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Achieving Data Agility With the Combined Strengths of AWS and Confluent

To create a genuinely reliable and highly scalable platform in the Cloud, companies often find they must combine technologies to meet their real-time demands. Many businesses are struggling with real-time streaming capabilities because it is challenging to accomplish elegantly and meet the requirements for effective data transformation and data movement.

To create a cloud-based powerhouse, you need to combine tools that can complement each other’s strengths. One of our favorite combinations is AWS and Confluent. AWS is the standard cloud provider for scalability and flexibility, especially for those using AWS serverless services. Confluent is best-of-breed for messaging, streaming, and real-time needs. Together, they create a synergy that helps businesses respond to their data agility needs.  

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Using Variables in Jekyll To Define Custom Content

I have a habit of constantly tinkering with my blog, and every now and then, it leads to a happy accident. I recently discovered that I can use Jekyll’s config.yml to store custom variables.  You may have already known about this, and I’m probably not the first to make this discovery, but I’m very excited about the possibilities.

The reason for the tinkering which led to the discovery is this: if you visit this website’s home page, about page, and footer section, you’ll notice that they all have some content in common. Specifically, my tag line and bio are used in many places, and copy-pasting them every time I change them is annoying and error-prone. On more than one occasion, my bio has been different on different pages of the website. This is why I wanted to figure out a way to define them as variables in one place and use them everywhere.

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Enhance Machine Performance Through IoT-Enabled Monitoring and Automation

Thanks to capabilities like remote monitoring, IoT is opening up new opportunities for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

Until recently, an OEM’s aftersales relationship with its customers was limited by visibility. The OEM would sell equipment and then perform maintenance on that purchased equipment according to a fixed schedule. If a mechanical or software issue arose between those service appointments, the customer would be the first to discover it. That customer would then either have to wait patiently until the service date or urgently call the OEM out for emergency troubleshooting and repair. Both of those situations left the customer looking to the OEM to respond.

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9 Top APIs for Cycling

Chances are if you live an urban, suburban or even rural area, you have noticed an increased amount of cyclists on roadways and trails in the last few years. The popularity of riding bikes has been rising for years, and has soared during the pandemic, for a number of reasons including health, economic, and social & environmental.

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Website Accessibility: What You Need to Know

In a world where we are more connected than ever before, everyone must have access to the same information and opportunities. Achieving web accessibility means removing any barriers that stand in the way of disadvantaged and or handicapped users accessing online content or services with the same capacity as other users.

In this guide, you will learn how to create a website that is accessible for screen-readers and SEO robots. 

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Processing 3D Data Using Python Multiprocessing Library

Today we’ll cover the tools that are very handy with large amount of data. I'm not going to tell you only general information that might be found in manuals but share some little tricks that I’ve discovered, such as using tqdm with multiprocessing imap, working with archives in parallel, plotting and processing 3D data, and how to search for a similar object within object meshes if you have a point cloud.

So why should we resort to parallel computing? Nowadays, if you work with any kind of data you might face problems related to "big data". Each time we have the data that doesn’t fit the RAM we need to process it piece by piece. Fortunately, modern programming languages allow us to spawn multiple processes (or even threads) that work perfectly on multi-core processors.  (NB: That doesn’t mean that single-core processors cannot handle multiprocessing.  Here’s the Stack Overflow thread on that topic.)

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How To Use CockroachDB With Your Django Application

This tutorial is intended to be a quick ramp-up on CockroachDB with Django.  In case you're searching for a proper Django tutorial, this is not it. At the time of writing, django-cockroachdb library is available in two versions, (2 and 3). This tutorial will cover version 3, and is inspired by the Digital Ocean tutorial using Django with PostgreSQL. I am going to highlight the steps where this tutorial differs from the original. For everything else, we will assume the tutorial is followed as is.

I originally wrote this post two years ago and had since updated it as CockroachDB RBAC is no longer an enterprise-only feature so we can skip that step. I'm also including steps to launch a Docker instance to make this more portable and comprehensive.

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An Intro to, Provisioning, and Configuring Vagrant

I’ve been happy using Vagrant for quite a while now. I work with AWS and DevOps tools, and installing them all on one system can mess things up. Vagrant is great for doing crazy things without actually breaking your system. And if you’re not already using it, you should start now.

If you’re familiar with VirtualBox or VMware then learning Vagrant will be easy. Think of Vagrant as simple interface in front of VirtualBox or VMware. A single config file, called Vagrantfile, allows you to customize your virtual machines, also called Vagrant boxes. And a simple CLI interface lets you start, stop, suspend, or destroy your boxes.

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iPaaS for Mobile Developers

Thinking of building the next big mobile application? The time to market of a mobile application is critical in the current fast-paced industry. Deciding if it’s an Android or an iOS application is just one part of the problem. Most of today’s applications need a backend system to carry out their operations. Features like remote data storage/syncing, authentication, and user communication require a set of backend services to be available.

So, how can we develop these backend systems for mobile applications? There are two main patterns for doing this. The first is to do direct integration.

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How to Deploy TiDB on Google Cloud Platform—Part 2

Overview

Welcome to the second of a two-part blog series on getting a simple TiDB cluster up and running on the Google Cloud Platform. The goal is to let you quickly set up TiDB and become familiar with its benefits. In Part 1, we created a GCP instance. Here in Part 2, we will install, configure, and run TiDB on that instance.

By the end of this article, your architecture may look similar to the following:

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Unlocking Developer Velocity With the Right CI/CD Platform

Today, in a world where online software is expected to be available 24/7 across the globe, engineering teams writing and delivering software are expected to do so at speed, while maintaining quality and security. To help meet the challenge, online CI/CD platforms have emerged to provide everything a developer needs to plan, version, deploy, test, and promote an application from their laptop to a production environment – where an end-user can consume it and provide valuable feedback. 

This article will cover the key ingredients of a CI/CD platform, how they are evolving and whether you should try to build your own or utilize an industry leader.