Episodes

  • When to Log Out

    When to Log Out
    Oct 7 2024

    Well, this is awkward.

    Coding Blocks is signing out for now, in this episode we’ll talk about what’s happening and why. We have had an amazing run, far better than we ever expected. Also, Joe recommends 50 games, Allen goes for the gold, and Outlaw is totally normal. (And we’re not crying you’re crying!)

    Thank you for the support over the last 11 (!!!) years. It's been a wild ride, and the last thing we ever expected when starting a tech podcast was getting to meet so many fantastic people.

    View the full show notes here:
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode242

    Tip of the Week

    • UFO 50 is an odd collection of 50 pseudo-retro video games made by a small group of game developers, most notably including Derek Yu of Spelunky. It's a unique and specific experience that reminds me of spending the night at your friend's house who had some console gaming system that you'd only ever heard rumors about. The games seem small and simple at first blush, but there is surprising depth. Favorites so far are Kick Club, Avianos, Attactics, and Mortol. (Steam)
    • Use JSDoc annotations to make VSCode "understand" your data (jsdoc.app)
    • Can you change your password without needing current password? (askubuntu.com)
    • Did you know you can use VS Code for interactive rebasing?
      • How to enable VS Code Interactive Editor (StackOverflow)
      • GitLens (marketplace.visualstudio.com)
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    1 hr and 3 mins
  • Things to Know when Considering Multi-Tenant or Multi-Threaded Applications

    Things to Know when Considering Multi-Tenant or Multi-Threaded Applications
    Sep 2 2024

    For the full show notes head over to:
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode241
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    1 hr and 59 mins
  • Two Water Coolers Walk Into a Bar

    Two Water Coolers Walk Into a Bar
    Aug 18 2024

    Grab your headphones because it's water cooler time! In this episode we're catching up on feedback, putting our skills to the test, and wondering what we're missing. Plus, Allen's telling it how it is, Outlaw is putting it all together and Joe is minding the gaps!

    View the full show notes here:
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode240

    Reviews

    Thank you again for taking the time to share your review with us!

    • iTunes: Yesso95
    • Spotify: Auxk0rd, artonus

    News

    Atlanta Dev Con
    September 7th, 2024
    https://www.atldevcon.com/

    DevFest Central Florida
    September 28th, 2024
    https://devfestflorida.com/

    Two water coolers walk into a bar...

    • Several folks share their origin stories in the Coding Blocks slack - especially in episode-discussion
    • Example of dealing with legacy code / hiring people that will work on it (Episode 239)
    • Intentional architecture…what's the worst that could happen?
    • What's the sentiment like on Hacker News? (outerbounds.com)
    • Cat8 is not small! Why isn't anything easy?
    • Kubernetes trivia, where are your blind spots? (proprofs.com)
    • Ask Claude: Can you give me an example of the kinds of competitions that might exist in a humorous version of the Olympics for programmers?
    • Data gathering and parsing - it doesn't seem to have gotten much better in decades…are we wrong?

    Tip of the Week

    • 8 Top Docker Tips and Tricks for 2024 (docker.com)
    • Have you tried Eartlhy, like Dockerfiles for all of your builds that you can run locally? (earthly.dev)
    • Java's JavaAgent Explained (bito.ai)
    • Mirrord is an alternative to Telepresence that makes working with Kubernetes easier (mirrord.dev)
    • Kubernetes + Skaffold + Telepresence + K9s = Winning, it's a great combination of tools that work great together!
      • https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine?hl=en
      • https://skaffold.dev/
      • https://www.telepresence.io/
      • https://k9scli.io/
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • How did We Even Arrive Here?

    How did We Even Arrive Here?
    Aug 4 2024

    For the full show notes please visit:

    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode239
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    1 hr and 37 mins
  • AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!

    AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!
    Jul 7 2024

    It's Water Cooler Time! We've got a variety of topics today, and also Outlaw's lawyering up, Allen can read QR codes now, and Joe is looking at second careers.

    View the full show notes here:
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode238

    News

    As always, thank you for leaving us a review – we really appreciate them! Almazkun, vassilbakalov, DzikijSver

    Atlanta Dev Con
    September 7th, 2024
    https://www.atldevcon.com/

    DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024
    Interested? Submit your talk proposal here:
    https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/

    Water Cooler

    • How many programmers are there now? (statista.com)
      • Are we still growing?
      • What will it be like when we stop growing?
      • What will people be doing instead?
    • AI music generators are being sued! (msn.com)
    • Curse of the Blank Page
      • Naming things is important, gives them power…but also the power to defeat them!
    • Don't make any one specific technology your hammer
    • Client libraries that completely change with server upgrades
    • What's the most important or relevant thing to learn as a developer now?
    • Do you research or learn on vacation?

    Tip of the Week

    • Curated, High-Quality Stories, Essays, Editorials, and Podcasts based around Software Engineering. It's more polished and less experimental than PagedOut (Github)
      Also, there's a new Paged Out, complete with downloadable art. It's more avant-garde than GIthub's Readme project, featuring articles on Art, Cryptography, Demoscenes, and Reverse Engineering. (pagedout.institute)
    • Travel Router - Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is used to pass the authentication information between the supplicant (the Wi-Fi workstation) and the authentication server (Microsoft IAS or other) (Amazon)
      • Comparison of Travel Routers (gi.inet.com)
      • Carrying case for router (Amazon)
      • Travel power cube - 6 power outlets followed by 3 (Amazon)
    • Did you know you that Windows has a built in camera QR code reader?
    • Guava caching libraries in Java (Github)
      • Caffiene is a more recent alternatitive (Github)
    • Generative AI for beginners - "Learn the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications with our 18-lesson comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates."
    • Microsoft has a course for getting into generative AI! (microsoft.github.io)
    • Claude is better than Chat GPT? (claude.ai)
    • How to Get the Most out of Postgres Memory Settings - thanks Mikerg! (temb.io)
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    1 hr and 47 mins
  • Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka

    Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka
    Jun 23 2024
    View the show notes on the web: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode237 In the past couple of episodes, we'd gone over what Apache Kafka is and along the way we mentioned some of the pains of managing and running Kafka clusters on your own. In this episode, we discuss some of the ways you can offload those responsibilities and focus on writing streaming applications. Along the way, Joe does a mighty fine fill-in for proper noun pronunciation and Allen does a southern auctioneer-style speed talk. Reviews As always, thank you for leaving us a review - we really do appreciate them! From iTunes: Abucr7 Upcoming Events Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/ Kafka Compatible and Kafka Functional Alternatives Why? Because running any type of infrastructure requires time, knowledge, and blood, sweat and tears Confluent https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/We've personally had good experiences with their Kafka as a service WarpStream https://www.warpstream.com/"WarpStream is an Apache Kafka® compatible data streaming platform built directly on top of object storage: no inter-AZ bandwidth costs, no disks to manage, and infinitely scalable, all within your VPC"ZERO disks to manage10x cheaper than running KafkaAgents stream data directly to and from object storage with no buffering on local disks and no data tiering.Create new serverless “Virtual Clusters” in our control plane instantlySupport different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructureThings you won't have to do with WarpStream Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of spaceFigure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus groupRebalance partitions in a cluster "WarpStream is protocol compatible with Apache Kafka®, so you can keep using all your favorite tools and software. No need to rewrite your application or use a proprietary SDK. Just change the URL in your favorite Kafka client library and start streaming!"Never again have to choose between reliability and your budget. WarpStream costs the same regardless of whether you run your workloads in a single availability zone, or distributed across multipleWarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storageWarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirelyCan be run in BYOC (bring your own cloud) or in Serverless BYOC - you provide all the compute and storage - the only thing that WarpStream provides is the control plane Data never leaves your environment Serverless - fully managed by WarpStream in AWS - will automatically scale for you even down to nothing! Can run in AWS, GCP and AzureAgents are also S3 compatible so can run with S3 compatible storage such as Minio and others RedPanda Redpanda is a slimmed down native Kafka protocol compliant drop-in replacement for KafkaThere's even a Redpanda Connect!It's main differentiator is performance, it's cheaper and faster Apache Pulsar Similar to Kafka, but changes the abstraction on storage to allow more flexibility on IOHas a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangabilitySimple data offload functionality to S3 or GCSMulti tenancyGeo replication Cloud alternatives Google Cloud - PubSub https://cloud.google.com/pubsub Azure - Event Hubs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/event-hubs AWS - Kinesis https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ Tip of the Week Chord AI is an Android/iOS app that uses AI to figure out the chords for a song. This is really useful if you just want to get the quick jist of a song to play along with. The base version is free, and has a few different integration options (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music Local Files for me) and it uses your phones microphone and a little AI magic to figure it out. It even shows you how to play the chords on guitar or piano. The free version gets you basic chords, but you can pay $8.99 a month to get more advanced/frequent chords. https://www.chordai.net/Pandas is nearly as good, if not better than SQL for exploring data https://pandas.pydata.org/Another tip for displaying in Jupyter notebooks - to HTML() your dataframes to show the full column data https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-render-pandas-dataframe-as-html-table/Take photos or video and convert them into 3d models https://lumalabs.ai/luma-api
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka

    Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka
    Jun 9 2024
    Topics, Partitions, and APIs oh my! This episode we're getting further into how Apache Kafka works and its use cases. Also, Allen is staying dry, Joe goes for broke, and Michael (eventually) gets on the right page. The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode236 News Thanks for the reviews! angingjellies and Nick Brooker Please leave us a review! (/review) Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) Kafka Topics They are partitioned - this means they are distributed (or can be) across multiple Kafka brokers into "buckets"New events written to Kafka are appended to partitions The distribution of data across brokers is what allows Kafka to scale so well as data can be written to and read from many brokers simultaneously Events with the same key are written to the same partition as the original event Kafka guarantees reads of events within a partition are always read in the order that they were written For fault tolerance and high availability, topics can be replicated…even across regions and data centers NOTE: If you're using a cloud provider, know that this can be very costly as you pay for inbound and outbound traffic across regions and availability zonesTypical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas Kafka APIS Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objectsProducer API - used to write events to Kafka topicsConsumer API - used to read data from Kafka topicsKafka Streams API - the ability to implement stream processing applications/microservices. Some of the key functionality includes functions for transformations, stateful operations like aggregations, joins, windowing, and more In the Kafka streams world, these transformations and aggregations are typically written to other topics (in from one topic, out to one or more other topics)Kafka Connect API - allows for the use of reusable import and export connectors that usually connect external systems. These connectors allow you to gather data from an external system (like a database using CDC) and write that data to Kafka. Then you could have another connector that could push that data to another system OR it could be used for transforming data in your streams application These connectors are referred to as Sources and Sinks in the connector portfolio (confluent.io)Source - gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topicSink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic Use Cases Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQMessage brokers are often used for responsive types of processing, decoupling systems, etc. - Kafka is usually a great alternative that scales, generally has faster throughput, and offers more functionalityWebsite activity tracking - this was one of the very first use cases for Kafka - the ability to rebuild user actions by recording all the user activities as eventsHow and why Kafka was developed (LinkedIn) Typically different activity types would be written to different topics - like web page interactions to one topic and searches to another Metrics - aggregating statistics from distributed applicationsLog aggregation - some use Kafka for storage of event logs rather than using something like HDFS or a file server or cloud storage - but why? Because using Kafka for the event storage abstracts away the events from the filesStream processing - taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topicsEvent sourcing - using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or systemCommit log - using Kafka as an external commit log is a way for synchronizing data between distributed systems, or help rebuild the state in a failed system https://youtu.be/IuUDRU9-HRk Tip of the Week Rémi Gallego is a music producer who makes music under a variety of names like The Algorithm and Boucle Infini, almost all of it is instrumental Synthwave with a hard-rock edge. They also make a lot of video game music, including 2 of my favorite game soundtracks of all time "The Last Spell" and "Hell is for Demons" (YouTube)Did you know that the Kubernetes-focused TUI we've raved about before can be used to look up information about other things as well, like :helm and :events. Events is particularly useful for figuring out mysteries. You can see all the "resources" available to you with "?". You might be surprised at everything you see (pop-eye, x-ray, and monitoring)WarpStream is an S3 backed, API compliant Kafka Alternative. Thanks MikeRg! (warpstream.com)Cloudflare's trillion message Kafka setup, thanks Mikerg! (blog.bytebytego.com)Want the power and flexibility of jq, but for yaml? Try yq! (gitbook.io)Zenith is terminal graphical metrics for your *nix system written in Rust, thanks MikeRg! (github.com)8 Big (O)Notation Every Developer should Know ...
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    1 hr and 37 mins
  • Intro to Apache Kafka

    Intro to Apache Kafka
    May 26 2024
    We finally start talking about Apache Kafka! Also, Allen is getting acquainted with Aesop, Outlaw is killing clusters, and Joe is paying attention in drama class. The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode235 News Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) Intro to Apache Kafka What is it? Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications. Core capabilities High throughput - Deliver messages at network-limited throughput using a cluster of machines with latencies as low as 2ms.Scalable - Scale production clusters up to a thousand brokers, trillions of messages per day, petabytes of data, and hundreds of thousands of partitions. Elastically expand and contract storage and processingPermanent storage - Store streams of data safely in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster.High availability - Stretch clusters efficiently over availability zones or connect separate clusters across geographic regions. Ecosystem Built-in stream processing - Process streams of events with joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and more, using event-time and exactly-once processing.Connect to almost anything - Kafka’s out-of-the-box Connect interface integrates with hundreds of event sources and event sinks including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, and more.Client libraries - Read, write, and process streams of events in a vast array of programming languagesLarge ecosystem of open source tools - Large ecosystem of open source tools: Leverage a vast array of community-driven tooling. Trust and Ease of Use Mission critical - Support mission-critical use cases with guaranteed ordering, zero message loss, and efficient exactly-once processing.Trusted by thousands of organizations - Thousands of organizations use Kafka, from internet giants to car manufacturers to stock exchanges. More than 5 million unique lifetime downloads.Vast user community - Kafka is one of the five most active projects of the Apache Software Foundation, with hundreds of meetups around the world. What is it? Getting data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, applications, etc. in the form of streams of events. Those events are stored "durably" (in Kafka) for processing, either in real-time or retrospectively, and then routed to various destinations depending on your needs. It's this continuous flow and processing of data that is known as "streaming data" How can it be used? (some examples)Processing payments and financial transactions in real-timeTracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposesCapture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipmentTo connect and share data from different divisions in a company Apache Kafka as an event streaming platform? It contains three key capabilities that make it a complete streaming platform Can publish and subscribe to streams of eventsCan store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as necessary (infinitely if you have the storage)To process streams of events in real-time or retrospectively Can be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines or to containers on-prem or in the cloudCan be run self-managed or via various cloud providers as a managed service How does Kafka work? A distributed system that's composed of servers and clients that communicate using a highly performant TCP protocol Servers Kafka runs as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple data centers or cloud regionsBrokers - these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layerKafka Connect - these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databasesKafka clusters are highly scalable and fault-tolerant Clients Allows you to write distributed applications that allow to read, write and process streams of events in parallel that are fault-tolerant and scale These clients are available in many programming languages - both the ones provided by the core platform as well as 3rd party clients Concepts Events It's a record of something that happened - also called a "record" in the documentation Has a keyHas a valueHas an event timestampCan have additional metadata Producers and Consumers Producers - these are the client applications that publish/write events to KafkaConsumers - these are the client applications that read/subscribe to events from KafkaProducers and consumers are completely decoupled from each other Topics Events are stored in topicsTopics are like folders on a file system - events would be the equivalent of files within that folderTopics are mutli-producer and multi-subscriber There can be zero, one or many producers or subscribers to a topic that ...
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    2 hrs and 5 mins