projects or critical threat vectors (fortinet.com) Both patchable and unpatchable exposures will be addressed Business can test the effectiveness of their security controls against the attacker's view "Expected outcomes from tactical and technical response are shifted to evidence-based security optimizations supported by improved cross-team mobilization." How to get started? Integrate CTEM with risk awareness and management programs Improve the prioritization of finding vulnerabilities through validation techniques Embrace cybersecurity validation technologies (cybersecurityvalidation.com) "security validation is a process or a technology that validates assumptions made about the actual security posture of a given environment, structure, or infrastructure" Sustainable Technology Framework Solutions for enabling social, environmental and governance outcomes for long term ecological balance and human rights Gartner prediction - by 2027, 25% of CIO's will have compensation that's linked to their sustainable technology impact Why trending? Environmental technologies help deal with risks in the natural world Social technologies help with human rights Governance technologies strengthen business conduct Sustainable technologies provide insights for improving overall performance How to get started? Select technologies that help drive sustainability Have an ethics board involved when developing the roadmap (gartner.com) Use the Gartner "Hype Cycle for Sustainability 2023" - helps identify well-established vs leading-edge technologies for enterprise sustainability (gartner.com) Resources We Like "Where Online Returns Really End Up And What Amazon Is Doing About It" (YouTube) Tip of the Week Lofi Girl is a youtube channel that plays lo-fi hip hop beats, with a relaxing minimalistic animations. The people behind Lo-Fi Girl also released a new channel featuring a Synthwave (80's influenced mid-tempo electro music) Boy. Same type thing, but Synthwave music. (youtube.com) If you are interested in streaming technologies and/or Apache Pinot then you should check out the Real-Time Analytics podcast by Tim Berglund (rta.buzzsprout.com) Are you having runtime issues with your Docker container? Why not run it, and poke around? (curl.se)

To see all the items on 2023's holiday shopping list, head over to https://www.codingblocks.net/episode223

News Thanks for the reviews! Debug Dugg myotherproglangisjava Daniel Kastinen The call for speakers is open till December 15th for Orlando Code Camp Sony announces a9 III: World's first full-frame global shutter camera (dpreview.com) Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024 Gartner Report Technology Adoption Roadmap for Midsize Enterprises 2022-2024More than 400 MSE's interviewed (gartner.com) 53 technologies were mapped to adoption stage (pilot, deployed 2022, deploy in 2023), value and risk Value was determined by looking at the following factors Increasing cost efficiency Improving speed and agility Enabling resilience Enhancing employee productivity Deployment risk Cybersecurity risks Implementation cost Talent availability Vendor supply chain disruption Geopolitical risks Key Takeaways Cybersecurity Investments prioritized in (M)anaged (D)etection and (R)response - this to deal with the growing threat of digital risks including things like ransomware (S)ecure (A)ccess (S)ervice (E)dge is gaining traction for moving away from hardware based security solutions to cloud based security services (Z)ero (T)rust (N)etwork (A)ccess is being evaluated to replace VPNs Future work environments Investments are being made in hybrid and remote work environments over collaboration and productivity tools Deployment of cloud security tools being prioritized to enable more security hybrid and remote work environments DIstributed cloud systems and cloud storage are also being prioritized (C)itizen (A)utomation and (D)evelopment (P)latforms are also being investigated to allow business users to leverage low-code services to help speed business decisions NLP - Natural Language Processing appears to be something that businesses want to adopt but are falling behind on plans to deploy due to some challenges Accuracy in language translation Even though NLP has come a LONG way in the past couple years, the human language is still a very challenging problem to solve Productivity and Operation Efficiency Experimenting with Enhanced Internet (cdsglobalcloud.com) Investing in AI and Data Science and Machine Learning to help observe infrastructure across on-prem, cloud and edge computing Comes with high deployment risks but still very highly adopted Investments in 5g for larger demand of networking Investments in API management PaaS One of the problems here is talent shortages in this area of expertise (azure.microsoft.com) Some of the high-value low-risk items being piloted Cloud Data Warehousing High-value low-risk items deployed or being deployed Security Orchestration Automation and Response Digital Experience Monitoring Robotic Process Automation Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery Integration Platform as a Service SD-WAN (software-defined WAN) Network Detection and Response High-value high risk Zero Trust Network Access Artificial Intelligence IT Operations - AIOps Cloud Application Discovery Hybrid Cloud Computing AI Cloud Services Cloud Managed Networks - CMNs Who have you partnered with? Email Addresses Registrar Cloud Storage (Dropbox, OneDrive, iCloud, etc) Backups (Do you still need them!?) Contacts Passwords Photos Tip of the Week Have a presentation to do? Slidev is a VueJs and markdown-based way to create slides. Because it's web based you can do cool interactive type stuff, and it's portable. Bonus: recording and camera view support built in. Thanks Dave! (sli.dev) There are a lot of great resources for Kubernetes on the official Kubernetes Certifications and Training page (kubernetes.io) Notes in iOS are pretty good now! Did you know you can use it for inline images, videos, along with note taking…. (youtube.com) Use Docker? Check out dive, it's a tool for exploring a docker image, layer contents, and discovering ways to shrink the size of your Docker/OCI image. (github.com)

https://www.codingblocks.net/episode221

We've got a smorgasbord of delights for you this week, ranging from mechanical switches to the cloud and beyond. Also, Michael's cosplaying as Megaman, Joe learns the difference between Clicks and Clacks, and Allen takes no prisoners. See the full show notes a https://www.codingblocks.net/episode220 News Thanks for the reviews! Meskell, itsmatt Leave us a review if you have a chance! (/reviews) The Show Why are mechanical keyboards so popular with programmers? Is it the sound? Is it the feel? What are silent switches? Are they missing the point? You can buy key switches for good prices (drop.com) Cloud Costs Every Programmer should know (vantage.sh) (Thanks Mikerg!) List of static analysis tools, so you can get with the times! (GitHub) (Thanks Mikerg!) From itsmatt: "I'd love a breakdown of what each of you think are your key differences in philosophies or approaches to software development. Could be from arguments or debates on older episodes, whether on coding, leadership, startups, AI, whatever - just curious about how best to tell everyone's voices apart based on what they're saying. I know one of you is Jay Z (JZ?), but slow to pick up on which host is which based on accents alone." Resources We Like 8Bitdo Retro Mechanical Keyboard (amazon) Hot Swap vs Solderable Keyboard PCBs (kineticlabs.com) Cherry MX Switch Tester (amazon) Keyboard Switch Sample Pack (amazon) Tip of the Week How do you center a div? Within a div? With right-align text? What about centering 3 divs? What if you want to space them out evenly? If you've been away from CSS for a while, you may be a bit rusty on the best ways to do this. Not sure if it's "the best" but an easy solution to these problems is to use Flexbox, and lucky for you there is a fun little game designed to teach you how to use it. (flexboxfroggy.com) Drop.com is a website focused on computer gear, headphones, keyboards, desk accessories etc. It's got a lot of cool stuff! (drop.com) Have you ever accidentally deleted a file? Recovering files in git doesn't have to be hard with the "restore" command (rewind.com) Have trouble with your hands and want to limber up? Also doubles as a cool retro Capcom Halloween costume. It's a LifePro Hand Massager! (amazon)

See the full episode's show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode219

In this episode, we are talking all about GitHub Actions. What are they, and why should you consider learning more about them? Also, Allen terminates the terminators, Outlaw remembers the good ol' days, and Joe tries his hand at sales. See the full show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode218 News Thanks for the reviews! iTunes: nononeveragain, JoeRecursionjoe, Viv-or-vyv, theoriginalniklas Leave us a review if you have a chance! (/reviews) Allen did some work on his computer: DeepCool LT720 Liquid Cooler (amazon) Noctua Dual-Tower CPU Cooler (amazon) What are GitHub Actions? GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform launched in 2018 that lets you define and automate workflows It's well integrated into Github.com and fits nicely with git paradigms - repository, branches, tags, pull requests, hashes, immutability (episode 195) The workflows can run on GitHub-hosted virtual machines, or on your own servers GitHub Actions are free for standard Github runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners, private repositories get a certain amount of "free" minutes and any overages are controlled by your spending limits 2000 minutes and 500MB for free, 3000 minutes and 1Gb for Pro, etc (docs.github.com) Examples of things you can do Automate builds and releases whenever a branch is changed Run tests or linters automatically on pull requests Automatically create or assign Issues, or labels to issues Publish changes to your gh-pages, wiki, releases, Check out the "Actions" tab on any github repository to check if a repository has anything setup (github.com) The "Actions" in GitHub Actions refers to the most atomic action that takes place - and we'll get there, but let us start from the top Workflows Workflow is the highest level concept, you see any workflows that a repository has set up (learn.microsoft.com) A workflow is triggered by an event: push, pull request, issue being opened, manual action, api call, scheduled event, etc (learn.microsoft.com) TypeScript examples: CI - Runs linting, checking, builds, and publishes changes for all supported versions of Node on pull request or push to main or release-* branches Close Issues - Looks for stale issues and closes them with a message (using gh!) Code Scanning - Runs CodeQL checks on pull request, push, and on a weekly schedule Publish Nightly - Publishes the last set of successful builds every night Workflows can call other workflows in your repository, or in a repository you have access to Special note about calling other workflows - when embedding other workflows you can specify a specific version with either a tag or a commit # to make sure you're running exactly what you expect In the UI you'll see a filterable history of workflow runs on the right The workflow is associated with a yaml file located in ./github/workflows Clicking on a workflow in the left will show you a history of that workflow and a link to that file (cli.github.com) Jobs Workflows are made up of jobs, which are associated with a "runner" (machine) (cli.github.com) Jobs are mainly just a container for "Steps" which are up next, but the important bit is that they are associated with a machine (virtual or you can provide your own either via network or container) Jobs can also be dependent on other jobs in the workflow - Github will figure out how to run things in the required order and parallelize anything it can You're minutes are counted by machine time, so if you have 2 jobs that run in parallel that each take 5 minutes…you're getting "charged" for 10 minutes Steps Jobs are a group of steps that are executed in order on the same runner Data can easily be shared between steps by echoing output, setting environment variables or mutating files Each step runs an action Actions GitHub Enterprise Onboarding Guide - GitHub Resources An action is a custom application written for the GitHub Actions platform GitHub provides a lot of actions and other 3p (verified or not) providers do as well in the "Marketplace", you can use other people's actions (as long as they don't delete it!), and you can write your own Marketplace Examples (github.com) Github Checkout - provides options for things like repository, fetch-depth, lfs (github.com) Setup .NET Core SDK - Sets up a .NET CLI environment for doing dotnet builds (github.com) Upload Artifact - Uploads data for sharing between jobs (90-day retention by default) (github.com) Docker Build Push - Has support for building a Docker container and pushing it to a repository (Note: ghrc is a valid repository and even free tiers have some free storage) (github.com) Custom Examples "run" command lets you run shell commands (docker builds, curl, echo, etc) Totally Custom (docs.github.com) Other things to mention We glossed over a lot of the details about how things work - such as various contexts where data is available and how it's shared, how inputs and outputs are handled…just know that it's there! (docs.github.com) You grant job permissions, default is conte

See the full show notes and join in the discussion by heading to https://www.codingblocks.net/episode217

In this episode, we're talking all about OpenTelemetry. Also, Allen lays down some knowledge, Joe plays director and Outlaw stumps the chumps. See the full show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode216 News Thanks for the reviews Lanjunnn and scott339! Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT (youtube) https://youtu.be/i6jSeLvoFmM Allen made the video on generating a baseball lineup application just by chatting with ChatGPT What is OpenTelemetry? An incubating project on the CNCF - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (cncf.io) What does incubating mean? Projects used in production by a small number of users with a good pool of contributors Basically you shouldn't be left out to dry here So what is Open Telemetry? A collection of APIs, SDKs and Tools that's used to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data This helps you analyze your software's performance and behavior It's available across multiple languages and frameworks It's all about Observability Understanding a system "from the outside" Doesn't require you to understand the inner workings of the system The goal is to be able to troubleshoot difficult problems and answer the "Why is this happening?" Question To answer those questions, the application must be properly "Instrumented" This means the application must emit signals like metrics, traces, and logs The application is properly instrumented when you can completely troubleshoot an issue with the instrumentation available That is the job of OpenTelemetry - to be the mechanism to instrument applications so they become observable List of vendors that support OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ecosystem/vendors/ Reliability and Metrics Telemetry - refers to the data emitted from a system about its behavior in the form of metrics, traces and logs Reliability - is the system behaving the way it's supposed to? Not just, is it up and running, but also is it doing what it is expected to do Metrics - numeric aggregations over a period of time about your application or infrastructure CPU Utilization Application error rates Number of requests per second SLI - Service Level Indicator - a measurement of a service's behavior - this should be in the perspective of a user / customer Example - how fast a webpage loads SLO - Service Level Objective - the means of communicating reliability to an organization or team Accomplished by attaching SLI's to business value Distributed Tracing To truly understand what distributed tracing is, there's a few parts we have to put together first Logs - a timestamped message emitted by applications Different than a trace - a trace is associated with a request or a transaction Heavily used in all applications to help people observe the behavior of a system Unfortunately, as you probably know, they aren't completely helpful in understanding the full context of the message - for instance, where was that particular code called from? Logs become much more useful when they become part of a span or when they are correlated with a trace and a span Span - represents a unit of work or operation Tracks the operations that a request makes - meaning it helps to paint a picture of what all happened during the "span" of that request/operation Contains a name, time-related data, structured log messages, and other metadata/attributes to provide information about that operation it's tracking Some example metadata/attributes are: http.method=GET, http.target=/urlpath, http.server_name=codingblocks.net Distributed trace is also known simply as a trace - record the paths taken for a user or system request as it passes through various services in a distributed, multi-service architecture, like micro-services or serverless applications (AWS Lambdas, Azure Functions, etc) Tracing is ESSENTIAL for distributed systems because of the non-deterministic nature of the application or the fact that many things are incredibly difficult to reproduce in a local environment Tracing makes it easier to understand and troubleshoot problems because they break down what happens in a request as it flows through the distributed system A trace is made of one or more spans The first span is the "root span" - this will represent a request from start to finish The child spans will just add more context to what happened during different steps of the request Some observability backends will visualize traces as waterfall diagrams where the root span is at the top and branching steps show as separate chains below - diagram linked below (opentelemetry.io) To be continued… Resources We Like OpenTelemetry Website (opentelemetry.io) Tip of the Week Attention Windows users, did you know you can hold the control key to prevent the tasks from moving around in the TaskManager. It makes it much easier to shut down those misbehaving key loggers! (verge.com) Does your JetBrains IDE feel sluggish? You can adjust the heap space to give it more juice! (blogs.jetbrains

See full show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode215

In this episode, we're talking about the history of "man" pages, console apps, team leadership, and Artificial Intelligence liability. Also, Allen's downloading the internet, Outlaw has fallen in love with the sound of a morrvair, and Joe says TUI like two hundred times as if it were a real word. See all the show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode214 News Thanks for the reviews! itunes: michael_mancuso DevFest Florida is a community-run one-day conference aimed to bring technologists, developers, students, tech companies, and speakers together in one location to learn, discuss and experiment with technology. (devfestfl.org) What are (were?) man pages? "man" is a command-line "pager" similar to "more" or "less" that was designed specifically to display documentation - ahem, "manuals" "man" pages would show you documentation for many apps in a (mostly) consistent manner that was available offline Do people still use them? People would print these out in the 70's and beyond! How do you create a man page? (allthings.how) Uses an old markup language named "roff" Install to the proper location, typically /usr/man/man: (tldp.org) Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon) How to Lead a Team (Anti-Patterns edition) Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon) Hire Pushovers Ignore Low Performers Ignore Human Issues Be Everyone's Friend Compromise the Hiring Bar Treat Your Team Like Children Terminal UIs A new frontier in programming? The Good: Keep your hands on the keyboard! Easily install on remote servers Often built by devs for devs Low overhead Purpose-built for their purposes (as opposed to IDE extensions) Looks ancient The Bad: Looks ancient Scriptability Each has it's own learning curve Examples: K9s (github) Lazygit (github) Lazydocker (github) Spotify TUI:(github) Meta AI Meta has been making serious strides in AI with LLAMA and...it's open source! Does that make them any more or less liable for the information? Does "publically available information" change things Resources we like Software Engineering at Google: Lessons Learned from Programming Over Time (amazon) List of awesome TUIs (github.com) AI at Meta (ai.meta.com) Download the AI Model (ai.meta.com) Tip of the Week Want to learn something new while also making your life easier? Why not try writing a TUI!? Here's an article that will kindly introduce you to terminal user interfaces, libraries like "Clap", "TUI", and "Crossterm" that people are using to write them, and…you can get some XP with Rust while you're at it! (blog.logrocket.com) Are you looking to upgrade your Kubernetes cluster? Check for API problems first! Are you a browser tab fiend? Did you know you can reload all your tabs simultaneously with a simple shortcut? (groups.google.com) No more nasty wiring jobs, get yourself to the hardware store website and pick up some wire and splicing connectors. Keep things nice, tidy, and organized. (wago.com) Similar but not as good (no lever) (homedepot.com) Matt's Off-road recovery channel is amazing if you're into cars or... beautiful-sounding things. Are you tired of manually correlating logs and events? No more! Check out the Open Telemetry project for your distributed tracing and analytics needs! (opentelemetry.io)

See the full show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode213

In this episode, we're talking about lessons learned and the lessons we still need to learn. Also, Michael shares some anti-monetization strategies, Allen wins by default, and Joe keeps it real 59/60 days a year! The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode212. News Thanks for the review rioredwards! Want to help us out? Leave a review! (/reviews) Exceptions vs Errors in Java Exceptions: Unwanted or unexpected events NullPointerException IntegerOverflowException IllegalArgumentException Errors: Serious problems that you should try not to catch - generally no recovery OutOfMemoryError StackOverflowError NoClassDefFoundError What happens if your code runs in a background thread? Thread gets terminated, but the application keeps running Resources are released, dependent threads are terminated It's up to the owner of the thread to handle the situation The best practice is to attempt to handle these situations by validating at startup Question from Twitter: (thanks jvilaverde!) How do you guys keep up with your data sources? Coding Blocks Slack (/slack) Hacker News StackOverflow Survey (thanks mikerg!) 70% of all respondents are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year 82% of people learning to code plan to use AI 30% don't plan on it 40% of devs trust the accuracy of AI Highest paid languages? Zig, Erlang, RB, Scala, Lisp, F# Lowest paid? Dart, MATLAB, PHP, Visual Basic, Delphi Warning: remember the audience! Web Frameworks: React 40% Angular 17%, Vue 16% Other frameworks: .NET, NumPy, Pandas What does this tell you about the demographics? Docker 51%, Kubernetes 20% Resources We Like StackOverflow 2023 Survey Results (survey.stackoverflow.com) We episode 147) Is Kubernetes Programming? (episode 141) Chik-Fil-A A Kubernetes Success Story (appvia.io) How to write amazing unit tests (episode 54) Zig Language (ziglang.org) Unit Testing Principles, Practices, and Patterns: Effective testing styles, patterns, and reliable automation for unit testing, mocking, and integration testing with examples in C# (Amazon)

You can find the full show notes at: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode211

In this sequence of sound, we compute Joe's unexpected pleasure in commercial-viewing algorithms, Michael's intricate process of slicing up the pizza, and Allen's persistent request for more cheese data augmentation. Will you engage in this data streaming session? The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode210. Resources we like Stack Overflow is ChatGPT Casualty: Traffic Down 14% in March similarweb.com Github Copilot Chat Leak Prompt: (news.ycombinator.com) We've been talking about Co-Pilot for 2 years now? (episode 163) Github vs Gitlab Rankings Github Trending Repositories (github.com) Gitlab Trending Repositories (gitlab.com) Gitlab Number of Stars (gitlab.com) Github ranking: gitstar-ranking.com The 3 laws of Robotics (or is it 4!?) (wikipedia.org) ML in Postgres with PostgresML (postgresml.org) Must See Videos Family Auto-Mart: I'll see you there! (youtube) AI-Generated Commercial: Pepperoni Hug Spot - Like family, but with more cheese (youtube) How many services per team? (microservices.io) AWS's take on services per team (docs.aws.com) SQL Server Machine Learning Service (learn.microsoft.com) Tip of the week MusicLM lets you create music from descriptive text, similar to Dalle-2. The output is a little strange, but could still potentially be really useful and inspiring with a little bit of effort. It's in private beta now, as part of the "AI Test Kitchen" but you can sign up to join the waitlist today. Sign up for the waitlist: (aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com) Samples (google-research.github.io) You can easily compare query results In DataGrip, using the "Compare Data" button (it's the button with two blue arrows) (jetbrains.com) IntelliJ now supports the entire IDE Zoom, great for...well...Zoom! View --> Appearance --> Zoom IDE (blog.jetbrains.com) Visual Studio Code Bookmarks (marketplace.visualstudio.com) Warped Kart Racers is a fun mobile game, kinda like Mario Kart but featuring characters from 20th Century Studios (apps.apple.com)

In this episode we talk about several things that have been on our mind. We find that Joe has been taken over by AI's, Michael now understands our love of Kotlin, and Allen wants to know how to escape supporting code you wrote forever. For the full episode show notes, visit: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode209

We're doing a water cooler talk today. Also, Allen can tell you how not to leak secrets, Michael knows how to work a spreadsheet, and Joe has been replaced by an AGI. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode208. Topics Want to score Vue.js London tickets? Tweet using both @CodingBlocks and #vuejs for a chance to win! (vue.js) How do you decide which projects are worth trying to convert into a money-making endeavor? Samsung ChatGPT sensitive information leaks (mashable.com) U.S Military Documents Leaked To Minecraft Discord Server (kotaku.com) Real-Time Analytics Podcast with Tim Berglund (podcasts.apple.com) CodeWhisperer from Amazon (aws.amazon.com) How much did GPT 3 cost? (pcguide.com) How much did GPT 4 cost? (medium.com) How much did Alpaca cost to train? (newatlas.com) Have any experience with Twilio? It's work! (twilio.com) Resources we like docker init is a tool (in beta) built into the latest Docker Desktop that you can use to get a leg up on your next project. It makes it easy to create docker files with best practices, as well as a docker-compose file to get you up and running. (docker.com) screen is an open-source powerful terminal multiplexer that allows users to create, manage, and switch between multiple terminal sessions, enabling seamless multitasking and persistent remote connections in a single window. How to use gnu screen (linuxize.com) tmux is a similar utility that some people prefer (github.com) tmux vs screen (stackoverflow.com) The VIVO Universal Treadmill Desk Riser is an adjustable, ergonomic workspace solution designed to fit most treadmills, allowing users to seamlessly combine their work and exercise routines for a healthy, productive lifestyle. (amazon.com) The LifeSpan Fitness Under Desk Walking Treadmill is a compact, low-profile treadmill designed to fit under standing desks, enabling remote workers to maintain an active lifestyle by seamlessly integrating walking or light jogging into their daily work routine, promoting better health and increased productivity. (amazon.com) Kubernetes Network Policies are a set of rules that define how pods within a cluster can communicate with each other and with external resources, allowing administrators to enforce fine-grained access control and enhance the security of their containerized applications. (kubernetes.io)

This episode is a deep dive on serial transactions and how they're even possible. For the full show notes go to: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode207

What are lost updates, and what can we do about them? Maybe we don't do anything and accept the write skew? Also, Allen has sharp ears, Outlaw's gort blah spotterfiles, and Joe is just thinking about breakfast. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode206. News Thank you for the amazing reviews! iTunes: JomilyAnv Want to help us out? Leave us a review. Great book! Preventing Lost Updates Last episode we talked about weak isolation, committed reads, and snapshot isolation There is one major problem we didn't discuss called "The Lost Update Problem" Consider a read-modify-write transaction, now imagine two of them happening at the same time Even with snapshot isolation, it's possible that read can happen for transaction A before B, but the write for A happens first Incrementing/Decrementing values (counters, bank accounts) Updating complex values (JSON for example) CMS updates that send the full page as an update Solutions: Atomic Writes - Some databases support atomic updates that effectively combine the read and write Cursor Stability - locking the read object until the update is performed Single Threading - Force all atomic operations to happen serially through a single thread Explicit Locking The application can be responsible for explicitly locking objects, placing responsibility in the devs hands This makes sense in certain situations - imagine a multiplayer game where multiple players can move a shared object. It's not enough to lock the data and then apply both updates in order since the shared game world can react. (ie: showing that the item is in use) Detecting Lost Updates Locks can be tricky, what if we reused the snapshot mechanism we discussed before? We're already keeping a record of the last transactionId to modify our data, and we know our current transactionId. What if we just failed any updates where our current transaction id was less than the transactionId of the last write to our data? This allows for naive application code, but also gives you fewer options…retry or give up Note: MySQL's InnoDB's Repeatable Read feature does not support this, so some argue it doesn't qualify as snapshot isolation What if you didn't have transactions? If you didn't have transactions, let alone a snapshot number, you could get similar behavior by doing a compare-and-set Example: update account set balance = 10 where balance = 9 and id = ABC This works best in simple databases that support atomic updates, but not great with snapshot isolation Note: it's up to the application code to check that updates were successful - Updating 0 records is not an error Conflict resolution and replication We haven't talked much about replicas lately, how do we handle lost updates when we have multiple copies of data on multiple nodes? Compare-and-Set strategies and locking strategies assume a single up-to-date copy of the data….uh oh The options are limited here, so the strategy is to accept the writes and have an application process to decide what to do Merge: Some operations, like incrementing a counter, can be safely merged. Riak has special datatypes for these Last Write Wins: This is a common solution. It's simple but inaccurate. Also the most common solution. Write Skew and Phantoms Write skew - when a race condition occurs that allows writes to different records to take place at the same time that violates a state constraint The example given in the book is the on-call doctor rotation If one record had been modified after another record's transaction had been completed, the race condition would not have taken place write-skew is a generalization of the lost update problem Preventing write-skew Atomic single-object locks won't work because there's more than one object being updated Snapshot isolation also doesn't work in many implementations - SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and MySQL won't prevent write skew Requires true serializable isolation Most databases don't allow you to create constraints on multiple objects but you may be able to work around this using triggers or materialized views as your constraint They mention if you can't use serializable isolation, your next best option may be to lock the rows for an update in a transaction meaning nothing else can access them while the transaction is open Phantoms causing write skew Pattern The query for some business requirement - ie there's more than one doctor on call The application decides what to do with the results from the query If the application decides to go forward with the change, then an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE operation will occur that would change the outcome of the previous step's Application decision They mention the steps could occur in different orders, for instance, you could do the write operation first and then check to make sure it didn't violate the business constraint In the case of checking for records that meet some condition, you could do a SELECT FOR UPDATE and lock those rows In the case

There's this thing called ChatGPT you may have heard of. Is it the end for all software developers? Have we reached the epitome of mankind? Also, should you write your own or find a FOSS solution? That and much more as Allen gets redemption, Joe has a beautiful monologue, and Outlaw debates a monitor that is a thumb size larger than his current setup. If you're in a podcast player and would prefer to read it on the web, follow this link: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode205 News Thank you for the amazing reviews! iTunes: MalTheWarlock, Abdullah Nafees, BarnabusNutslap Orlando Code Camp coming up Saturday March 25th https://orlandocodecamp.com/ ChatGPT Is this the beginning or the end of software development as we know it? Are you using it for work? Does your work have an AI policy? OpenAI has recently announced a whopping 90% price reduction on their ChatGPT and Whisper APi calls $.002 per 1000 ChatGPT tokens $.006 per minute to Whisper You also get $5 in free credit in your first 3 months, so give it a shot! https://openai.com/pricing Roll Your Own vs FOSS This probably isn't the first time and it won't be the last we ask the question - should you write your own version of something if there's a good Free Open Source Software alternative out there? Typed vs Untyped Languages Another topic that we've touched on over the years - which is better and why? Any considerations when working with teams of developers? What are the pros and cons of each? Cloud Pricing If you're spending a good amount of money in the cloud, you should probably talk to a sales rep for your given cloud and try to negotiate rates. You may be surprised how much you can save. And...you never know until you ask! Outlaw has the Itch to get a new Monitor Is it worth upgrading from a 34" ultrawide to a 38" ultrawide? What's a good size for a 4k monitor? Should you even get a 4k monitor? Should you go curved? Some references mentioned during the show NVidia monitor search page: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/g-sync-monitors/specs/ LG 38" ultrawide: https://amzn.to/3SLeqUO Rtings recommended gaming monitors: https://www.rtings.com/monitor/reviews/best/by-usage/gaming Games Radar best G-Sync monitors: https://www.gamesradar.com/best-g-sync-monitors/ Acer Predator 38" ultrawide: https://amzn.to/3ZBDb80 Samsung Odyssey Neo G9 49" Ultrawide: https://amzn.to/3ZGMTpx LG 49WQ95C-W 49" Ultrawide: https://amzn.to/3mk0TY5 Resources from this episode How to jailbreak ChatGPT - List of Prompts: https://www.mlyearning.org/how-to-jailbreak-chatgpt/ Magazine stops accepting submissions due to bots: https://nypost.com/2023/02/22/sci-fi-magazine-not-accepting-submissions-due-to-bots/ Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT answers: https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/5/23493932/chatgpt-ai-generated-answers-temporarily-banned-stack-overflow-llms-dangers ChatGPT detection tool already out: https://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/cheaters-beware-chatgpt-maker-releases-ai-detection-tool-1.6253847 Tips of the Week Did you know that the handy, dandy application jq is great for formatting json AND it's also Turing complete? You can do full on programming inside jq to make changes - conditionals, variables, math, filtering, mapping...it's Turing Complete! https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ Want to freshen up your space, but you just don't have the vision? Give interiorai.com a chance, upload a picture of your room and give it a description. It works better than it should. You can sort your command line output when doing something like an ls sort -k2 -b On macOS you can drag a non-fullscreen window to a fullscreen desktop When using the ls -l command in a terminal, that first numeric column shows the number of hard links to a file - meaning the number of names an inode has for that file Argument parser for Python 3 - makes parsing command line arguments a breeze and creates beautiful --help documentation to boot! https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html .NET has an equivalent parser we've mentioned in the past https://www.nuget.org/packages/NuGet.CommandLine

Ever wonder how database backups work if new data is coming in while the backup is running? Hang with us while we talk about that, while Allen doesn't stand a chance, Outlaw is in love, and Joe forgets his radio voice. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode204.

It's time we learn about multi-object transactions as we continue our journey into Designing Data-Intensive Applications, while Allen didn't specifically have that thought, Joe took a marketing class, and Michael promised he wouldn't cry. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode203. News Thanks for the reviews! iTunes: Dom Bell 30, Tontonton2 Want some swag? We got swag! (/swag) Orlando Codecamp 2023 is coming up in March 25th 2023 (orlandocodecamp.com) Single Object and Multi-Object Operations Best book evarr! Multi-object transactions need to know which reads and writes are part of the same transaction. In an RDBMS, this is typically handled by a unique transaction identifier managed by a transaction manager. All statements between the BEGIN TRANSACTION and COMMIT TRANSACTION are part of that transaction. Many non-relational databases don't have a way of grouping those statements together. Single object transactions must also be atomic and isolated. Reading values while in the process of writing updated values would yield really weird results. It's for this reason that nearly all databases must support single object atomicity and isolation. Atomicity is achievable with a log for crash recovery. Isolation is achieved by locking the object to be written. Some databases use a more complex atomic setup, such as an incrementer, eliminating the need for a read, modify, write cycle. Another operation used is a compare and set. These types of operations are useful for ensuring good writes when multiple clients are attempting to write the same object concurrently. Transactions are more typically known for grouping multiple object writes into a single operational unit Need for multi object transactions Many distributed databases / datastores don't have transactions because they are difficult to implement across partitions. This can also cause problems for high performance or availability needs. But there is no technical reason distributed transactions are not possible. The author poses the question in the book: "Do we even need transactions?" The short answer is, yes sometimes, such as: Relational database systems where rows in tables link to rows in other tables, In non-relational systems when data is denormalized for "object" reasons, those records need to be updated in a single shot, or Indexes against tables in relational databases need to be updated at the same time as the underlying records in the tables. These can be handled without database transactions, but error handling on the application side becomes much more difficult. Lack of isolation can cause concurrency problems. Handling errors and aborts ACID transactions that fail are easily retry-able. Some systems with leaderless replication follow the "best effort" basis. The database will do what it can, and if something fails in the middle, it'll leave anything that was written, meaning it won't undo anything it already finished. This puts all the burden on the application to recover from an error or failure. The book calls out developers saying that we only like to think about the happy path and not worry about what happens when something goes wrong. The author also mentioned there are a number of ORM's that don't do transactions proud and rather than building in some retry functionality, if something goes wrong, it'll just bubble an error up the stack, specifically calling out Rails ActiveRecord and Django. Even ACID transactions aren't necessarily perfect. What if a transaction actually succeeded but the notification to the client got interrupted and now the application thinks it needs to try again, and MIGHT actually write a duplicate? If an error is due to "overload", basically a condition that will continue to error constantly, this could cause an unnecessary load of retries against the database. Retrying may be pointless if there are network errors occurring. Retrying something that will always yield an error is also pointless, such as a constraint violation. There may be situations where your transactions trigger other actions, such as emails, SMS messages, etc. and in those situations you wouldn't want to send new notifications every time you retry a transaction as it might generate a lot of noise. When dealing with multiple systems such as the previous example, you may want to use something called a two-phase commit. Tip of the Week Manything is an app that lets you use your old devices as security cameras. You install the app on your old phone or tablet, hit record, and configure motion detection. A much easier and cheaper option than ordering a camera! (apps.apple.com, play.google.com) The Linux Foundation offers training and certifications. Many great training courses, some free, some paid. There's a nice Introduction to Kubernetes course you can try, and any money you do spend is going to a good place! (training.linuxfoundation.org) Kubernetes has recommendations for common-labels. The labels

We decided to knock the dust off our copies of Designing Data-Intensive Applications to learn about transactions while Michael is full of solutions, Allen isn't deterred by Cheater McCheaterton, and Joe realizes wurds iz hard. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode202. News Thanks for the reviews! iTunes: Jla115, Cuttin' Corner Barbershop, mirgeee, JackUnver Audible: Mr. William M. Davies Want some swag? We got swag! (/swag) It's baaaaack! Chapter 7: Transactions Great statement from one of the creators of Google's Spanner where the general idea is that it's better to have transactions as an available feature even if it has performance issues and let developers decide if the performance is worth the tradeoff, rather than not having transactions and putting all that complexity on the developer. Number of things that can go wrong during database interactions: DB software or underlying hardware could fail during a write, An application that uses the DB might crash in the middle of a series of operations, Network problems could arise, Multiple writes to the same records from multiple places causing race conditions, Reads could happen to partially updated data which may not make sense, and/or Race conditions between clients could cause weird problems. "Reliable" systems can handle those situations and ensure they don't cause catastrophic failures, but making a system "reliable" is a lot of work. Transactions are what have been used for decades to address those issues. A transaction is a way to group all related reads and writes into a single operation. Either a transaction as a whole completes successfully as a "commit" or fails as an "abort, rollback". If the transaction fails, the application can choose what to do, like retry for example. In general, transactions make error handling much simpler for an application. That was their purpose, to make developing against a database much simpler. Not all applications need transactions. In some cases, it makes sense not to use transactions for performance and/or availability reasons. How do you know if you need a transaction? What are the safety guarantees? What are the costs of using them? Concepts of a transaction Most relational DBs support transactions and some non-relational DBs support transactions. The general idea of a transaction has been around mostly unchanged for over 40 years, originally introduced in IBM System R, the first relational database. With the introduction of a lot of the NoSQL (non-relational) databases, transactions were left out. In some NoSQL implementations, they redefined what a transaction meant with a weaker set of guarantees. A popular belief was put out there that transactions meant anti-scalable. Another popular belief was that to have a "serious" database, it had to have transactions. The book calls out both as hyperbole. The reality is there are tradeoffs for both having or not having transactions. ACID is the acronym to describe the safety guarantees of databases and stands for Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Coined in 1983 by Theo Harder and Andreas Reuter. The reality is that each database's implementation of ACID may be very different. Lots of ambiguity for what Isolation means. Because ACID doesn't specify the actual guarantees, it's basically a marketing term. Systems that don't support ACID are often referred to as BASE, BAsically available, Soft state, and Eventual consistency. Even more vague than ACID! BASE, more or less, just means anything but ACID. Atomicity Atomicity refers to something that can not be broken into smaller parts. In terms of multi-threaded programming, this means you can only see the state of something before or after a complete operation and nothing in-between. In the world of database and ACID, atomicity has nothing to do with concurrency. For instance, if multiple actions are trying to processes the same data, that's covered under Isolation. Instead, ACID describes what should happen if there is a fault while performing multiple related writes. For example, if a group of related writes are to be performed in an operation and there is some underlying error that occurs before the transaction of writes can be committed, then the operation is aborted and any writes that occurred during that operation must be undone, i.e. rolled back. Without atomicity, it is difficult to know what part of the operation completed and what failed. The benefit of the rollback is you don't have to have any special logic in your application to figure out how to get back to the original state. You can just simply try again because the transaction took care of the cleanup for you. This ability to get rid of any writes after an abort is basically what the atomicity is all about. Consistency In ACID, consistency just means the database is in a good state. But consistency is a property of the application as it's what defines the invariants for its operations.

Michael spends the holidays changing his passwords, Joe forgot to cancel his subscriptions, and Allen's busy playing Call of Duty: Modern Healthcare as we discuss the our 2023 resolutions. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode201. News Thanks for the reviews CourageousPotato, Billlhead, [JD]Milo! Want to help us out? Leave us a review. Game Jam is coming up, January 20-23! (itch.io) Thoughts on LastPass? Check out the encrypted fields, as figured out by a developer. (GitHub) LastPass users: Your info and password vault data are now in hackers' hands (Ars Technica) Our 2023 Resolutions Michael's Learn Kotlin, Go deeper on streaming technologies, such as Kafka, Flink, and/or Kafka Connect, and Learn more music theory and techniques. Drink! JZ's Of course Joe has categorized his resolutions into the following areas: finances, health, personal development, and career management, Go deeper on Spring and streaming technologies, and Do more game dev and LeetCode. Q&A Round 1 What skills are opposite and which are adjacent that can be picked up this year? Angular unit testing, Front end development, Spring, Big data concepts and technologies Any books, courses, or certifications? Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppmann (Amazon) Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) (cncf.io) Allen's Spend more time focusing on health and fun, Updating the About Us page with recent info, Go deeper on streaming technologies and conepts, Go deeper on big data concepts such as data lakes, and best practices, etc., Get back into making content again, such as YouTube, and/or maybe presenting. Q&A Round 2 What do you want to avoid in 2023? Less Jenkins, Avoid piecemeal Spring upgrades, 2023 Predictions Data, privacy … do we need it?, New languages, frameworks, Generated content (Dalle-2, ChatGPT, Copilot), and AI ethics ChatGPT Wrote My AP English Essay—and I Passed (WSJ) Resources Designing Data Intensive Applications (Amazon) Orlando Code Camp (OrlandoCodeCamp.com) Atlanta Dev Con (AtlDevCon.com) Tip of the Week You can pipe directly to Visual Studio Code (in bash anyway), much easier than outputting to a file and opening it in Code … especially if you end up accidentally checking it in! Example: curl https://www.codingblocks.net | code - Is your trackpad not responding on your new(-ish) MacBook? Run a piece of paper around the edge to clean out any gunk. Also maybe avoid dripping BBQ sauce on it. How does the iOS MFA / Verification Code settings work? We want MFA, but we we're tired of the runaround! Jump around – nope, not Kris Kross, great tip from Thiyagarajan – keeps track of your most "frecent" directories to make navigation easier (GitHub) There's a version for PowerShell too – thank you Brad Knowles! (GitHub)

We take a few to step back and look at how things have changed since we first started the show while Outlaw is dancing on tables, Allen really knows his movie monsters, and Joe's math is on point. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode200. News Thanks for the review nickname222Apple Want to help us out? Leave us a review. Want Free stickers? Send us a SASE, instructions over at (/swag) Game Jam is coming up, January 20-23 (itch.io) Favorite Episodes We Still Don't Understand Open Source Licensing (#5) Comparing Git Workflows (#90) Git from the Bottom Up series (#195) Designing Data-Intensive Applications series (series) The DevOps Handbook series (series) The Imposters Handbook series (series) Boxing and Unboxing in .NET (#2) Docker for Developers (#80) Elasticsearch (#83) Show Recursion Show (#154) Why is Python Popular? (#152) Hierarchical database patterns (series) Favorite Events NDC 2020 (#126) Atlanta Dev Con (atldevcon.com) Orlando Code Camp (orlandocodecamp.com) South Florida Code Camp (#SoFloDevCon) Tampa Code Camp (facebook.com) Game Jams How things have changed since we started? Social media The technologies we use Our careers Show format Media consumption habits Any viewpoints that have changed? Technology We've wrapped up 9 years…how have we changed the most…why? Bonus: Buying a window with 3 huge tvs (youtube.com) Top 3 things you've gotten out of it … Alphabetize all the things in your class A better understanding of DB technologies and the impact of their underlying data structures It's forced us to study various topics … Amazing friends, community The application tier can / should be your most powerful Don't make your tech-du-jour a hammer Tip of the Week If you want to enable Markdown support, open a document in Google Docs, head over to the top of the screen, go to "Tools" then "Preferences" and enable "Automatically detect Markdown." After that, you're good to go..except this only works for the current doc. (techcrunch.com) Markdown Viewer is also a plugin for Chrome that lets you support .md files in Google Drive (workspace.google.com) DataGrip's useless "error at position" messages are frustrating, but the IDE actually does give you the info you need. Check your cursor! Minikube's "profile" feature makes it easy to swap between clusters. No more tearing down and rebuilding if you need to switch to a new task! (minikube.sigs.k8s.io) SQLforDevs.com has a free ebook: Next-Level Database Techniques for Developers. (sqlfordevs.com) Thanks for the tip Mikerg!

We talk about career management and interview tips, pushing data contracts "left", and our favorite dev books while Outlaw is [redacted], Joe's trying to figure out how to hire junior devs, and Allen's trying to screw some nails in. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode199. After Media file Featured Image News Thanks for the reviews Ryan Barger and Amazon Customer! Want to help us out? Leave us a review. The sign-up form for The 3rd Coding Blocks Game Jam is live! #cbjam Check out videos from past years: CBJAM '22 (youtube) CBJAM '21 (youtube) Interesting article about AI potentially replacing recruiters at Amazon (vox.com) From 'Round the Water-Cooler Why don't companies want junior developers? You see a lot of advice out there for developers to get that first job, but what advice does the industry have to trying to hire and support them? …not much How long do you need to stay at a job? What do you do if you're worried about being a "job hopper"? Data Contracts..moving left? Where should normalization happen? (Analytics Engineering Podcast) Most impactful books we've covered on the show Find more on our resources page Joe Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Amazon) The DevOps Handbook (Amazon) Clean Architecture (Amazon) Allen Designing Data-Intensive Applications (Amazon) The Imposter's Handbook (bigmachine.io) Clean Architecture (Amazon) How do you prepare to interview for a company? Interviewing…know what the company is creating so you'll have an idea of what challenges they may have technically and so you can look up how you might solve some of those problems How do you decide when to bring in new tech? Right tool for the job - don't always be jumping ship to the newest, shiniest thing - it might be you just need to augment your stack with a new piece of technology rather than thinking something new will solve ALL your problems Tip of the Week Did you know Obsidian has a command palette similar to Code? Same short-cut (Cmd/Ctrl-P) as VS Code and it makes for a great learning curve! Don't know how to make something italic? Cmd-P. Insert a template? Cmd-P. Pretty much anything you want to do, but don't know how to do. Cmd P! (help.obsidian.md) Ghostery plugin for Firefox cuts down on ads and protects your privacy. Thanks for the tip Aaron Jeskie! (addons.mozilla.org) Amazing prank to play on Windows user, hit F-11 to full screen this website next time your co-worker or family member leaves their computer unlocked. Thanks Scott Harden! (fakeupdate.net)

We take a peak into some of the challenges Twitter has faced while solving data problems at large scale, while Michael challenges the audience, Joe speaks from experience, and Allen blindsides them both. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode198. News Want to help us out? Leave us a review! The 2023 Game Ja-Ja-Ja Jam is coming up! Twitter has a Data Problem Moving an Exabyte of Data In 2019, over 100 million people per day would visit Twitter. Every tweet and user action creates an event that is used by machine learning and employees for analytics. Their goal was to democratize data analysis within Twitter to allow people with various skillsets to analyze and/or visualize the data. At the time, various technologies were used for data analysis: Scalding which required programmer knowledge, and Presto and Vertica which had performance issues at scale. Another problem was having data spread across multiple systems without a simple way to access it. Moving pieces to Google Cloud Platform The Google Cloud big data tools at play: BigQuery, a cost-effective, serverless, multicloud enterprise data warehouse to power your data-driven innovation. DataStudio, unifying data in one place with ability to explore, visualize and tell stories with the data. History of Data Warehousing at Twitter 2011 – Data analysis was done with Vertica and Hadoop and data was ingested using Pig for MapReduce. 2012 – Replaced Pig with Scalding using Scala APIs that were geared towards creating complex pipelines that were easy to test. However, it was difficult for people with SQL skills to pick up. 2016 – Started using Presto to access Hadoop data using SQL and also used Spark for ad hoc data science and machine learning. 2018 … Scalding for production pipelines, Scalding and Spark for ad hoc data science and machine learning, Vertica and Presto for ad hoc, interactive SQL analysis, Druid for interactive, exploratory access to time-series metrics, and Tableau, Zeppelin, and Pivot for data visualization. So why the change? To simplify analytical tools for Twitter employees. BigQuery for Everyone Challenges: Needed to develop an infrastructure to reliably ingest large amounts of data, Support company-wide data management, Implement access controls, Ensure customer privacy, and Build systems for: Resource allocation, Monitoring, and Charge-back. In 2018, they rolled out an alpha release. The most frequently used tables were offered with personal data removed. Over 250 users, from engineering, finance, and marketing used the alpha. Sometime around June of 2019, they had a month where 8,000 queries were run that processed over 100 petabytes of data, not including scheduled reports. The alpha turned out to be a large success so they moved forward with more using BigQuery. They have a nice diagram that's an overview of what their processes looked like at this time, where they essentially pushed data into GCS from on-premise Hadoop data clusters, and then used Airflow to move that into BigQuery, from which Data Studio pulled its data. Ease of Use BigQuery was easy to use because it didn't require the installation of special tools and instead was easy to navigate via a web UI. Users did need to become familiar with some GCP and BigQuery concepts such as projects, datasets, and tables. They developed educational material for users which helped get people up and running with BigQuery and Data Studio. In regards to loading data, they looked at various pieces … Cloud Composer (managed Airflow) couldn't be used due to Domain Restricted Sharing (data governance). Google Data Transfer Service was not flexible enough for data pipelines with dependencies. They ended up using Apache Airflow as they could customize it to their needs. For data transformation, once data was in BigQuery, they created scheduled jobs to do simple SQL transforms. For complex transformations, they planned to use Airflow or Cloud Composer with Cloud Dataflow. Performance BigQuery is not for low-latency, high-throughput queries, or for low-latency, time-series analytics. It is for SQL queries that process large amounts of data. Their requirements for their BigQuery usage was to return results within a minute. To achieve these requirements, they allowed their internal customers to reserve minimum slots for their queries, where a slot is a unit of computational capacity to execute a query. The engineering team had to analyze 800+ queries, each processing around 1TB of data, to figure out how to allocate the proper slots for production and other environments. Data Governance Twitter focused on discoverability, access control, security, and privacy. For data discovery and management, they extended their DAL to work with both their on-premise and GCP data, providing a single API to query all sets of data. In regards to controlling access to the data, they took advantage of two GCP features: Domain restricted sharing, meaning only users in

It's that time of year where we've got money burning a hole in our pockets. That's right, it's time for the annual shopping spree. Meanwhile, Fiona Allen is being gross, Joe throws shade at Burger King, and Michael has a new character encoding method. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode197. Sponsors Retool – Stop wrestling with UI libraries, hacking together data sources, and figuring out access controls, and instead start shipping apps that move your business forward. News Thank you to everyone that left a review! Anonymous User, rd, Ian Matchett, Glen Jakobsen Want to help out the show? Leave us a review! Almost time to start talking about … Game JA JA JA JAMUARY! What's your perspective on strong, static, weak or dynamic typing and how is it shaped by your experiences? How do you move into DevOps or SRE roles if you have developer experience? Check out Google's career pages! (sre.google) We did an episode, or eight, on The DevOps Handbook once upon a time. (The DevOps Handbook episodes) Allen's List Price Description Nerdy Stuff $459.00 Kinesis Advantage360 – Bluetooth Version (Amazon) $99.99 Logitech Ergonomic MX Vertical Wireless Mouse (Amazon) Healthy Stuff $109.97 Bodylastics Warrior Resistance Band Set (Amazon) $19.99 Resistance Band Rack Storage / Hanger (Amazon) Entertainment Stuff $99.00 Wiim Mini Streamer (Amazon) $49.99 Roku Streaming Stick 4k (Amazon) $549.00 PS VR2 (PlayStation) Audio Stuff $169.00 Audio Technica M50x (Amazon) $58.95 Honorable mention: AKG Pro Audio K240 Studio Headphones (Amazon) $21.99 Honorable mention: Brainwavz Round Memory Foam Earpads (Amazon) $56.95 AIYIMA DAC-A2 (Amazon) Woodworking stuff $349.00 20-Volt Maximum Lithium-Ion Cordless Combo Kit (4-Tool) with 4 Ah Battery, 2 Ah Battery, Charger and Bag (Amazon) $44.00 Kreg KMA2685 Rip-Cut Circular Saw Guide (Amazon) Joe's List Well, you know Joe has to be a little different so the format's a bit different here! What if there was a way to spend money that could actually make you happy? Check out this article: Yes, you can buy happiness … if you spend it to save time (CNBC). Ideas for ways to spend $2k to save you time A good mattress will improve your sleep, and therefore your amount of quality time in a day! ($1k), Cleaning Service ($100 – $300 per month), Massage ($50 per month), Car Wash Subscription ($20 per month), Grocery Delivery Service (Shipt is $10 a month + up charges on items), Hire landscapers ($100 per month), Get a virtual assistant ($10 to $20 an hour), Use a delivery services like DoorDash or Postmates, or Get your meals mailed to you (Blue Apron, Factor ~$7 to $10 per meal per person). Remember, it's not just about the time you save, it's also about increasing the quality and value of the time you're already saving! What to do with that time and energy? You could … Create a Business, Create a hobby website or portfolio, LeetCode, or Game Ja Ja Ja Jamuary! Or you could … Hang out with friends or family, Go to the gym, Learn an instrument, or Meditate. Trust the process, knowing that whatever time you do put into tech will be more fruitful! Michael's List Description Price Workstations Honorable mention: Zero Gravity Workstations (ErgoQuest.com) $$$$$.$$ Serious Stuff Google Nest Wifi Pro (Amazon) Connection Failed During Setup (Reddit) $399.99 Honorable mention: ASUS ZenWiFi ET8 (Amazon) $480.00 Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) (Amazon) $239.00 Lifelong Office Chair Wheels (Black) (Amazon) $36.95 Alex Tech Wire Loom Tubing Cable Sleeve (Amazon) $12.99 OXO Good Grips Sweep & Swipe Laptop Cleaner (Amazon) $11.95 Fun Stuff DJI OM 5 Smartphone Gimbal Stabilizer (Amazon) $129.00 Ember Temperature Control Travel Mug 2, 12 oz, Black (Amazon) $191.95 Gillette Heated Razor for Men (Amazon) $99.99 MScreen Standard Widescreen (Indiegogo) $149.00 Transformers Optimus Prime Auto-Converting Robot by Robosen (Elite Edition) (Amazon) $699.00 LuckyBot Food 3D Printer Extruder (Amazon) $169.00 Stealth Abs + Plank Core Trainer (Amazon) $149.00 Tip of the Week How do you fix a typo on your phone? Try pressing and then sliding your thumb on the space bar! It's a nifty trick to keep you in the flow. And it works on both Android and iOS. Heading off to holiday? Here's an addendum to episode 191's Tip of the Week … Don't forget your calendar! On iOS, go to Settings -> Mail -> Accounts -> Select your work account -> Turn off the Mail and Calendar sliders. Also, in Slack, you can pause notifications for an extended period and if you do, it'll automatically change your status to Vacationing . Did you know that Docker only has an image cache locally, there isn't a local registry installed? This matters if you go to use something like microk8s instead of minikube! (microk8s.io) What if you want to see what process has a file locked? In Windows, Ronald Sahagun let us know you can use File Locksmith in PowerToys from Microsoft. (learn.microsoft.com) In Linux based systems, Dave

We gather around the watercooler to discuss the latest gossip and shenanigans have been called while Coach Allen is not wrong, Michael gets called out, and Joe gets it right the first time. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode196. News Want to help out the show? Leave us a review! It's almost time to start talking about Ja Ja Ja Jamuary! 2021 Game Jam Recap (YouTube) 2022 Game Jam Recap (YouTube) Water-cooler Topics Now that we're post pandemic, are there any plans to get back out there and start doing some meetups, presenting, etc.? What's your dream conference look like? Which do you prefer: using managed services or managing your own? What's the right balance of processes? Which do you prefer: work alone on an island or as part of a team? What are you going to be for Halloween? Allen's creepy/cool LED face changing smart mask by Lunar Lights Resources we Like Git Merge Conference (git-merge.com) Comparing Git Workflows (episode 90) Kafka No Longer Requires Zookeeper (towardsdatascience.com) Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule (paulgraham.com) Lunar Lights LED Smart Mask 2.0 (lunarlights.com) Tip of the Week DuckDB is an in-process SQL OLAP database management system. You can use it from the command line, drop it into your POM file, pip install it, or npm install it, and then you can easily work with CSV or Parquet files as if they were a database. (duckdb.org) It's really easy to try out in the browser too! (shell.duckdb.org) Want to be sure a file or URL is safe? Use Virus Total to find out. From VirusTotal: VirusTotal inspects items with over 70 antivirus scanners and URL/domain blocklisting services, in addition to a myriad of tools to extract signals from the studied content. (virustotal.com) How to Show & Verify Code Signatures for Apps in Mac OS X (osxdaily.com) tldr: codesign -dv --verbose=4 /path/to/some.app How to Get GitHub-like Diff Support in Git on the Command-Line (matthewsetter.com) Speed up development cycles when working in Kubernetes with Telepresence. (telepresence.io)

We wrap up Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley while Joe has a convenient excuse, Allen gets thrown under the bus, and Michael somehow made it worse. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode195. Sponsors Retool – Stop wrestling with UI libraries, hacking together data sources, and figuring out access controls, and instead start shipping apps that move your business forward. News Thanks for the reviews on iTunes jessetsilva, Marco Fernandooo, and sysadmike702! Want to help out the show? Leave us a review! In Conclusion, … Git Reset Git's reset is likely one of the commands that people shy away from using because it can mess with your working tree as well as what commit HEAD references. reset is a reference editor, an index editor and a working tree editor. git reset Modifies HEAD? Modifies the index? Modifies the working tree? --mixed YES YES. Removes all staged changes from the index, effectively unstaging them back to the working tree. YES. All changes from the reset commit(s) are put in the working tree. Any previous changes are merged with the reset commit(s)'s changes in the working tree. --soft YES YES. All changes from the reset commit(s) are put in the index. Any previously staged changes are merged with the reset commit(s)'s changes in the index. NO. Any changes in the working tree are left untouched. --hard YES YES. Clears the index of any staged changes. YES. Clears the working tree of any unstaged changes. What do the git reset mode flags change? Mixed reset --mixed is the default mode. If you do a reset --mixed of more than one commit, all of those changes will be put back in the working tree together essentially setting you up for a squash of those commits. Soft Reset These two commands are equivalent, both effectively ignoring the last commit: git reset --soft HEAD^ git update-ref HEAD HEAD^ If you did a git status after either of the previous commands, you'd see more changes because your working tree is now being compared to a different commit, assuming you previously had changes in your working tree. This effectively allows you to create a new commit in place of the old one. Instead of doing this, you can always do git commit --amend. Similar to the use of --mixed for multiple commits, if you do a reset --soft of more than one commit, all of those changes will be put back in the index together essentially setting you up for a squash of those commits. Hard Reset This can be one of the most consequential commands. Performing git reset --hard HEAD will get rid of any changes in your index and working tree to all tracked files, such that all of your files will match the contents of HEAD. If you do a reset --hard to an earlier commit, such as git reset --hard HEAD~3, Git is removing changes from your working tree to match the state of the files from the earlier commit, and it's changing HEAD to reference that earlier commit. Similar to the previous point, all uncommitted changes to tracked files are undone. Again, this is a destructive/dangerous way to do something like this and there is another way that is safer: Instead, perform a git stash followed by git checkout -b new-branch HEAD~3. This will save, i.e. stash, your index and working tree changes, and then check out a new branch that references HEAD's great grandparent. git stash saves your work in a stash that you can then apply to any branch you wish in the future; it is not branch specific. Checking out a new branch to the older state allows you to maintain your previous branch and still make the changes you wanted on your new branch. If you decide that you like what is in your new branch better than your old branch, you can run these commands: git branch -D oldbranch git branch -m newbranch oldbranch After learning all of this, the author's recommendation is to always do the stashing/branch creation as it's safer and there's basically no real overhead to it. If you do accidentally blow away changes, the author mentions that you can do a restore from the reflog such as git reset --hard HEAD@{1}. The author also recommends ALWAYS doing a git stash before doing a git reset --hard This allows you to do a git stash apply and recover anything you lost, i.e. nice backup plan. As mentioned previously, if you have other consumers of your branch/commits, you should be careful when making changes that modify history like this as it can force unexpected merges to happen to your consumers. Stashing and the Reflog There are two new ways that blobs can make their way into the repository. The first is the reflog, a metadata repository that records everything you do in your repository. So any time you make a commit in your repository, a commit is also being made to the reflog. You can view the reflog with git reflog. The glorious thing about the reflog is even if you did something like a git reset and blew away your changes, any changes previously committed would still exist in the reflog for at least

This episode, we learn more about Git's Index and compare it to other version control systems while Joe is throwing shade, Michael learns a new command, and Allen makes it gross. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode194. News Want to help out the show? Leave us a review! Ludum Dare is a bi-annual game jam that's been running for over 20 years now. Jam #51 is coming up September 30th to October 3rd. (ldjam.com) We previously talked about Ludum Dare in episode 146. The Index Meet the Middle Man The index refers to the set of blobs and trees created when running a git add, when you "stage" files. These trees and blobs are not a part of the repository yet! If you were to unstage the changes using a reset, you'd have an orphaned blob(s) that would eventually get cleaned up. The index is a staging area for your next commit. The staging area allows you to build up your next commit in stages. You can almost ignore the index by doing a git commit -a (but shouldn't). In Subversion, the next set of changes is always determined by looking at the differences in the current working tree. In Git, the next set of changes is determined by looking at your index and comparing that to the latest HEAD. git add allows you to make additional changes before executing your commit with things like git add --patch and git add --interactive parameters. For Emacs fans out there, the author mentioned gitsum. (GitHub) Taking the Index Further The author mentions "Quilt!", is it this? (man7.org) The primary difference between Git and Quilt is Git only allows one patch to be constructed at a time. Situation the author describes is: What if I had multiple changes I wanted to test independently with each other? There isn't anything built into Git to allow you to try out parallel sets of changes on the fly. Multiple branches would allow you to try out different combinations and the index allows you to stage your changes in a series of commits, but you can't do both at the same time. To do this you'd need an index that allows for more than a single commit at a time. Stacked Git is a tool that lets you prepare more than one index at a time. (stacked-git.github.io) The author gives an example of using regular Git to do two commits by interactively selecting a patch. Then, the author gives the example of how you'd have to go about disabling one set of changes to test the other set of changes. It's not great … swapping between branches, cherry-picking changes, etc. If you find yourself in this situation, definitely take a look at Stacked Git. Using Stacked Git, you are basically pushing and popping commits on a stack. Resources we Like Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley (jwiegley.github.io) The Index: Meet the middle man (jwiegley.github.io) Taking the Index Further (jwiegley.github.io) git add –patch and –interactive by Markus Wein (nuclearsquid.com) We previously discussed the --patch option in episode 22. gitsum Emacs Plugin (GitHub) Darcs is a free, open-source, cross platform version control system with a focus on changes rather than snapshots. (darcs.net) Stacked Git (stacked-git.github.io) Tip of the Week Diffusion Bee is GUI for running Stable Diffusion on M1 macs. It's got a one-click installer that you can get up and generating weird computer art in minutes … as long as you're on a recent version of macOS and M1 hardware. (GitHub) No M1 Mac? You can install the various packages you need to do it yourself, some assembly required! (assembly.ai) Git Tower is a fresh take on Git UI that lets you drag-n-drop branches, undo changes, and manage conflicts. Give it a shot! (git-tower.com) Git Kraken is the Gold Standard when it comes to Git UIs. It's a rich, fully featured environment for managing all of your branches and changes. They are also the people behind the popular VS Code Extension GitLens (gitkraken.com) GitHub CLI is an easy to use command line interface for interacting with GitHub. Reason 532 to love it … draft PR creation via gh pr create --draft ! (cli.github.com)

It's time to understand the full power of Git's rebase capabilities while Allen takes a call from Doc Brown, Michael is breaking stuff all day long, and Joe must be punished. The full show notes for this episode are available at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode193. News Thanks for the review Itsamritchahal! Want to help out the show? Leave us a review! Ludum Dare is a bi-annual game jam that's been running for over 20 years now. Jam #51 is coming up September 30th to October 3rd. (ldjam.com) We previously talked about Ludum Dare in episode 146. Branching and the power of rebase Every branch you work in typically has one or more base commits, i.e. the commits the branch started from. git branch shows the branches in your local repo. git show-branch shows the branch ancestry in your local repo. Reading the output from the bottom up takes you from oldest to newest history in the branches Plus signs, are used to indicate commits on divergent branches from the one that's currently checked out. An asterisk, is used to indicate commits that happened on the current branch. At the top of the output above the dashed line, the output shows the branches, the column and color that will identify their commits, and the label used when identifying their commits. Consider an example repo where we have two branches, T and F, where T = Trunk and F = Feature and the commit history looks like this: What we want to do is bring Feature up to date with what's in Trunk, so bring T2, T3, and T4 into F3. In most source control systems, your only option here is to merge, which you can also do in Git, and should be done if this is a published branch where we don't want to change history. After a merge, the commit tree would look like this: The F3' commit is essentially a "meta-commit" because it's showing the work necessary to bring T4 and F3 together in the repository but contains no new changes from the working tree (assuming there were no merge conflicts to resolve, etc.) If you would rather have your work in your Feature branch be directly based on the commits from Trunk rather than merge commits, you can do a git rebase, but you should only do this for local development. The resulting branch would look like this: You should only rebase local branches because you're potentially rewriting commits and you should not change public history. When doing the merge, the merge commit, F3' is an instruction on how to transform F3 + T4. When doing the rebase, the commits are being rewritten, such that F1' is based on T4 as if that's how it was originally written by the author. Use rebase for local branches that don't have other branches off it, otherwise use merge for anything else. Interactive rebasing git rebase will try to automatically do all the merging. git rebase -i will allow you to handle every aspect of the rebase process. pick – This is the default behavior when not using -i. The commit should be applied to its rewritten parent. If there are conflicts, you're allowed to resolve them before continuing. squash – Use this option when you want to combine the contents of a commit into the previous commit rather than keeping the commits separate. This is useful for when you want multiple commits to be rewritten as a single commit. edit – This will stop the rebasing process at that commit and let you make any changes before doing a git rebase --continue. This allows you to make changes in the middle of the process, making it look like the edit was always there. drop – Use when you want to remove a commit from the history as if it had never been committed. You can also remove the commit from the list or comment it out from the rebase file to get the same results. If there were any commits later that depended on the dropped commit, you will get merge conflicts. Interactive gives you the ability to reshape your branch to how you wish you'd done it in the first place, such as reordering commits. Resources we Like Git from the Bottom Up by John Wiegley (jwiegley.github.io) Branching and the power of rebase (jwiegley.github.io) Interactive rebasing (jwiegley.github.io) Site Reliability Engineering – Embracing Risk (episode 182) Tip of the Week Russian Circles is a rock band that makes gloomy, mid-tempo, instrumental music that's perfect for coding. They just put out a new album and, much like the others, it's great for coding to! (YouTube) GitLens for Visual Studio Code is an open-source extension for Visual Studio Code that brings in a lot more information from your Git repository into your editor. (marketplace.visualstudio.com) Also mentioned in episode 79 and episode 149. Configure Visual Studio Code as your Git editor. (coding.visualstudio.com) JSON Crack is a website that makes it easy to "crack" JSON documents and view them hierarchically. Great for large docs. Thanks for the tip Thiyagu! (JsonCrack.com) Handle is a Windows utility that you can use to see which process has a "handle" on your resource. Thanks for the tip Larry Weiss! (