News Aggregator


Practical Coding Principles for Sustainable Development

Aggregated on: 2025-01-22 14:17:19

As I look back at my journey in software development, spanning a little more than fifteen years, I can remember all the numerous moments when my decisions under the pressure of a deadline either set a project up for success in the long run or cursed it with chronic headaches. Sustainable software development, I've come to realize, is little more than a buzzword. It's an overarching philosophy that informs how we write code, structure projects, and think about the future. Initially, I was lured by the excitement of delivering new features rapidly. But after seeing those same shortcuts morph into technical debt, I changed my approach: code that merely "works" today is not enough; it needs to remain robust and maintainable for years to come. Throughout this article, I'll share my firsthand experiences and the principles I've adopted for sustainable development. We'll talk about the real cost of quick fixes, the importance of simplicity in code, the technical tools and techniques that keep quality high (like Git, SonarQube, and automated testing frameworks), and the practices, such as code reviews and refactoring, that help us pay down technical debt before it spirals out of control. If there is one underlying theme to all this, it's that "less is more." Focusing on quality over quantity, and keeping our code lean, maintainable, and tested, we can solve problems not only for now but for the future.

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Automate Serverless Deployments With Ansible and OCI

Aggregated on: 2025-01-22 13:32:19

Serverless computing has become a key part of modern applications, allowing for flexible scaling, lower costs, and event-based workflows. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Functions is a fully managed platform that lets the user run functions on demand. It supports multiple users, scales easily, and provides serverless computing. Ansible is a powerful automation tool that makes it easier to deploy OCI Functions. It works without needing agents and uses a straightforward, declarative approach. OCI Functions OCI Functions is Oracle’s Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) offering, based on the open-source Fn Project. Key features of OCI Functions include:

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COM Design Pattern for Automation With Selenium and Cucumber

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 23:32:19

The Component Object Model (COM) is a design pattern that allows you to structure tests in test automation projects. Inspired by the popular Page Object Model (POM), COM goes beyond handling entire pages and focuses on specific UI components, such as buttons, text fields, dropdown menus, or other reusable elements. In this tutorial, we will explain how to implement COM to test a web application with Selenium WebDriver and Cucumber and how this approach can make your tests more flexible, modular, and easier to maintain.

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Build Your Own GitHub-Like Tool With React in One Hour

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 22:32:19

GitHub is a widely used platform for version control and collaboration, enabling developers to store, manage, and share code repositories. It supports Git, a distributed version control system that allows multiple contributors to work on projects simultaneously. With features like pull requests, issue tracking, and code reviews, GitHub has become a vital tool for open-source and professional software development. Introduction Howdy! I’m Maulik Suchak, the creator of this project, and I’m excited to introduce you to my GitHub web application. MyGitHub is a public web app built for browsing repositories under specific organizations and diving into their commit histories.

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5 Key Steps for a Successful Cloud Migration Strategy

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 21:17:18

If you have not remodeled your business to the cloud, you have stayed behind your competitors. The first step towards optimizing business strategy is cloud migration. 80% of companies, from small to large, have shifted their services to the cloud.  Cloud migration can enhance data security, functionality, scalability, and customer service and reduce costs. Businesses can store their data, software applications, and more components in the cloud. However, migration from one cloud to another or from local data centers to the cloud requires the right strategy to be considered. 

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Development of a Truck Tracker and Delivery Services Software

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 20:17:19

As the logistics industry evolves, it requires advanced solutions to streamline operations and enhance efficiency. This case study explores the development of a truck tracker cum delivery services software built using React Native, RESTful APIs, and SQLite. The software caters to both drivers and management, providing features such as route mapping, delivery status updates, and real-time tracking. Objective The primary goal was to create a comprehensive logistics management tool that enables:

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Choose a Database With Hybrid Vector Search for AI Apps

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 19:32:19

More and more, we see data pipelines being built to move and prepare data for AI use cases. To avoid being too buzzwordy, we'll define "AI use-cases" for this article as "RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) applications" to provide documents for a 'chat’-like application. The goal is to "augment" the question you will be posting to an LLM (like ChatGPT) with additional content you "retrieved," e.g.: C   You are a helpful in-store assistant. Your #1 goal in life is to help our employees and customers find what they need. Some helpful context is: {{ relevant_documents }} Your task is to answer the question: {{ prompt }} Please don’t make things up. Only return answers based on the context provided in this prompt.

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Azure Web Apps: Seamless Deployments With Deployment Slots

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 18:17:18

Suppose you work for a healthcare company that provides its services via a web platform. The user interface for this platform is set up as a PHP web app hosted in Azure App Services. Frequent updates to the app's source code are rolled out to production to enhance features or address bugs. However, these updates sometimes introduce problems: Undetected bugs: Despite rigorous testing, testers occasionally miss critical bugs, leading to issues in the production environment. Downtime: When bugs are identified, rolling back changes causes service interruptions, which frustrates end-users. Slow deployments: The deployment and compilation process affects app responsiveness, especially during peak usage times, leading to user dissatisfaction. Is there a better solution to ensure seamless updates without interrupting the services? Yes! Microsoft Azure offers a powerful feature known as deployment slots.

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Creating Scrolling Text With HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 17:02:18

When you’ve been building web applications for over 25 years, as I have done, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript has become second nature.  In this article, I’ll show you some simple ways to create scrolling text using these tools, including five different methods for coding scrolling text with plain HTML, HTML and CSS, and finally, HTML + CSS + JS.

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How to Design Event Streams, Part 3

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 16:17:18

See previous Part 1 and Part 2. The relationship between your event definitions and the event streams themselves is a major design. One of the most common questions I get is, “Is it okay to put multiple event types in one stream? Or should we publish each event type to its own stream?”

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Structured Logging in Spring Boot 3.4 for Improved Logs

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 15:17:18

Structured logging has become essential in modern applications to simplify the analysis of logs and improve observability. Spring Boot 3.4 extends the logging capabilities of Spring Framework 6.2. This can be easily configured log formats using application.yml or application.properties. Before jumping into the details of the improvements, below is a brief on how structured logging has evolved, with comparisons between traditional logging and structured logging in Spring Framework 6.2 and Spring Boot 3.4.

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Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Sealed Secrets Management in Jenkins

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 14:32:18

The Jenkins pipeline below automates the secure management of Kubernetes sealed secrets across multiple environments and clusters, including AKS (Non-Production), GKE (Production Cluster 1), and EKS (Production Cluster 2). It dynamically adapts based on the selected environment, processes secrets in parallel for scalability, and ensures secure storage of credentials and artifacts.  With features like dynamic cluster mapping, parallel execution, and post-build artifact archiving, the pipeline is optimized for efficiency, security, and flexibility in a multi-cloud Kubernetes landscape.

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OPC-UA and MQTT: A Guide to Protocols, Python Implementations

Aggregated on: 2025-01-21 13:17:18

The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming industries by enabling seamless communication between a wide array of devices, from simple sensors to complex industrial machines. Two of the most prominent protocols driving IoT systems are OPC-UA (Open Platform Communications - Unified Architecture) and MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport). Each protocol plays a vital role in facilitating data exchange, but their use cases and strengths vary significantly. This article delves into how these protocols work, their advantages, and how to implement them using Python for creating robust IoT solutions.

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AWS CloudTrail Insights for AWS Glue

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 23:17:18

AWS CloudTrail Insights is a part of AWS CloudTrail that always checks API activity in your AWS account to spot unusual patterns and behaviors. CloudTrail Insights helps you find potential security risks, operational oddities, or resource setup problems by looking at CloudTrail logs and pointing out differences from normal activity. For AWS Glue, CloudTrail Insights can keep an eye on:

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Seamless Transition from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 22:17:18

Elasticsearch and OpenSearch are powerful tools for handling search and analytics workloads, offering scalability, real-time capabilities, and a rich ecosystem of plugins and integrations. Elasticsearch is widely used for full-text search, log monitoring, and data visualization across industries due to its mature ecosystem. OpenSearch, a community-driven fork of Elasticsearch, provides a fully open-source alternative with many of the same capabilities, making it an excellent choice for organizations prioritizing open-source principles and cost efficiency.  Migration to OpenSearch should be considered if you are using Elasticsearch versions up to 7.10 and want to avoid licensing restrictions introduced with Elasticsearch's SSPL license. It is also ideal for those seeking continued access to an open-source ecosystem while maintaining compatibility with existing Elasticsearch APIs and tools. Organizations with a focus on community-driven innovation, transparent governance, or cost control will find OpenSearch a compelling option.

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Real-Time Data Streaming With AI

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 21:32:18

Over the years, data has become more and more meaningful and powerful. Both the world and artificial intelligence move at a very quick pace. In this case, AI is very useful for implementations of real-time data use cases. Furthermore, streaming data with AI offers a competitive edge for businesses and industries. AI for real-time and streaming data analytics allows for the most current data to be managed in a timely, continuous flow, as opposed to the traditional way, with several batches of information being handled in varying intervals. Data silos with one platform for streaming and batching data are old news, and pipelines that simplify operations with automated tooling and unified governance are the way of the future.

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Create a Custom Logger to Log Response Details With Playwright Java

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 20:17:18

While working on the series of tutorial blogs for GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, and DELETE requests for API Automation using Playwright Java. I noticed that there is no logging method provided by the Playwright Java framework to log the requests and responses. In the REST-assured framework, we have the log().all() method available that is used for logging the request as well as the response. However, Playwright does not provide any such method. However, Playwright offers a text() method in the APIResponse interface that could be well used to extract the response text.

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How to Edit a PowerPoint PPTX Document in Java

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 19:17:18

Building applications for programmatically editing Open Office XML (OOXML) documents like PowerPoint, Excel, and Word has never been easier to accomplish. Depending on the scope of their projects, Java developers can leverage open-source libraries in their code — or plugin-simplified API services — to manipulate content stored and displayed in the OOXML structure. Introduction In this article, we’ll specifically discuss how PowerPoint Presentation XML (PPTX) files are structured, and we’ll learn the basic processes involved in navigating and manipulating PPTX content. We’ll transition into talking about a popular open-source Java library for programmatically manipulating PPTX files (specifically, replacing instances of a text string), and we’ll subsequently explore a free third-party API solution that can help simplify that process and reduce local memory consumption.

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Evolution of Recommendation Systems: From Legacy Rules Engines to Machine Learning

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 18:32:18

In the world of technology, personalization is the key to keeping users engaged and satisfied. One of the most visible implementations of personalization is through recommendation systems, which provide users with tailored content, products, or experiences based on their interactions and preferences. Historically, the first implementations of recommendation systems were built on legacy rule-based engines like IBM ODM (Operational Decision Manager) and Red Hat JBoss BRMS (Business Rule Management System).  However, recent advances in machine learning have fundamentally changed how recommendations are generated. This article explores how legacy rules-based systems operate, their limitations, and how machine learning has disrupted this space.

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A Guide to Deploying AI for Real-Time Content Moderation

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 17:17:18

Content moderation is crucial for any digital platform to ensure the trust and safety of the users. While human moderation can handle some tasks, AI-driven real-time moderation becomes essential as platforms scale. Machine learning (ML) powered systems can moderate content efficiently at scale with minimal retraining and operational costs. This step-by-step guide outlines an approach to deploying an AI-powered real-time moderation system.  Attributes of Real-Time Moderation System A real-time content moderation system evaluates user-submitted content — text, images, videos, or other formats — to ensure compliance with platform policies. Key attributes of an effective system include:

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Building a Reactive Event-Driven App With Dead Letter Queue

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 16:17:18

Event-driven architecture facilitates systems to reply to real-life events, such as when the user's profile is updated. This post illustrates building reactive event-driven applications that handle data loss by combining Spring WebFlux, Apache Kafka, and Dead Letter Queue. When used together, these provide the framework for creating fault-tolerant, resilient, and high-performance systems that are important for large applications that need to handle massive volumes of data efficiently. Features Used in this Article Spring Webflux: It provides a Reactive paradigm that depends on non-blocking back pressure for the simultaneous processing of events. Apache Kafka: Reactive Kafka producers and consumers help in building competent and adaptable processing pipelines. Reactive Streams: They do not block the execution of Kafka producers and consumers' streams. Dead Letter Queue (DLQ): A DLQ stores messages temporarily that could not have been processed due to various reasons. DLQ messages can be later used to reprocess messages to prevent data loss and make event processing resilient. Reactive Kafka Producer A Reactive Kafka Producer pushes messages in parallel and does not block other threads while publishing. It is beneficial where large data to be processed. It blends well with Spring WebFlux and handles backpressure within microservices architectures. This integration helps in not only processing large messages but also managing cloud resources well. 

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Optimizing Prometheus Queries With PromQL

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 15:32:18

Prometheus is a powerful monitoring tool that provides extensive metrics and insights into your infrastructure and applications, especially in k8s and OCP (enterprise k8s). While crafting PromQL (Prometheus Query Language) expressions, ensuring accuracy and compatibility is essential, especially when comparing metrics or calculating thresholds.  In this article, we will explore how to count worker nodes and track changes in resources effectively using PromQL.

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Troubleshooting Connection Issues When Connecting to MySQL Server

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 14:17:18

Encountering connection problems while accessing a MySQL server is a common challenge for database users. These issues often arise due to incorrect configuration, user permissions, or compatibility problems. Below are the most common errors and their solutions to help you resolve connection issues efficiently. 1. Error: Host ‘xxx.xx.xxx.xxx’ is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server Cause This error indicates that the MySQL server does not permit the specified host or user to access the database. It is typically due to insufficient privileges assigned to the user or client host. Solution To resolve this issue, grant the required privileges to the user from the MySQL command line:

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Chain-of-Thought Prompting: A Comprehensive Analysis of Reasoning Techniques in Large Language Models

Aggregated on: 2025-01-20 13:32:18

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a transformative technique in artificial intelligence, enabling large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into logical, sequential steps. First introduced by Wei et al. in 2022, this approach mirrors human cognitive processes and has demonstrated remarkable improvements in tasks requiring multi-step reasoning[1]. CoT: Explanation and Definition What Is CoT? Chain-of-thought prompting is a technique that guides LLMs through structured reasoning processes by breaking down complex tasks into smaller, manageable steps. Unlike traditional prompting, which seeks direct answers, CoT encourages models to articulate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching a conclusion, significantly improving their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks [1].

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Creating Artificial Doubt Significantly Improves AI Math Accuracy

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 21:32:16

What makes an AI system good at math? Not raw computational power, but something that seems almost contradictory: being neurotically careful about being right. When AI researchers talk about mathematical reasoning, they typically focus on scaling up  —  bigger models, more parameters, and larger datasets. But in practice, mathematical ability isn’t about how much compute you have for your model. It’s actually about whether machines can learn to verify their own work, because at least 90% of reasoning errors come from models confidently stating wrong intermediate steps.

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Dark Data: Recovering the Lost Opportunities

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 19:17:16

Dark data may contain secret information that is valuable for corporate operations. Companies can lead the competition by gaining insights from dark data using the relevant tools and practices. Let's check what dark data is all about and how to use it to make smarter decisions.

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Business Logic Database Agent

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 17:17:16

In a recent interview, Satya Nadella prophesied the "end of SaaS" with Business Logic Database Agents. The vision was exciting and broad but indefinite. And, it sparked concerns — serious ones. In this article, we describe a definite (in fact, running) vision for such a system and how to deal with reasonable concerns raised in the comments.

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Talk to Your Project: An LLM Experiment You Can Join and Build On

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 15:17:16

Today, I want to share the story of a small open-source project I created just for fun and experimentation — ConsoleGpt. The process, results, and overall experience turned out to be fascinating, so I hope you find this story interesting and, perhaps, even inspiring. After all, I taught my project how to understand spoken commands and do exactly what I want.  This story might spark new ideas for you, encourage your own experiments, or even motivate you to build a similar project. And of course, I'd be thrilled if you join me in developing ConsoleGpt — whether by contributing new features, running it locally, or simply starring it on GitHub. Anyone who's ever worked on an open-source project knows how much even small support means.

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Schema Changes Are a Blind Spot

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 13:32:16

Schema changes and migrations can quickly spiral into chaos, leading to significant challenges. Overcoming these obstacles requires effective strategies for streamlining schema migrations and adaptations, enabling seamless database changes with minimal downtime and performance impact.  Without these practices, the risk of flawed schema migrations grows — just as GitHub experienced. Discover how to avoid similar pitfalls.

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ArangoDB: Achieving Success With a Multivalue Database

Aggregated on: 2025-01-17 00:47:16

Handling diverse database structures often introduces significant complexity to system architecture, especially when multiple database instances are required. This fragmentation can complicate operations, increase costs, and reduce efficiency. Multimodel databases like ArangoDB provide a unified solution to address these challenges. They simplify architecture and streamline data management by supporting multiple data models — key-value, document, and graph — within a single database instance. Unlike relational databases, NoSQL databases do not adhere to a universal standard like SQL. Instead, they are categorized based on their storage structure. Among the popular types are:

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Build Your First Chrome Extension With Rust and WebAssembly

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 23:17:16

Chrome extensions have traditionally been built using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. However, with the rise of WebAssembly (Wasm), we can now leverage Rust's performance, safety, and modern development features in browser extensions.  In this tutorial, we will create a simple Chrome extension that uses Rust compiled to WebAssembly.

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Understanding Leaderless Replication for Distributed Data

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 21:47:16

Leaderless replication is another fundamental replication approach for distributed systems. It alleviates problems of multi-leader replication while, at the same time, it introduces its own problems.  Write conflicts in multi-leader replication are tackled in leaderless replication with quorum-based writes and systematic conflict resolution (e.g., version vectors). Cascading failures, synchronization overhead, and operational complexity can be handled in leaderless replication via its decentralized architecture. Removing leaders can simplify cluster management, failure handling,g and recovery mechanisms.

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Best Gantt Chart Libraries for React

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 20:47:16

Gantt chart is an advanced visualization solution for project management that considerably facilitates planning, scheduling, and controlling the progress of short-, mid-, and long-term projects.  Gantt charts were invented more than a hundred years ago by Henry Gantt, who made a major contribution to the development of scientific management. Decades ago, the entire procedure of implementing Gantt charts in infrastructure projects was really time-consuming. Today, we are lucky to have modern tools that greatly speed up the process. 

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Feature Flags in .NET 8 and Azure

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 19:32:15

In an industry where fast, reliable, and iterative development cycles define success, the ability to deploy software while minimizing risks is invaluable. Feature flags have become an essential part of the modern developer’s toolkit, offering a flexible approach to enabling and disabling features dynamically.  Let’s examine how the Microsoft .NET team, in combination with Azure, manages new feature releases efficiently without reverting (redeploying) in case of regressions.

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Forensic Product Backlog Analysis: A New Team Exercise

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 18:17:16

The Forensic Product Backlog Analysis: A 60-minute team exercise to fix your Backlog. Identify what’s broken, find out why, and agree on practical fixes — all in five quick steps. There is no fluff, just results. Want technical excellence and solve customer problems? Start with a solid Product Backlog.

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You Need to Validate Your Databases

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 17:17:16

Ensuring database consistency can quickly become chaotic, posing significant challenges. To tackle these hurdles, it's essential to adopt effective strategies for streamlining schema migrations and adjustments.  These approaches help implement database changes smoothly, with minimal downtime and impact on performance. Without them, the risk of misconfigured databases increases — just as Heroku experienced. Learn how to steer clear of similar mistakes.

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ISO 27001 vs SOC 2: Understanding the Differences

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 16:17:16

When organizations handle sensitive information, ensuring its security and maintaining compliance are paramount. Two key frameworks in this domain are ISO 27001 and SOC 2. While they share common goals, they differ significantly in their approach, scope, and purpose. Here’s a deep dive into both frameworks: What Is ISO 27001? ISO 27001 is an internationally recognized standard established by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) for implementing and maintaining an Information Security Management System (ISMS). This framework provides a structured methodology for managing sensitive company information, focusing on risk management, preventive measures, and ongoing improvement.

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Data Sharing Using Google Analytics Hub

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 15:17:15

Google Cloud Analytics Hub is a tool built on BigQuery that enables seamless data sharing across the organization by making it easier to share and access datasets. Analytics Hub makes it easy to discover public, private, and internally shared data sources.  Accessing Public Datasets in Analytics Hub Navigate to the Google Cloud console using the URL "https://console.cloud.google.com," search for BigQuery, and select BigQuery.

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Mastering Observability in 10 Minutes Using OpenSearch

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 14:17:15

Observability has become a key component in software development as it enables the best customer experience by ensuring system health and performance and detecting systemic issues proactively. However, getting started can often feel overwhelming. OpenSearch simplifies this by providing an open-source, scalable solution for logging, metrics, and visualization. In this article, we’ll walk through setting up observability in 10 minutes using OpenSearch Observability. No complex jargon, just simple steps to get you started with real-world examples.

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The Importance of Middleware in Integrating CIS and GIS Systems

Aggregated on: 2025-01-16 13:17:15

Integrating Customer Information Systems (CIS) with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is crucial, as both are Tier 1 applications. CIS serves as the core for customer and billing management, while GIS is essential for infrastructure management. Middleware functions as a vital layer that enables communication and data exchange between these diverse systems, playing a key role in data transformation, protocol mediation, message routing, and transaction management to ensure seamless integration. This article will delve into the significance of middleware in bridging the gap between CIS and GIS, along with a practical demonstration of its implementation using Python.

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Efficient Long-Term Trend Analysis in Presto Using Datelists

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 23:32:15

Data analytics teams, plenty of times, would have to do long-term trend analysis to study patterns over time. Some of the common analyses are WoW (week over week), MoM (month over month), and YoY (year over year). This would usually require data to be stored across multiple years.  However, this takes up a lot of storage and querying across years worth of partitions is inefficient and expensive. On top of this, if we have to do user attribute cuts, it will be more cumbersome. To overcome this issue, we can implement an efficient solution using datelists.

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Kafka vs NATS: A Comparison for Message Processing

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 22:17:15

In a distributed architecture, communications between systems form the foundation of the entire infrastructure. The performance, scalability, and reliability of the infrastructure depend much on how events/messages/data are exchanged and persisted.  Kafka and NATS are two popular tools for handling streaming and messaging. They have different architectures and different performance characteristics. They are suitable for specific use cases. In this article, we will compare the features of NATS with Kafka and explain the use cases I addressed at work.

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Heterogeneity of Computing Environments Using Cross-Compilation

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 21:17:15

With the advent of open-source software and the acceptance of these solutions in creating complex systems, the ability to develop applications that can run seamlessly across multiple hardware platforms becomes inherently important. There is a constant need to develop the software on one architecture but have the capability to execute these on other target architectures. One common technique to achieve this is cross-compilation of the application for the target architecture.  Cross-compilation is significant in embedded systems where the intent is to run applications on specialized hardware like ARM and PowerPC boards. These systems are resource-constrained and hence a direct compilation is not an option. Thus, developers will leverage the common x86 architecture as a host and use toolchains specific to the target hardware, generating binaries compatible with the target hardware. 

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Consistency Conundrum: The Challenge of Keeping Data Aligned

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 20:32:15

A system may store and replicate its data across different nodes to fulfill its scaling, fault tolerance, load balancing, or partitioning needs. This causes data synchronization issues, read-write conflicts, causality problems, or out-of-order updates. These issues arise due to concurrent updates on copies of the same data, network latency or network partition between nodes, node or process crashes, and clock synchronization, to name a few. Due to these issues, the application may read stale or incorrect data. Non-repeatable reads may occur, and own writes may not be read, either! The solution to these common problems of a distributed system is to maintain consistency, i.e., keep the data aligned.

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Branches to Backlogs: Implementing Effective Timeframes in Software Development

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 19:32:15

A few years ago, at my previous company, I found myself on a familiar quest: hunting down a specific Jira issue. What I discovered was both amusing and alarming — three versions of the same problem statement, each with different solutions spaced four to six months apart. Every solution was valid in its context, but the older ones had become obsolete. This scenario is all too common in the software development world. New ideas constantly emerge, priorities shift, and tasks often get put on hold. As a result, the same issues resurface repeatedly, leading to a chaotic backlog with multiple solutions for identical problems. This clutter makes it challenging to grasp our true roadmap and impedes our ability to achieve objectives.

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Bye Tokens, Hello Patches

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 18:32:15

Do we really need to break text into tokens, or could we work directly with raw bytes? First, let’s think about how do LLMs currently handle text. They first chop it up into chunks called tokens using rules about common word pieces. This tokenization step has always been a bit of an odd one out. While the rest of the model learns and adapts during training, tokenization stays fixed, based on those initial rules. This can cause problems, especially for languages that aren’t well-represented in the training data or when handling unusual text formats.

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Advanced Bot Mitigation Using Custom Rate-Limiting Techniques

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 17:17:15

Today, automated bot traffic creates a very costly and complex challenge for organizations in the modern digital environment. The traditional defenses present the platform operators with a paradox: the very methods effective in keeping the bots away frustrate legitimate users, leading to higher abandonment rates and thus debilitating user experience.  What if one could block bots without deterring actual users? Let’s take a look at an innovative and data-driven approach to bot mitigation, which uses a custom rate-limiting technique, with real-world examples that prove this can drastically reduce costs, increase stability, and result in a frictionless user experience.

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Data-First IDP: Driving AI Innovation in Developer Platforms

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 16:32:15

Traditional internal developer platforms (IDPs) have transformed how organizations manage code and infrastructure. By standardizing workflows through tools like CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), these platforms have enabled rapid deployments, reduced manual errors, and improved developer experience. However, their focus has primarily been on operational efficiency, often treating data as an afterthought. This omission becomes critical in today's AI-driven landscape. While traditional IDPs excel at managing infrastructure, they fall short when it comes to the foundational elements required for scalable and compliant AI innovation:

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Personalized Search Optimization Using Semantic Models and Context-Aware NLP for Improved Results

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 15:17:15

Have you ever wondered how search engines like Google interpret phrases such as "budget-friendly vacation spots" and "cheap places to travel" as essentially the same query? That’s the power of semantic search. Traditional search engines rely heavily on exact keyword matches. They only find documents or results that contain the exact words entered in a query. For example, if you search for "budget-friendly vacation spots," a keyword-based search engine would return results containing those exact terms. However, this method falls short when it comes to understanding the nuances of human language, such as synonyms, different phrasing, or the intent behind the words. For instance, one user might search for "affordable beach resorts," while another might search for "cheap seaside hotels." Both queries refer to similar types of accommodations, but traditional search engines might fail to connect these two searches effectively due to differing phrasing.

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Distributed Training at Scale

Aggregated on: 2025-01-15 14:17:15

As artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) models grow in complexity, the computational resources required to train them increase exponentially. Training large models on vast datasets can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process, often taking days or even weeks to complete on a single machine.  This is where distributed training comes into play. By leveraging multiple computing resources, distributed training allows for faster model training, enabling teams to iterate more quickly. In this article, we will explore the concept of distributed training, its importance, key strategies, and tools to scale model training efficiently.

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