Coding Blocks

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 that you're querying for a condition by checking on records to exist, if they don't exist there's nothing to lock, so the SELECT FOR UPDATE won't work and you get a phantom write - a write in one transaction changes the search result of a query in another transaction Snapshot isolation avoids phantoms in read-only queries, but can't stop them in read-write transactions Materializing conflicts The problem we mentioned with phantom is there'd no record/object to lock because it doesn't exist What if you were to have a set of records that could be used for locking to alleviate the phantom writes? Create records for every possible combination of conflicting events and only use those to lock when doing a write "materializing conflicts" because you're taking the phantom writes and turning them into lock records that will prevent those conflicts This can be difficult and prone to errors trying to create all the combinations of locks AND this is a nasty leakage of your storage into your application Should be a last resort Resources We Like The 12 Factor App and Google Cloud (cloud.google.com) Tip of the Week Docker's Buildkit is their backend builder that replaces the "legacy" builder by adding new non-backward compatible functionality. The way you enable buildkit is a little awkward, either passing flags or setting variables as well as enabling the features per Dockerfile, but it's worth it! One of the cool features is the "mount" flag that you can pass as part of a RUN statement to bring in files that are not persisted past that layer. This is great for efficiency and security. The "cache" type is great for utilizing Docker's cache to save time in future builds. The "bind" type is nice for mounting files you only need temporarily. like source code in for a compiled language. The "secret" is great for temporarily bringing in environment variables without persisting them. Type "ssh" is similar to "secret", but for sharing ssh keys. Finally "tmpfs" is similar to swap memory, using an in-memory file system that's nice for temporarily storing data in primary memory as a file that doesn't need to be persisted. (github.com) Did you know Google has a Google Cloud Architecture diagramming tool? It's free and easy to use so give it a shot! (cloud.google.com) ChatGTP has an app for slack. It's designed to deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance. Is this the end of scrolling through hundreds of messages to catch up on whatever is happening? /chatgpt summarize (salesforce.com) Have you heard about ephemeral containers? It's a convenient way to spin up temporary containers that let you inspect files in a pod and do other debugging activities. Great for, well, debugging! (kubernetes.io)

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

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

https://www.codingblocks.net/episode221

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, your "sometimes" is now! 🚫 "git reset --hard". ✅ "git stash -u"  

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)

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)

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 content-read-only but you must give fine-grained permissions to the jobs you run - write content, gh-pages, repository, issues, packages, etc There is a section under settings for setting secrets (unretrievable and masked in output) and variables for your jobs. You have to explicitly share secrets with other jobs you call There is support for "expressions" which are common programming constructions such as conditionals and string helper functions you can run to save you some scripting (docs.github.com) Verdict Pros: GitHub Actions is amazing because it's built around git! Great features comparable (or much better) than other CI/CD providers Great integration with a popular tool you might already be using (docs.github.com) Works well w/ the concepts of Git By default, workflows cannot use actions from GitHub.com and GitHub Marketplace. You can restrict your developers to using actions that are stored on your GitHub Enterprise Server instance, which includes most official GitHub-authored actions, as well as any actions your developers create. Alternatively, to allow your developers to benefit from the full ecosystem of actions built by industry leaders and the open-source community, you can configure access to other actions from GitHub.com. Great free tier Great documentation https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-containerized-services/creating-postgresql-service-containers Hosted/Enterprise version Cons: Working via commits can get ugly…make your changes in a branch and rebase when you're done! Next Steps If you are interested in getting started with DevOps, or just learning a bit more about it, then this is a great way to go! It's a great investment in your skillset as a developer in any case. Examples: Build your project on every pull request or push to trunk Run your tests, output the results from a test coverage tool Run a linter or static analysis tool Post to X, Update LinkedIn whenever you create a new release Auto-tag issues that you haven't triaged yet Resources We Like GitHub Actions (github.com) GitHub Actions Documentation (github.com) Learn GitHub Actions (github.com) Actions on the GitHub marketplace (github.com) Tip of the Week There is a GitHub Actions plugin for VSCode that provides a similar UI to the website. This is much easier than trying to make all your changes in Github.com or bouncing between VSCode and the website to see how your changes worked. It also offers some integrated documentation and code completion! It's definitely my preferred way of working with actions. (marketplace.visualstudio.com) Did you know that you can cancel terminating a terminating persistent volume in Kubernetes? Hopefully you never need to, but you can do it! (github.com) How are the Framework Wars going? Check out Google trends for one point of view. (trends.google.com) Rebasing is great, don't be afraid of it! A nice way to get started is to rebase while you are pulling to keep your commits on top. git pull origin main --rebase=i There's a Dockerfile Linter written in Haskell that will help you keep your Docker files in great shape. (docker.com)

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.com) Beware of string interpolation in logging statements in Kotlin, you can end up performing the interpolation even if you're not configured to output the statement types! IntelliJ will show you some squiggles to warn you. Use string templates instead. Also, Kotlin has "use" statements to avoid unnecessary processing, and only executes when it's necessary. (discuss.kotlinlang.org) Thanks to Tom for the tip on tldr pages, they are a community effort to simplify the beloved man pages with practical examples. (tldr.sh) Looking for some new coding music? Check out these albums from popular guitar heroes! Portals from Kirk Hammett (music.apple.com) Terminal Velocity from John Petrucci (music.apple.com)

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