14 Sept 2016
13 Sept 2016
Check how middleware software functions protects against un-trusted code, and distributes computation globally.
Over the last 3 years I built our startup taking on multiple roles, engineer + VP of engineering + CTO, I’m finally transitioning to being a full time CTO. Funny enough, I kind of always disliked the CTO title. This is probably because this is one of the most poorly defined titles out there. It doesn’t seem to mean anything,…
Now that the interns have mostly gone back to school, it’s a good time to look back at what they did while they were here. We had a bumper crop – more than 30 dev interns between our London, New York and Hong Kong offices – and they worked on just about every corner of our code-base.
Austen talks about the Serverless Framework and the important role our open source community plays in shaping it
12 Sept 2016
Introducing Functions, a better way to do serverless computing at scale with real-time data. Now you can program the data network yourself!
It’s no secret that we at Small Improvements love to use cutting edge technologies for our application. On the client side, there’s no limit, that’s why we’re rapidly transitioning to React. In the backend, we’re pushing the limits too, but we’re currently bound by what the App Engine has to offer. The main grievance for us is that […]
Tavish Armstrong has a great document where he describes how and when he learned the programming skills he has. I like this idea because I've found that the paths that people take to get into programming are much more varied than stereotypes give credit for, and I think it's useful to see that there are many possible paths into programming.…
9 Sept 2016
The amount of complexity a single human programmer can handle is fundamentally limited. Until our brave cyborg future comes, even the best programmers can only hold so much in their minds at once. And the number of programmers that can productively work on a single project is limited by the
Peter Sbarski discusses how Serverlessconf came to be and what it's future holds
8 Sept 2016
Part two of our series on a JavaScript parser for building your own programming language and symbol calculator using Ohm.
Onboarding is the process of getting clients to successfully start using a new service. In this free e-Book, we show you how to successfully onboard clients to a cloud service.
Why are so many firms shunning debt, and should they?
We've all been there - trying to get right font sizes from PhotoShop to CSS. Designers usually work with points, which are used in the print, but not common on the web. They also use term tracking a lot, which is actually only a letter spacing with different units. You can recalculate everything by hand and try to keep track…
6 Sept 2016
Build a real-time voting web app using PubNub's Project EON chart framework and Javascript.
New Serverless variable system for serverless.yml added to the serverless framework
3 Sept 2016
I have seen a few databases recently that could have saved a lot of space by being more efficient with how they stored data. Sometimes this isn't a big problem, when a table is not going to grow particularly quickly. But it can become a big problem and you can be leaving a lot of […]
Every now and then an active java-based project enters a “dependency hell” state. That usually happens because people keep adding dependencies without checking what comes in transitively nor if that dependency is declared somewhere else already.
2 Sept 2016
Despite some bad things that happen in our planet (e.g. worldwide terrorism, weapons of mass destruction easily reached by dictators), if there’s something that makes me really positively thrilled about the near future, this thing is autonomous cars. I’m writing The post Autonomous Cars: A Letter to My Future Self appeared first on FullStack - Ofer Zelig's Blog.
Always try to use <button> when element is clickable, but it is not a link. Avoid <a>, <span>, <div> and other elements. Note that display: flex works differently on buttons in different browsers, but we have an easy fix for that. Why? # You will get multiple benefits - user can "tab" to it, and to activate it by pressing…
1 Sept 2016
Build a freeform virtual whiteboard allowing users to collaborate remotely using PubNub, Firebase, and Google as an identity provider.
You’ve probably heard the term serverless. But what does it actually mean? And more importantly, as a developer, why should you care?
31 Aug 2016
I use nmap all the time at work and recently came across rainmap-lite which is an amazing web interface for nmap that allows you to easily schedule and email scan results. I wanted to be able to share it with a class I am teaching so I did what I have been doing lately and put it into a docker…
Recruiting talented people has always been challenging.
New open-source project TileServer GL has just been released in version 1.0 at the FOSS4G conference and is available on our GitHub.
30 Aug 2016
Introducing Ohm, a JavaScript parser generator for building your own programming languages.
The UK energy sector is undergoing a major shift, all because of technology.
The success of a cloud-based service is underpinned by how well data flows between the firm and its clients. Find out how you can make sure the best process is backed up by a great client experience.
In the last few years, we’ve spent more and more effort working on developer tools, to the point where we now have a tools-and-compilers group devoted to the area, for which we’re actively hiring.
I recently made a 3D Card Flip element as part of my Supercharged YouTube video series, and I ran into some challenges with the shadows. I decided I should explain how I approached the solution.
I decided to move my CSS playground to the CodePen, and this is the first one I made. Idea came to me while I was riding on a bus, and I might use it on this blog, as a part of it's redesign. This is CSS only animation (I used JS to create 50 elements though). And you can see…
29 Aug 2016
This article explains how to build a simple Universal JavaScript application using React, React Router and Express. It shows how to implement server side rendering with React and Node.js to create an isomorphic app.
An Android application with a map that displays Pokemon from Pokemon Go around you and uses PubNub for Android push notifications.
With Java 8 being mainstream now, people start using Streams for everything, even in cases where that’s a bit exaggerated (a.k.a. completely nuts, if you were expecting a hyperbole here). For instance, take mykong’s article here, showing how to collect a Map’s entry set stream into a list of keys and a list of values: … Continue reading Using jOOλ…
Deep learning is an empirical science, and the quality of a group’s infrastructure is a multiplier on progress. Fortunately, today’s open-source ecosystem makes it possible for anyone to build great deep learning infrastructure.
Part two # Update: Part two is pretty much done. Part three will cover redux and production builds. Other parts: Part 1 - Webpack, Babel, React, Router, ESLint Part 2 - SASS, More ES6 goodness (Static props, decorators, deconstruction...) Part 3 - Where to go from here Adding SASS # We will use SASS loader for webpack, so let's install…
27 Aug 2016
Migrating 17M rows with no downtime - Isotope Scenario: 17M rows in a table, constant writes/reads, slave/master setup. If you try to run an ALTER TABLE (especially on older versions of MySQL), most operations will lock the table for writes for the entire run-time of the query. To avoid this, we need to incrementally update the table, incorporating write changes…
26 Aug 2016
An example on how to make blue-green deployment of containers with Docker and Nginx.
In a previous series of blog posts, we covered our decision to move away from a monolithic architecture, replacing it with microservices, interacting synchronously with each other over HTTP, and asynchronously using events. In this post, we review our progress toward this goal, and talk about the conditions and strategy required to decommission our monolith.
25 Aug 2016
If you're looking for a technical internship, look no further than PubNub. Located in SF, our culture and fun team is hard to beat.
One of the first things I like to do when I start looking at a PCAP during an investigation is run it through snort to see if it finds anything suspicious. You can easily do this at the command line with snort -dv -r test.pcap but the output is not great. I have been using a tool called websnort for…
24 Aug 2016
A few months ago it was starting to seem like you couldn’t go a week without a new attack on TLS. In that context, this summer has been a blessed relief. Sadly, it looks like our vacation is over, and it’s time to go back to school. Today brings the news that Karthikeyan Bhargavan and Gaëtan Leurent … Continue reading…
23 Aug 2016
Learn to remotely configure the WiFi credentials, or other settings, on your Arduino MKR1000 by transitioning in and out of access point mode.
Do you ever walk to the bathroom across the office only to discover that it’s in use? Then you’ve got to decide if you want to awkwardly hover right outside, or hold it in for a while and try again later. This is obviously a first world problem, but bathroom contention was getting to be a challenge as we quickly…
Klokan Technologies is behind a new implementation of PDFium in GDAL. It allows efficient reading of PDF and GeoPDF file formats.
Update, October 2017 # I just released updated tutorial right here. So feel free to skip this one, and read a new one. It uses updated tools, and hopefully it will grow into a new series of webpack/react posts. Update, March 2017 # Webpack 2 is out, so this post is slowly becoming outdated. For webpack 2 - react boilerplate…
22 Aug 2016
Join leaders, software architects, and developers in SF; explore how always-on data streams will be managed, scaled, secured, and monetized
20 Aug 2016
This post is based on the text of my GolangUK keynote delivered on the 18th of August 2016. A recording of the talk is available on YouTube. This post has been translated into Simplified Chinese by Haohao Tian. Thanks Haohao! This post has been translated to Russian by Artem Zinoviev. Thanks Artem! How many Go programmers […]
19 Aug 2016
I was inspired last night by Cate Huston’s post, The Day I Leave the Tech Industry. I decided to write my own, except I’m not as eloquent a writer as Cate so before I go any further please, please, please read her post and not mine. Mine is going to be a bit different. Lately I’ve been thinking more and…
how to integrate with an Identity Platform using OAuth and Access Manager, in reference to two-legged and three-legged authentication.
18 Aug 2016
The latest information about the Unconference is now available at the Unconference wiki, which will be periodically updated with more information for attendees.
17 Aug 2016
Over the last 20 years of my career, I have worked with a lot of different people and lot of different teams. Some were very successful, and some were not. I am always trying to understand what makes successful people tick, and what I can do differently to be more successful. Your Energy The one […]
Build an app that controls your home from anywhere in the world using a Raspberry Pi, your smart phone, and PubNub’s Global Data Stream Network
Welcome to the jOOQ Tuesdays series. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every other month (today, exceptionally on a Wednesday because of technical issues) where we interview someone we find exciting in our industry from a jOOQ perspective. This includes people who work with SQL, Java, Open Source, and a … Continue reading jOOQ Tuesdays:…
My friends at DigitalOcean were nice enough to give me a generous amount of credit on their cloud platform to do some security research with so I decided to do the most reckless thing I could think of and run a full ssh honeypot on the internet. The build out is pretty simple, it is the SSHoneypot Docker Container I…
CORS support added for AWS API Gateway in the serverless framework
We unified the site with our updated branding, and also focused on improving digitalocean.com's accessibility, organization, and performance.
16 Aug 2016
Much of the literature and writing related to sofware development focuses on the creation, new ideas, fresh ideas and things to improve in your next project. But when is it a good moment to delete the old stuff in an long term project? Here’s my short rant about this; I recently deleted a chunk of code in my current project…
We’ve hired more great people to help us achieve our goals. Welcome, everyone!
15 Aug 2016
By using a combination of curl, grep, cut, sort, uniq and other common bash utilities it is possible to extract structured data from Wikipedia and compute insights without writing a full program.
Small Improvements conducts Hackathons every few months which usually involves two days of hacking on an experimental project. Hacking doesn’t imply that it’s a “developers-only” affair either; other departments at Small Improvements like Customer Success and Marketing also get a chance to get experimental too. Hackathons usually give us a chance to really get creative […]
13 Aug 2016
TL;DR: No, it isn’t. If that’s all you wanted to know, you can stop reading. Has anybody noticed that Apple just gave a talk about how they secured a master key that would allow en-masse brute-forcing of device PINs — Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) August 9, 2016 Still crazy how Apple went to BlackHat, … Continue reading Is Apple’s…
What was supposed to be one blog post about memory segmentation turned into what will be a series of posts. As the first in the series, we cover the extreme basics of object files and symbols. In follow up posts, I plan to talk about static libraries, dynamic libraries, dynamic linkage, memory segments, and finally memory usage accounting. I also…
11 Aug 2016
This hilarious article with a click-bait title caught my attention, recently: View at Medium.com A hilarious (although not so true or serious) rant about the current state of JavaScript development in the node ecosystem. Dependency hell isn’t new Dependency hell is a term that made it into wikipedia. It defines it as such: Dependency hell … Continue reading All Libraries…
PubNub is excited to announce that Microsoft Power BI users can now ingest their PubNub data streams into this powerful data visualization platform.
We’ve been using Consul for about 18 months at Datadog and it’s an important part of our production stack. In this post we will discuss some of the lessons we have learned.
10 Aug 2016
As the summer comes to an end, so do the internships for numerous university students here at Bazaarvoice. This past week, the interns were given an opportunity to present a summary of their accomplishments. This afternoon of presentations, known as the Bazaarvoice “Intern Demo Day”, highlighted the various achievements throughout the company, not just in […]
Jump into Arduino's MKR1000 and explore its WiFi capabilities, find out how to create an access point,publish data, and use flash storage, and more
Pagination is one of those things that almost everyone gets wrong for two reasons: Here’s why. What’s wrong with pagination? Most applications blindly produce pagination like this: This is how GMail implements pagination. With my current settings, it displays 100 E-Mails at a time and also shows how many E-Mails there are in total, namely … Continue reading Why Most…
9 Aug 2016
PubNub JavaScript SDK v4 is improved with better performance, smaller in size, using event emitter pattern, and provide you easier-to-use APIs.
8 Aug 2016
I usually attend quite a few meetups in Melbourne, in the areas of entrepreneurship and software development, but recently all planets aligned perfectly and I was fortunate enough to go to NDC Sydney – my first attendance at an International The post Observations from NDC Sydney 2016 appeared first on FullStack - Ofer Zelig's Blog.
I’ve recently made an embarassing discovery: wha. I've never used while loops in PL/SQL. TIL :) — Lukas Eder (@lukaseder) July 26, 2016 Yes. In all of my professional work with PL/SQL (and that has been quite a bit, in the banking industry), I have never really used a WHILE loop – at least not … Continue reading Why I…
Garden waste collection charges have sparked controversy across the UK. But local authorities can prevent ‘bin tax’ protests by communicating openly and making the transition easy for constituents.
7 Aug 2016
I really enjoyed Felipe Hoffa’s post on Analyzing GitHub issues and comments with BigQuery . Which got me wondering about my favorite subject ever, The Art of Closing. I wonder what the stats are for the top 15 projects on GitHub in terms of pull requests opened vs. pull requests closed. This post will use the GitHub Archive dataset. Top…
I’ve lost a considerable amount of time trying to bind those things together, so I decided to write this quick post about it, so others could also benefit from it.
5 Aug 2016
Do concurrency bugs matter? From the literature, we know that most reported bugs in distributed systems have really simple causes and can be caught by trivial tests, even when we only look at bugs that cause really bad failures, like loss of a cluster or data corruption. The filesystem literature echos this result -- a simple checker that looks for…
4 Aug 2016
Today we will continue closing the gap between where we are right now and where we want to be: a fully functional interpreter for a subset of Pascal programming language. In this article we will update our interpreter to parse and interpret our very first complete Pascal program. The program can also be compiled by the Free Pascal compiler, fpc.…
3 Aug 2016
This blog post is going to be a bit different. After watching Stranger Things, my friend and I started discussing scary movies from our childhood. I couldn’t help but remember a very specific strange thing that happened to me growing up. I thought, hey, this would be a kinda weird blog post. So here it is. The events following are…
In this post, we explore exceptions in more detail. Our goal is to print additional information when an exception occurs, for example the values of the instruction and stack pointer. In the course of this, we will explore inline assembly and naked functions. We will also add a handler function for page faults and read the associated error code. As…
Multi language support added to the serverless framework
About a year ago we faced an interesting question at SoundCloud: can we build SoundCloud Pulse — our app for creators — with React Native? Is a five-month-old technology mature enough to become part of SoundCloud’s tech stack?
Recently I lost my iPhone headphones. I didn't care much, as they were almost three years old, and I had a brand new ones. But today, while getting ready for work, I found them in the pocket of the pants I washed about week ago. I was sure they wouldn't work, but guess what? They do! Probably the fact that…
2 Aug 2016
For the past few weeks I've been on the hunt for a configuration file format with the following three properties: You can use a library to parse the configuration. Most configuration formats allow for this, though some (nginx, haproxy, vim) aren't so easy. You can manipulate the keys and values, using the same library. When […]
1 Aug 2016
I am at Security Summer Camp this week and you always hear about how how dangerous these networks are with no real proof so I decided to see how dangerous they are*. I built the most insecure docker container I can think of. It runs SSHD with the root password set to root* to see see what happens when I…
Monitoring systems allow you to monitor changes to your front-end code base over time, catching any regression issues and monitoring the ongoing effects of any performance optimisation changes. Easy to use dashboards are a must when it comes to monitoring the state of your web apps. Companies like Calibre or SpeedCurve offer this as a […]
Last time, we saw a specific zero-knowledge proof for graph isomorphism. This introduced us to the concept of an interactive proof, where you have a prover and a verifier sending messages back and forth, and the prover is trying to prove a specific claim to the verifier. A zero-knowledge proof is a special kind of interactive proof in which the…
As well as adding new features and updates, we review existing features to see if they’re still beneficial to the community. As we dug into…
This post started with a simple search and turned into a trove of undocumented knowledge I discovered about finicky cross-browser SVG properties.
31 Jul 2016
I always like to check the new build settings and analyzer improvements of every Xcode release. And this year’s main release includes a couple of goodies. Let’s check them out! Analyzer improvements From the current Xcode 8 beta 3 release notes: ‘Misuse of null’ or CLANG_ANALYZER_NONNULL The static analyzer check for nullability violations supports both aggressive and less aggressive levels…
The author announces the release of "Node.js design patterns - second edition", a new book covering design patterns for Node.js and JavaScript. It includes updated code for Node v6 and ES2015 across 11 chapters and 100+ examples.
29 Jul 2016
Last night, I attended my first Ottawa Python Authors Meetup. It was the first time that I had attended despite wanting to attend for a long time. (Mr. Releng also works with Python and thus every time there's a meetup, we discuss who gets to go and who gets to stay home and take care of little Releng. It depends…
I received this very kind email in my inbox this morning. "David Williams has expired your commit rights to the eclipse.platform.releng project. The reason for this change is: We have all known this day would come, but it does not make it any easier. It has taken me four years to accept that Kim is no longer helping us with…