Retrospective – This term can elicit a negative response in people in the software development industry (verbally and physically). After all, it is a bit of a loaded term. Looking back can be painful especially since that usually means looking back at mistakes, missteps and decisions we might want to take back. I have worked […]
Impactful scientific work requires working on the right problems—problems which are not just interesting, but whose solutions matter.
My name is Matthew Green. I am a professor of computer science and a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. I focus on computer security and applied cryptography. Today I filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, to strike down Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. This law violates my First Amendment … Continue reading Statement on…
Since we started breaking our monolith and introduced a microservices architecture we rely a lot on synchronous request-response style communication. In this blog post we’ll go over our current status and some of the lessons we learned.
The Bazaarvoice headquarters hosted the July 20th HackerX event in Austin, Texas. The event featured not only Bazaarvoice, but also included Facebook, Amazon, and Indeed. 70+ engineers participated in onsite interviews and networking. HackerX commented that “this was one of the most successful events” they have ever seen. Gary Allison, Executive Vice President of Engineering, […]
I took some time tonight and read through the Security Summer Camp (BSidesLV, Blackhat and Defcon) schedules and picked the talks from this year that I think will be the best and that I do not want to miss. I ended up with these 16 talks I am going to make a special point to see next week: BSidesLV Managing…
We programmers keep cargo culting these wrong ideas. Recently, we said “NO” to Venn diagrams. Today we’re going to say no to surrogate keys. The surrogate keys vs. natural keys non-debate is one of the most overheated debates in data architecture, and I don’t get why everyone is so emotional. Both sides claim to hold … Continue reading Say NO…
Go is a modern programming language created at Google. It’s designed to be a very rational (read non-fancy), simple, and fast programming language. It’s quickly becoming one of the key new programming languages due to its familiarity, simplicity, scalability, performance, and approach to concurrency. It’s the common language of modern systems solutions (Docker, Kubernetes, CoreOS, Hashicorp…), many of small and…
“Challenge accepted” said Tagir Valeev when I recently asked the readers of the jOOQ blog to show if the Java JIT (Just-In-Time compilation) can optimise away a for loop. Tagir is the author of StreamEx, very useful Java 8 Stream extension library that adds additional parallelism features on top of standard streams. He’s a speaker … Continue reading The Java…
I like to think of myself as a coder of convenience. I often tell myself this work is just a means to an end – I am only coding till I can afford to spend the rest of my days lying in a hammock, drinking out of a coconut. But that’s not really true. If […]
Serverless templates added to the serverless framework
On Monday this week, the Prometheus authors have released version 1.0.0 of the central component of the Prometheus monitoring and alerting system, the Prometheus server. (Other components will follow suit over the next months.) This is a major milestone for the project. Read more about it on the Prometheus blog, and check out the announcement of the CNCF, which has…
The package mock-require is useful if you want to mock require statements in Node.js. It has a simple API that allows you to mock anything, from a single exported function to a standard library. Here’s an example: app/config.js app/services/content.js test/services/content_spec.js
Hello and welcome to what will become the most sarcastic post on my blog. This is going to be a series of “buzzfeed” style programming articles and after this post I very happily pass the baton to Filippo Valsorda to continue. And I urge you to write your own as well. @jessfraz "We asked Jess for her top 10 ldflags;…
Security Summer Camp (BSidesLV, Blackhat and Defcon) is the most important week in the security industry and as such you need to be prepared to network like a professional. Here are 6 things you can do this week to get ready: Freshen Up Your Social Media Profiles Is your twitter profile picture 4 years old? Does your twitter bio mention…
We are two weeks away from Security Summer Camp (which is BSidesLV, Blackhat and Defcon)! So it is time for everyone to write their annual blog posts about what you must do before you head out. I want to be one of the cool kids so here is my list of 6 things to do before you pack: Delete All…
Bazaarvoice’s Small Web App Technologies (SWAT) team is pleased to announce that we are open sourcing swat-proxy – a tool to inject applications onto third-party webpages. In third-party web application development it is difficult to be certain how our applications will look and behave on a client’s webpage until they are implemented. Any number of things could interfere – including…
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove. – Antoine de Saint Exupéry in Terre des Hommes As SQL developers, we keep adding more and more indexes to our tables. Every time we run new queries that are potentially slow, a … Continue reading How to…
A lot of people use SQL constraints mainly to enforce data integrity, and that’s already a very good thing. A UNIQUE constraint, for instance, makes sure that there is at most one instance of any possible value (or tuple, in the case of a composite constraint) in a table. For instance: Constraints are also good … Continue reading How Adding…
Creating WordPress Site Visualization Plugin Powered by PubNub with PHP.
Citizens’ Advice has seen a 33% increase in requests for help with UK council tax debts over the last 3 years. This makes it the number one debt issue for the charity.
MapTiler Desktop 7 comes with new interface, auto-save of the georefence, and other cool features.
While doing security research it is not uncommon for me to build and destroy between 20 and 25 cloud servers a week on Digital Ocean. While there are great guides like: My First 10 Minutes On a Server – Primer for Securing Ubuntu My First 5 Minutes On A Server; Or, Essential Security for Linux Servers I do not have…
This tutorial guides you through building a Smart Home controller for tvOS. A user can control devices from their Apple TV.
Another tech meetup is behind us, even more people came this time. As promised, we will keep them coming more often. Miloš spoke first about learning in tech, and keeping up with it. My talk was about SPAs, and how hard they can be. We hope that meetups like this will help to build and strengthen the community in Belgrade,…
Start using the Photon, a WiFi-enabled board from Particle, to send and receive messages using PubNub's global data stream network.
A recent Tweet by Aaron Bertrand (whom you’ve certainly encountered on Stack Overflow) has triggered my interest Or the one that asks a bunch of questions about ANY / ALL syntax, which nobody has used since Celko was still in college? — Aaron Bertrand (@AaronBertrand) July 11, 2016 Indeed, few people I’ve met and who’ve … Continue reading Quantified Comparison…
Apple Watch Heart Rate Monitoring System using Twitter Fabric, EON and Raspberry Pi.
Problem: Design a random number generator that is computationally indistinguishable from a truly random number generator. Solution (in Python): note this solution uses the Miller-Rabin primality tester, though any primality test will do. See the github repository for the referenced implementation. from randomized.primality import probablyPrime import random def goodPrime(p): return p % 4 == 3 and probablyPrime(p, accuracy=100) def findGoodPrime(numBits=512):…
When it comes to cloud many firms are making the mistake of choosing software first and deciding what to do with it after. Find out how to create a clear strategy for your cloud proposition, ensuring it meets real business needs.
To commemorate the third annual GopherCon US in Denver this week, we’re releasing cgo bindings to two compression libraries that we’ve been using in production at Datadog for a while now: czlib and zstd.
Wish media being the biggest performance bottleneck on the web, let's turn our focus to design. This post outlines 3 easy wins for more performant UI's.
There has been a lot of talk about why you should use a VPN on public networks and why it shouldn’t be a commercial one. I am a huge fan of the Streisand privacy stack because it includes and L2TP/IPsec VPN, OpenConnect, OpenSSH, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks, sslh, Stunnel, and a Tor bridge all in one amazing package. The problem with Streisand…
I worked with a consultant using the lair framework two years ago and since then I have been a huge fan of the project to manage pentest information. Tom Steele has done an amazing job with the project but it has been a pain to install but thanks to Ryan Hanson and Docker you can now setup a lair instance…
Build an AppleTV controlled smart home using a Raspberry Pi, LED, temperature sensor, LED matrix and PubNub's global network.
This tutorial guides you through building a Radio station app for iOS. A user can create a radio station or listen to one from a list of stations.
Catchy headline, yes. But check out this Stack Overflow question by user Mike: (I’m duplicating it here on the blog, as it might be deleted soon) It’s a pretty open ended question. I’ll be starting out a new project and am looking at different ORMs to integrate with database access. Do you have any favorites? … Continue reading “What Java…
For our internal search engine I am currently developing a simple microservice to make our CMDBuild instance searchable. The microservice provides a fairly simple JSON API which itself queries the REST API of CMDBuild. Because of the insufficient documentation of CMDBuild I had to dig into the the source how […] The post Executing a CQL wildcard search in CMDBuild’s…
Hallo 👋 Born in the mid 90s I was always fiddling with electronics and computers, which is why I’m here now. I spend my days living in London as a systems engineer/architect, having far too many dogs and listening to some music. My playlists absolutely slap.
One of the tips that security professionals love to give is to use a VPN on public wifi networks. This is great advice and (I personally like PrivateInternetAccess and NordVPN). Recently I noticed nike.com blocks traffic from TOR and VPN providers: That got me wondering what other websites were blocking traffic from these sources so I decided to test the…
A week-long Android development program for college juniors put on by Twitter in San Francisco taught both technical and non-technical skills.
Part 2 of our tutorial on how to build a live dashboard camera that broadcasts using AngularJS, Raspberry Pi, and the Raspberry Pi Camera.
After a significant project involving making Small Improvements responsive, we came up with some UI ‘rules’ that we in the design team or (‘UI Taskforce’) agreed upon. The longer we worked on this refactoring and ‘cleaning up’ of the app’s style, the more we realised the importance of (finally) having a Style Guide. At Small Improvements, […]
In recent times, there have been a couple of tremendously popular blog posts explaining JOINs using Venn Diagrams. After all, relational algebra and SQL are set oriented theories and languages, so it only makes sense to illustrate set operations like JOINs using Venn Diagrams. Right? Google seems to say so: Everyone uses Venn Diagrams to … Continue reading Say NO…
In this post we’ll get a strong taste for zero knowledge proofs by exploring the graph isomorphism problem in detail. In the next post, we’ll see how this relates to cryptography and the bigger picture. The goal of this post is to get a strong understanding of the terms “prover,” “verifier,” and “simulator,” and “zero knowledge” in the context of…
Over the last 100 years we have dialed into radio stations at home, on the road, or in the office to access a curated mix of top hits delivered to us by our favorite DJ. With more and more of our daily activities taking place online, we find our source of music now comes from a mix of our mobile…
I had a 2014 Dell Chromebook 11 I was not doing anything so I decided to turn it into a stand alone Kali box using the Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment. The installation steps are pretty simple: Add a l33t hacker sticker: Enable Developer Mode (this will wipe the device). Login and download the latest crouton. Access the terminal by…
Introduction Recall from the previous post that the Hare growth parameter undergoes Brownian motion so that the further into the future we go, the less certain we are about it. In order to ensure that this parameter remains positive, let’s model the log of it to be Brownian motion. where the final equation is a … Continue reading Modelling an…
A recent article about various ways to implement structural pattern matching in Java has triggered my interest: http://blog.higher-order.com/blog/2009/08/21/structural-pattern-matching-in-java The article mentions a Scala example where a tree data structure can be traversed very easily and neatly using Scala’s match keyword, along with using algebraic data types (more specifically, a sum type): Even if you’re not … Continue reading How Functional…
I've been following the commits to the Go project for some time now. Occasionally someone will post a commit with benchmarks showing how much the commit improves performance along some axis or another. In this commit, they've increased the performance of division by 7 (a notoriously tricky number to divide by) by about 40% on […]
In my latest post I showed some examples of how I ran mostly the same PC hardware over a period of 8 years. Today I finally finished setting up my new PC hardware in my new home, so I can report about what I did differently, my thought process, and some problems I encountered and hacks I did to solve…
Let’s say you want to build a hello world command line application in C or C++ and run it on your Android phone. How would you go about it? It’s not super practical; apps visible and distributable to end users must use the framework (AFAIK), but for folks looking to get into developing on ARM it’s likely they have an…
We are excited to announce a newly improved AngularJS SDK that offers AngularJS developers a better experience for building real-time apps.
When people start creating commercially licensed software (like we did, in 2013 with jOOQ), there is always the big looming question: What do I do about piracy? I’ve had numerous discussions with fellow entrepreneurs about this topic, and this fear is omnipresent. There has also been a recent discussion on reddit, titled “prevent sharing of … Continue reading With Commercial…
Long time readers of this blog will know that when I’m not shilling for the Go language, my hobbies include electronics and retro computing. For me, projects like James Newman’s Megaprocessor, a computer built entirely from discrete components, is about as good as it gets. James has recently finished construction of the Megaprocessor and has started […]
Use the Arduino MKR1000 to wirelessly track temperature data, then view it from practically anywhere using PubNub
For a current project I'm on, we needed both circular timer, and progress bar. Again, I wasn't able to find small library to do that. But I found awesome answer on Stack Overflow, decided SVG is way to go, and wrote Sektor. Sektor is a plain JavaScript library that draws circle sector (or an arc). Once it is drawn, you…
If you are part of an agile, or lean, or kanban development team, you probably do or have done demos at one point. Some people call them “end of sprint” demos. Some people call them “stakeholder” demos. We are pretty informal and irreverent about it at Bazaarvoice, and we just call them “demos” because giving […]
Introducing the serverless service concept in the serverless framework v1 alpha
This tutorial shows you how to build a live dashboard camera that broadcasts using Node.js, Raspberry Pi, and the Raspberry Pi Camera.
I was invited to take part in this year’s Docker keynote to discuss how we use Docker at Splice and how our two companies share the same philosophy. I wrote a summary blog post of my talk. And you can read the official Docker blog post about the keynote Video
With the proliferation of video on-demand streaming services, viewers face a big challenge: finding content across multiple screens and apps. There may be quality information available online but it may be difficult to find. Traditionally, viewers resort to “app switching” which can be frustrating when it comes to finding quality content. With the emergence of […]
Introduction In the 1920s, Lotka (1909) and Volterra (1926) developed a model of a very simple predator-prey ecosystem. Although simple, it turns out that the Canadian lynx and showshoe hare are well represented by such a model. Furthermore, the Hudson Bay Company kept records of how many pelts of each species were trapped for almost … Continue reading Ecology, Dynamical…
gb has been in development for just over a year now. Since the announcement in May 2015 the project has received over 1,600 stars, produced 16 releases, and attracted 41 contributors. Thanks to a committed band of early adopters, gb has grown to be a usable day to day replacement for the go tool. But, there is […]
What do we want? Version management for Go packages! When do we want it? Yesterday! What does everyone want? We want our Go build tool of choice to fetch the latest stable version when you start using the package in your project. We want them to grab security updates and bug fixes automatically, but not upgrade […]
A picture started floating around the internet of Mark Zuckerberg holding an Instagram cutout: People almost instantly started to notice that his webcam and mic were taped over. While Mark Zuckerberg isnt exactly known for having great security practices, all his social media passwords were Dadada. This started a discussion in the office if someone could really spy on you…
This was accidentally first posted here on my Code Blog. I deleted it and subsequently posted it in the proper place on my non-code blog. I’ve restored this placeholder post just so that anyone following links to it won’t get a 404…
Welcome to the jOOQ Tuesdays series. In this series, we’ll publish an article on the third Tuesday every other month 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 variety of other related topics. I’m very excited to … Continue reading jOOQ Tuesdays:…
We (along with researchers from Berkeley and Stanford) are co-authors on today’s paper led by Google Brain researchers, Concrete Problems in AI Safety. The paper explores many research problems around ensuring that modern machine learning systems operate as intended.
Divide and Conquer As Engineers, we often like nice clean solutions that don’t carry along what we like to call technical debt. Technical debt literally is stuff that we have to go back to fix/rewrite later or that requires significant ongoing maintenance effort. In a perfect world, we fire up the the new platform and […]
This is a short post to illustrate how I use the inotifywait command as a cheap and cheerful way to run my tests automatically on save. Note: inotify is only available on linux, sorry OS X users. Step 1. Install inotify-tools On Debian/Ubuntu, inotifywait and friends live in the inotify-tools package. % sudo apt-get install […]
Earlier this year, we created a ppx_let, a PPX rewriter that introduces a syntax for working with monadic and applicative libraries like Command, Async, Result and Incremental. We’ve now amassed about six months of experience with it, and we’ve now seen enough to recommend it to a wider audience.
With more than 125 million tracks from over 12 million creators heard each month on our platform, SoundCloud is uniquely positioned to offer listeners a full spectrum of music discovery. Classic hits, the latest releases, gems from underground talent and the best of what’s up-and-coming – all in one place. How can you make great content discoverable and available at…
After reading the feedback of my recent article about running DDNet, I noticed that people found it interesting how I’m trying to minimize money and resources. I also noticed that I had been doing something similar with my personal computing hardware setup for an even longer time. I’ve mostly been using the same hardware for personal computation purposes over the…
OpenAI’s mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI’s benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible.
While rebuilding my iPad this weekend I noticed that I could name it an emoji. So I named my iPad 📱(U+1F4F1): While I don’t have any problem using the iPad it basically makes it unreachable on the network via hostname. From there I renamed all of my lab machines emojis. Mostly variations of 💩 (U+1F4A9) because I am sophomoric: In…
Over the last couple years, I’ve seen more and more people in technology trying to make government work better. They’re idealists who are also making a large impact. These are people that I respect–some of them worked to fix healthcare.gov, for example. From talking to many of them, I can tell you that their energy […]
I was looking to set up the mutt email client on my Ubuntu box to go through my gmail account. Since it took me a couple of hours to figure out, and I’ll probably forget by the time I need to know again, I figure I’d post my steps here. I’m on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (lsb_release -a) Install mutt: $…
Building an wearable to track different parameters in your body easily with Bluetooth and PubNub. Use Cordova to build iOS and Android applications.
This post describes four projects that share a common theme of enhancing or using generative models, a branch of unsupervised learning techniques in machine learning. In addition to describing our work, this post will tell you a bit more about generative models: what they are, why they are important, and where they might be going.
I have a lot of tests in Go that integrate with Postgres, and test the interactions between Go models and the database. A lot of these tests can run in parallel. For example, any test that attempts to write a record, but fails with a constraint failure, can run in parallel with all other tests. […]
In Learning From Your Bugs, I wrote about how I have been keeping track of the most interesting bugs I have come across. I recently reviewed all 194 entries (going back 13 years), to see what lessons I have learned from them. … Continue reading →
Building an internet connected bluetooth wearable device using Arduino and Cordova. This enables real-time monitoring of fitness tracker using PubNub.
Yesterday at the WWDC keynote, Apple announced a series of new security and privacy features, including one feature that’s drawn a bit of attention — and confusion. Specifically, Apple announced that they will be using a technique called “Differential Privacy” (henceforth: DP) to improve the privacy of their data collection practices. The reaction to this … Continue reading What is…
If you ever had to fix element on scroll, you probably had an issue on iOS Safari (and other mobile devices). Element will usually flicker, and disappear until scrolling has stopped completely. Just force GPU acceleration by adding transform: translate3d(0,0,0); to your element. You will have something like this: .Element-header { transform: translate3d(0,0,0); } .Element-header--fixed { top: 0; position: fixed;…
Japanese Translation In this article we’re going to write a simple 2D platform game. You can also consider this as a tutorial for game development with SDL2 in Nim. We will read in user input, display graphics and a tile map, and simulate simple 2D physics with collision detection and handling. Afterwards we will implement simple camera movement and game…
Intro # Virtualization is awesome. It’s been the standard for enterprises for many years and although containers are gaining interest, virtual machines remain the go-to for any business; you’d be either crazy or incompetent not to go down this route in most scenarios. This post will go through the very basics of setting up and using ESXi.
Earlier today I ran across this blog post on hijacking windows .lnk file so I decided to build out and test a full POC for it using Windows 8.1. To reproduce this just copy these 7 lines into powershell and ctrl+c now runs calc.exe instead of copying your text: https://gist.github.com/jgamblin/4aa897a2cca6912eeea96a12d73d8cd6 For extra jerkiness this will shutdown a windows machine when…
A few months ago I gave a presentation on my philosophy for error handling. In the talk I introduced a small errors package designed to support the ideas presented in the talk. This post is an update to my previous blog post which reflects the changes in the errors package as I’ve put it into service […]
At Bazaarvoice, we’ve pulled off an incredible feat, one that is such an enormous task that I’ve seen other companies hesitate to take on. We’ve learned a lot along the way and I wanted to share some of these experiences and lessons in hopes they may benefit others facing similar decisions. The Beginning Our original […]
In the past, we at Small Improvements have sponsored various Angular Conferences and Meetups. So how did our developers end up at React Europe? Let’s backpedal to understand the story behind that. Small Improvements and React!? At Small Improvements we decided in early 2016 to shift towards React instead of working to migrate to Angular […]
I’ve been following the progress of .NET Core with a lot of interest, and trying to make the Noda Time master branch keep up with it. The aim is that when Noda Time 2.0 eventually ships (apologies for the delays…) it will be compatible with .NET Core from the start. (I’d expected to be able … Continue reading Tracking down…
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