As the newest product designer at Serverless, I had to ramp fast. Here's what I learned about keeping developers at the center of my design strategy.
3 Oct 2017
1 Oct 2017
I kinda got bored by the current design. Rotating SVGs in the header ate too much CPU power (oh the irony). So I decided to change a thing or two. First thing was to get rid of the rotation. Then logo got replaced and I added this marvelous font. Header is a bit smaller now and footer blends more with…
29 Sept 2017
Last time I wrote about events in a spring based application I’ve introduced some basics on how events can be dispatched using spring infrastructure. In this post, I’m going to dig deeper into an order of handlers, exceptions and asynchronous events handlers. Read more
Being a Serverless plugin author has never been easier. Take advantage of these awesome new features to write your very own plugin.
28 Sept 2017
Cost Based Optimisation is the de-facto standard way to optimise SQL queries in most modern databases. It is the reason why it is really really hard to implement a complex, hand-written algorithm in a 3GL (third generation programming language) such as Java that outperforms a dynamically calculated database execution plan, that has been generated from … Continue reading 10 Cool…
27 Sept 2017
Product development flow (flow) is the rate at which our products are developed, from idea to deployment. Good flow means that products should pass through the development cycle quickly and continuously.
Please note that I'm not using Jekyll anymore, so this post might be outdated. Update, March 2020 # This post is outdated and I simplified my setup a lot. I'll try to cover my current setup in one of the future blog posts. Original post # Few days ago I got a following message on LinkedIn. Hi Stanko! I'm a…
But I need to regroup and focus on finishing at least one, instead of starting all of the trillion ones and finishing none.
26 Sept 2017
After a summer hiatus, the Jane Street Tech Talks series is back on for the fall! Last we left it, our very own Dominick LoBraico presented on the evolution of our internal configuration methodology and the systems that support it. For anybody that missed it, you can check out a recording of the talk on YouTube.
How to re-wire your brain to learn Serverless monitoring.
25 Sept 2017
I wrote about OTOY over four years ago, in “Today I Saw The Future”. Since then, I have been inspired by the commitment of the founders Jules Urbach and Alissa Grainger to the vision that Jules enunciates: “… to render and remix simulated reality as effortlessly as the web did for text and digital media. … Continue reading "The Render…
Learn how to use the same domain name for multiple Serverless services with API Gateway base path mappings.
24 Sept 2017
Previously in this series: Linear programming and healthy diets — Part 1 Linear programing and the simplex algorithm Foods of the Father My dad’s an interesting guy. Every so often he picks up a health trend and/or weight loss goal that would make many people’s jaw drop. For example, we once went on a 5-day, 50-mile backpacking trip in the…
22 Sept 2017
How to connect real-time data streams from a source and chart the live updates on a Plotly chart.
Today we're launching GPGPU (General Purpose Computing on Graphics Processing Units) flavors on cPouta! NVIDIA P100 Pascal cards - each! They are backed by tons of memory and two SSDs in RAID1. This ensures that you can get the most out of these power-packed cards. This hardware is being shared with the CSC Super Cluster Taito; we can move GPGPUs…
A very common type of SQL query is the TOP-N query, where we need the “TOP N” records ordered by some value, possibly per category. In this blog post, we’re going to look into a variety of different aspects to this problem, as well as how to solve them with standard and non-standard SQL. These … Continue reading How to…
21 Sept 2017
Eliminate cold starts and get from zero to deploy in under 3 minutes with the Auth0 Webtasks provider integration
20 Sept 2017
Let's take a look at the Node.js Process module. Learn about process states & graceful shutdown to write production-ready applications with more confidence. The post Mastering the Node.js Core Modules – The Process Module appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
If you are part of the team managing the AWS infrastructure at your organization, you’ve likely had to wrestle with the complexity of managing multiple accounts for some time now.
There’s this thing I hate about the modern web which is that sites are rarely one giant html file filled with goodies. You can’t just “run a site” locally. You need an npm or a gulp step or a docker if you’re lucky. And probably a local server, but not the one you have installed. Which, I mean, makes sense,…
19 Sept 2017
I wanted to write a few words about the postal survey on marriage law currently underway in Australia. As an Australian, our country and our government do so many things that make me ashamed; the poverty of our indigenous population, the inhumane treatment of refugees on Manus Island, and the maniacal desire to burn every […]
At some point in your career, you will not be happy with just a job, you’ll be looking for something which will keep you interested and will sharpen your skills. Lately, I’ve been looking for something new to do. Since I got burned last time I’ve jumped ships I decided it is the time to prepare a list of the…
18 Sept 2017
"Mens et Manus" (latin for "Mind and Hand") is the official motto of MIT. Lots of schools have Latin mottoes, and they are usually pretty bland. But mens et manus was — and still is — a radical social statement. It says that knowing and doing
Managing complex workflows with Serverless and AWS Step Functions.
16 Sept 2017
A good programming quote captures an insight about programming, often in a funny way. Many quotes are quite famous, but I like ones that are a bit less well-know. A while ago, I listed some favorites. Here are more good … Continue reading →
15 Sept 2017
It’s now been about a week since Equifax announced the record-breaking breach that affected 143 million Americans. We still don’t know enough — but a few details have begun to come out about the causes of the attack. It’s now being reported that Equifax’s woes stem from an unpatched vulnerability in Apache Struts that dates … Continue reading Patching is…
If you’ve followed Bazaarvoice’s R&D blog, you’ve probably read some of our posts on web application performance testing with tools like Jmeter here and here. In this post, we’ll continue our dive into web app performance, this time, focusing on testing front end applications. API Response Time vs App Usability: Application UI testing in general […]
Understand the cost structure of AWS Lambda and related products, and when they can lead to unpleasant billing surprises.
How to build an application using multiple runtimes to supported mixed-language development with the Serverless Framework
14 Sept 2017
Recently I started a gig where I was handed a laptop and told I should take it home with me at night. Now this isn't the worst thing ever but I was already carrying one laptop with me (my personal/work laptop as opposed to the one given to me
How to use Infobip and PubNub BLOCKS to send and receive SMS text messages with a serverless infrastructure.
We’re releasing an algorithm which accounts for the fact that other agents are learning too, and discovers self-interested yet collaborative strategies like tit-for-tat in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma. This algorithm, Learning with Opponent-Learning Awareness (LOLA), is a small step towards agents that model other minds.
Serverless v1.22 - CLI-based plugin discovery, encrypted variables support and new provider SpotInst
ServerlessCLI based plugin management, SSM via Serverless Variables, Spotinst Functions support, enhancements, bug fixes and more added in the Serverless Framework v1.22 release.
13 Sept 2017
This post explains timings in an HTTP request and shows how to measure them in Node.js to discover performance bottlenecks in client/server to server comms. The post Understanding & Measuring HTTP Timings with Node.js appeared first on RisingStack Engineering.
12 Sept 2017
Here at Small Improvements we have 3 development teams. Each team is an autonomous unit that consists of frontend & backend developers, UI/UX developers and designers, so that they can build and ship features independently. In this blogpost we want to share an insight into what the development process looks like in Team Green. We […]
Learn how to write an event-driven serverless application with full local development experience using the Serverless Application Platform.
11 Sept 2017
We’ve recently released an update to the Teamwork Projects webhooks feature and I was asked to do a tech talk on the topic, a recording of which can be found below. This article is a rough summary of the talk with further elaboration of the thought process behind some of our decisions, but in summary: We have a microservice written…
Learn how to set up a custom domain name for AWS Lambda & API Gateway using the Serverless Framework to configure a clean domain name for your services.
10 Sept 2017
In this article I will give a quick overview of how to spot UX problems in your product and fix them quickly and effectively. UX — what’s it all about? Let’s imagine — you have launched your product and are quite happy with it. And then suddenly you hear everyone talk about UX, which gets you wondering: what is UX?…
How to pfSense # So, you’ve decided to ditch that POS ISP provided router, or just literally anything marketed towards consumers and have installed pfSense, so.. what now?
9 Sept 2017
I recently started a job at Microsoft. In my first week I have already learned so much about Windows, I figured I would try to put it all into writing. This post is coming to you from a Windows Subsystem for Linux console! I'm headed to Seattle because I'M JOINING MICROSOFT, at the airport wearing this awesome shirt from @listonb…
8 Sept 2017
Monitor and Debug your Serverless Lambda functions with CloudWatch and centralized logging.
7 Sept 2017
How to use an Alexa for Raspberry Pi, and how to hook up Lambda, Alexa Skills, and PubNub.
To raise millions of dollars in donations, you need a zero-maintenance architecture that never turns a donor away
6 Sept 2017
At Clever, we chose early on to deliberately define the key principles we wanted our culture to reflect. These tenets are a part of day-to-day vocabulary, and we think they make us a stronger team. About a year ago, we asked ourselves: how do these tenets apply to our engineering team? Are there aspects of […] The post Defining Clever’s…
Everyone gets the same set of tools Something that had long puzzled me was the question “Why do some people [in the organisation] have root, and others do not?” It seemed to me that the reason the sysadmins had the root passwords, and everyone else had to raise tickets, was a tooling problem. Giving everyone […]
Designing powerful outlier and anomaly detection algorithms requires using the right tools. Discover how robust statistical distances can help.
When I’ve got some free time I try to add new features to springmock. Lately, after adding some new stuff I realized that double definition parsing class has more than one responsibility (class parsing, naming, definition creation, etc). So I’ve decided it’s time to refactor it and split responsibilities into dedicated classes. Once I did that and tests in the…
Using the Spotinst provider integration for serverless you can run multi-region, cross-cloud functions at 50-80% the cost
5 Sept 2017
Language: Scala TestTool: Scalatest How did we get here? When systems become reasonably complex, tests must manage cumbersome amounts of data. A test case that may test a small bit of functionality may start to require large amounts of domain knowledge about the system being tested. This is often done through the mock data used […]
A blog post from a few years ago that really stuck with me was Martin Olsson’s Browser Engines 2015: Commit Rates and Active Developer Counts, where he shows information about the number of authors and commits to popular web browsers. The graphs and analysis had interesting takeaways like showing the obvious split in blink and webkit, and relative number of…
4 Sept 2017
Last November I hacked together a script that continually monitored your network and sent a slack alert when something change. It worked but I was never 100% happy with it so I spent some time this weekend and rewrote it so that is hopefully more user friendly and functional. Some changes in this version includes the ability to set timeouts…
Challenger brands are shaking up the UK energy sector; offering strong competition to existing brands while creating more choice for consumers
This past weekend I decided I need to clean up my GitHub profile. In this post I’ll write about why I cleaned everything up and also how I did, as well as some initial results.
3 Sept 2017
Hear from accountancy firm Kinder Pocock on how they are tapping into the potential of apps in cloud accounting software to deliver value for their practice and their clients.
2 Sept 2017
On the project I'm currently working on, client's logo is displayed in two versions, black on the white background and vice versa. To make their life easier, so they don't have to upload two assets, I suggested SVG. Alas they can't use SVGs (kinda long story), so I just applied CSS filter: invert(1);, but... ...you guessed it - it doesn't…
If you are JavaScript developer and not using nvm you might want to look at it. Node Version Manager is easy way to install, manage and work with multiple node versions. Recently I got npm update notification, that looks something like this: For some reason, when I had node installed through nvm, npm i -g npm didn't work. However, when…
1 Sept 2017
Node string encoding is all over the place. Let's try to straighten out how it works. First, some very basics about string encoding. A string is a series of bytes. A byte is 8 bits, each of which can be 0 or 1, so a byte can have 28 or 256 different values. Encoding is […]
The SQL language has one great advantage over procedural, object oriented, and “ordinary” functional programming languages. The fact that it is truly declarative (i.e. a 4GL / fourth generation programming language) means that a sophisticated optimiser can easily transform one SQL expression into another, equivalent SQL expression, which might be faster to execute. How does … Continue reading JOIN Elimination:…
31 Aug 2017
Serverless v1.21 - Kubeless provider support, AWS credentials management and invoke improvements added
ServerlessKubeless support, AWS credentials management, new AWS service templates, invoke improvements, enhancements, bug fixes and more added in the Serverless Framework v1.21 release.
30 Aug 2017
I do most of my work in the google-cloud-dotnet github repo (That’s the repo for the Google Cloud Client Libraries for .NET, just to get a quick bit of marketing in there.) We try to keep our build and test dependencies up to date, so I recently updated to the latest versions of Microsoft.NET.Test.Sdk and … Continue reading Diagnosing a…
Kubeless is a Kubernetes-native way to deploy and manage your serverless functions via the serverless framework
29 Aug 2017
Code review is a great process which gradually improves code quality. It is a system you can implement in many ways. In this post I’m going to grumble about one particular way of performing code reviews - when there is only one person responsible for doing code reviews and suggesting/accepting/rejecting changes. Read more
28 Aug 2017
When Google set out to measure what makes their best software development teams successful, they found a strong correlation with psychological safety: A shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking... A sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass,
The first half of 2017 has been quite a busy year for us. With all the features that’ve been rolling out, fixes to deploy, improvements to discuss, design and implement, it can be hard to organise an event that won’t disrupt everybody’s flow. Until we realize that there is never a “right” time. Here in […]
Trading is a competitive business. You need great people and great technology, of course, but also trading strategies that make money. Where do those strategies come from? In this post we’ll discuss how the interplay of data, math and technology informs how we develop and run strategies.
25 Aug 2017
For those of you interested in what what interns do at Jane Street, here’s a post from former intern Tristan Hume, on his work developing tree-diffing algorithms last summer at Jane Street. It’s a fun (and very detailed!) read.
Emit Conf 2017 has come and gone. Here are the key serverless takeaways you should know about.
24 Aug 2017
One of the cooler hidden features in jOOQ is the JPADatabase, which allows for reverse engineering a pre-existing set of JPA-annotated entities to generate jOOQ code. For instance, you could write these entities here: (Just a simple example. Let’s not discuss the caveats of @ManyToMany mapping). For more info, the full example can be found … Continue reading jOOQ 3.10…
I was working on a project recently and was asked if it was possible to stop users from setting common passwords. Using the pam_cracklib module and @DanielMiessler common passwords list it is as simple as these 3 commands: sudo apt-get install libpam-cracklib -y sudo wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/danielmiessler/SecLists/master/Passwords/10_million_password_list_top_1000000.txt /usr/share/dict/ -O /usr/share/dict/million.txt sudo create-cracklib-dict /usr/share/dict/million.txt Seriously
People seem to enjoy talking about programming methodologies. They give them cute names, like eXtreme programming, Agile, and Scrum; run conferences and build communities around them; write books that describe how to use them in excruciating detail; and manifestos that lay out their philosophy.
Follow us on our journey to create a resilient team culture that attracts world class talent to the Serverless team.
23 Aug 2017
How to use Rails and PubNub to build a real-time commenting system that streams comments with no refreshing required.
In September i’ll be speaking about Go at events in Russia and Taiwan. DevFest Siberia 2017, September 23rd and 24th I’ve been accepted to give two presentations at the GDG Novosibirsk DevFest Siberia 2017 event in Russia. High performance servers without the event loop Conventional wisdom suggests that the key to high performance servers are native threads, […]
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC. How many of you use branches in your code? Could you please raise your hand if you use if statements or pattern matching? Most of the audience raises their hands I won’t ask you…
The Datadog Solutions Team reproduces problems that customers run into while they try using our many integrations in their own, always-unique environments.
The Serverless Guide is the open-source, definitive guide to serverless architectures. A single resource for serverless developers and organizations.
22 Aug 2017
SQL is a really cool language. I can write really complex business logic with this logic programming language. I was again thrilled about SQL recently, at a customer site: Writing some nifty SQL queries for a customer. Wondering why anyone would even consider using a 3GL for any business logic at all?? — Lukas Eder … Continue reading Finding all…
Maybe fixing a bug just spawned a dozen new ones. Or your code breaks in such a weird way that you wonder if you really understand it at all. You think it’s time for a deep dive. But knowing you need to dive deeply into a topic? That’s only step 1. How do you actually learn a topic down to…
21 Aug 2017
Service Organization Control (SOC) 2 verifies that PubNub passed a rigorous audit of its internal controls, meeting standards set by AICPA.
The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal is a very important artefact in computing history. If you want to know why your shell abbreviates $HOME to ~, it’s because of the label on the ~ key on the ADM-3A. If you want to know why hjkl are the de facto cursor keys in vi, look at the symbols above the […]
20 Aug 2017
I recently found out about the book Developer Testing – Building Quality Into Software by Alexander Tarlinder, and I immediately wanted to read it. Even though I am a developer at heart, I have always been interested in software testing … Continue reading →
This is an experience report about the use of, and difficulties with, the context.Context facility in Go. Many authors, including myself, have written about the use of, misuse of, and how they would change, context.Context in a future iteration of Go. While opinions differs on many aspects of context.Context, one thing is clear–there is almost unanimous agreement that […]
19 Aug 2017
Unlike the previous tests which have been based on Noda Time, this post is based on some issues I’ve had with my main project at work: the Google Cloud Client Libraries for .NET. Background This is somewhat detailed for those of you who really care about the chain of events. If you don’t, skip to … Continue reading Diagnosing a…
Mod_Security is the most widely known and used server based Web Application Firewall but I had not had a chance to play with it so I decided to take sometime this weekend to build a website (modsec.handsonhacking.org) to test it. Here is a small walk through on how I did it. Base Server Install: I used AWS Lightsail to build…