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by Allen Underwood, Michael Outlaw, Joseph Zack
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- Oct 7, 20241h 3m
When to Log Out
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)
- Sep 2, 20241h 58m
Things to Know when Considering Multi-Tenant or Multi-Threaded Applications
For the full show notes head over to: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode241
- Aug 18, 20241h 33m
Two Water Coolers Walk Into a Bar
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/
- Aug 4, 20241h 37m
How did We Even Arrive Here?
For the full show notes please visit: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode239
- Jul 7, 20241h 47m
AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!
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." <!-- wp:lis
- Jun 23, 20241h 5m
Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka
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 manage 10x cheaper than running Kafka Agents 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 instantly Support different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructure Things you won't have to do with WarpStream Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of space Figure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus group Rebalance 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 multiple WarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storage WarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirely Can be run in BYOC (bring your own cloud) or in Serverless <
- Jun 9, 20241h 37m
Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka
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 zones Typical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas Kafka APIS Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects Producer API - used to write events to Kafka topics Consumer API - used to read data from Kafka topics Kafka 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 topic Sink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic Use Cases Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ Message brokers are often used for responsive types of processing, decoupling systems, etc. - Kafka is usually a great
- May 26, 20242h 4m
Intro to Apache Kafka
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 processing Permanent 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 languages Large 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-time Tracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposes Capture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipment To connect and share data from different divisions in a co
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About Coding Blocks
The world of computer programming is vast in scope. There are literally thousands of topics to cover and no one person could ever reach them all. One of the goals of the Coding Blocks podcast is to introduce a number of these topics to the audience so they can learn during their commute or while cutting the grass. We will cover topics such as best programming practices, design patterns, coding for performance, object oriented coding, database design and implementation, tips, tricks and a whole lot of other things. You'll be exposed to broad areas of information as well as deep dives into the guts of a programming language. While Microsoft.NET is the development platform we're using, most topics discussed are relevant in any number of Object Oriented programming languages. We are all web and database programmers and will be providing useful information on a full spectrum of technologies and are open to any suggestions anyone might have for a topic. So please join us, subscribe, and invi
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