News Aggregator

Mastering Shift-Left: The Ultimate Guide to Input Validation in Jenkins Pipelines

Aggregated on: 2025-04-28 18:43:32

Successful software development hinges on maintaining a balance between speed and quality. To stay ahead, many organizations are progressively adopting a shift-left approach. Rather than waiting until the end to catch bugs, this strategy emphasizes conducting quality checks and testing much earlier in the development process. One crucial aspect of this approach is input validation—ensuring that the configurations used in builds are correct right from the start. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through how to create a custom input validation framework for Jenkins pipeline. We’ll cover how to validate different input configurations such as JSON files, YAML files, and environment variables. With this system, shift-left framework can catch potential issues early and avoid delays in build and deployment process.

Contextual AI Integration for Agile Product Teams

Aggregated on: 2025-04-28 17:28:32

TL; DR: Not Onboarding But Integration Stop treating AI as a team member to “onboard.” Instead, give it just enough context for specific tasks, connect it to your existing artifacts, and create clear boundaries through team agreements. This lightweight, modular approach of contextual AI integration delivers immediate value without unrealistic expectations, letting AI enhance your team’s capabilities without pretending it’s human. Contextual AI Integration for Agile Product Teams Imagine this scenario: An empowered product team implements an AI assistant to help with feature prioritization and customer insights. Six weeks later, the Product Owner finds its ranking suggestions use irrelevant criteria, product designers notice it ignores established design patterns, and developers see it making technically sound suggestions that are misaligned with their architecture. Despite everyone using the same AI tool, it doesn’t understand how the product team actually works.

Building a Simple To-Do App With Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Aggregated on: 2025-04-28 16:13:32

What Is MCP? The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open protocol that standardizes how applications, tools, and AI models provide and access context. Think of MCP as the “USB-C port for AI applications”—just as USB-C lets you connect all sorts of devices with a single standard, MCP lets you connect AI models, desktop apps, and tools to a wide variety of data sources and capabilities in a consistent way. MCP is especially useful for building agents and complex workflows on top of large language models (LLMs), making it easy to integrate your own data and tools into AI-powered environments.

How to Convert Between PDF and TIFF in Java

Aggregated on: 2025-04-28 15:43:32

PDF and TIFF: Converting Between Document and Image in Java We rarely encounter just one document format in enterprise applications. The longer a system has been in production, the more likely it is that file interoperability becomes a real concern. That’s especially true for file types that sit at the intersection of document and image processing, like PDF and TIFF. TIFF and PDF are both widely used in healthcare, insurance, and legal services (among other industries) where a premium is placed upon long-term file fidelity and visual accuracy. While PDF has a much wider range of use-cases, TIFF holds ground in archival contexts and systems that prefer image-based representations over embedded formatting.

Building Event-Driven Go Applications With Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions

Aggregated on: 2025-04-28 14:58:32

The Go programming language is a great fit for building serverless applications. Go applications can be easily compiled to a single, statically linked binary, making deployment simple and reducing external dependencies. They start up quickly, which is ideal for serverless environments where functions are frequently invoked from a cold start. Go applications also tend to use less memory compared to other languages, helping optimize resource usage and reduce costs in serverless scenarios. Azure Functions supports Go using custom handlers, and you can use triggers and input and output bindings via extension bundles. Azure Functions is tightly integrated with Azure Cosmos DB using bindings (input, output) and triggers.

Thermometer Continuation in Scala

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 21:28:30

A continuation represents the control state of computation at a given point during evaluation. Delimited Continuations is a programming mechanism that can be used to implement various control flow constructs. Thermometer continuations implement delimited continuation using exceptions and state, particularly focused on saving and resuming interactive or concurrent computations at specific points; they often require additional context or constructs to be fully realized. In a 2018 paper, “Capturing the Future by Replaying the Past,” Koppel et al. showed that in any language with exception and state, thermometer continuations can be used. This allows most of the languages to implement thermometer continuations. Koppel provided Java, OCaml and SML reference implementations as part of the paper; Python implementation is available here, where the author devised a way to overcome python generator’s inability to run the continuation multiple times.

SQL Server Index Optimization Strategies: Best Practices with Ola Hallengren’s Scripts

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 19:13:30

Index maintenance is a critical component of database administration as it helps ensure the ongoing efficiency and performance of a Structured Query Language (SQL) Server environment. Over time, as data is added, updated, and deleted, index fragmentation can occur, where the logical and physical ordering of index pages becomes misaligned. This fragmentation can lead to increased disk I/O, decreased query performance, and overall system inefficiency. Running index maintenance jobs, such as those provided by the Ola Hallengren SQL Server Maintenance Solution, allows DBAs to proactively address this fragmentation and optimize the indexes for better performance. By regularly monitoring index fragmentation levels and executing maintenance operations like index reorganizations and rebuilds, DBAs can keep their databases running at peak efficiency. This is especially important for large, mission-critical databases, where any degradation in performance can have a significant business impact. Maintaining optimal index health helps ensure fast, reliable data access, reduced resource consumption, and an overall improvement in the user experience. Consequently, implementing a well-designed index maintenance strategy is a crucial responsibility for any DBA managing a complex SQL Server environment.

Clean Up Event Data in Ansible Event-Driven Automation

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 18:13:30

In the past few articles, we explored how to use different event sources in Ansible Event-Driven Automation (EDA). In this demo, we'll focus on how event filters can help clean up and simplify event data, making automation easier to manage. Specifically, we'll explore the ansible.eda.dashes_to_underscores event filter and how it works. When using Ansible EDA with tools like webhooks, Prometheus, or cloud services, events often come in as JSON data. These JSON payloads usually have keys with dashes in their names, like alert-name or instance-id. While this is fine in JSON, it becomes a problem in Ansible because variable names with dashes can't be used directly in playbooks or Jinja2 templates. The dashes_to_underscores filter helps solve this issue by converting those dashed keys into names that Ansible can work with more easily.

How to Build the Right Infrastructure for AI in Your Private Cloud

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 17:28:30

AI is no longer optional. From fraud detection to predictive maintenance, businesses everywhere are investing in machine learning and deep learning models. But training and running these models isn't light work. They require high-performance hardware, massive storage, fast networking, and serious automation. Public clouds like AWS and Azure offer AI-ready infrastructure, but not every company wants to go that route. Whether it's for compliance, cost control, or pure performance, many teams are building AI stacks in their private cloud environments.

Analyzing “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Failed to create a thread” Error

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 15:28:30

Understanding the Error The OutOfMemoryError thrown appears not because of insufficient heap memory but due to the following reasons: Excessive Thread Creation If the application creates too many threads, it may reach a limit where no more threads can be created. In such cases, it is crucial to investigate the stack trace thrown with the error and reduce the number of thread creations at the application code level.

Java's Quiet Revolution: Thriving in the Serverless Kubernetes Era

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 13:28:30

Along with the rise of Kubernetes, there is another shift that is happening under the hood - the rise of serverless architecture, which is quietly rewriting the way we deploy and scale applications, with Java taking a lead. Java, which is usually associated with legacy code and monolithic enterprise applications, has been slowly but steadily evolving into a microservices architecture and is now evolving into a leaner, serverless-ready world. With the availability of tools like Knative and frameworks like Quarkus, Java has been transforming from a heavyweight language into a zero-management, Kubernetes-ready ready. In this article, we will reflect on this promising transformation in Java and where it can take us in 2025 and beyond.

Scalability 101: How to Build, Measure, and Improve It

Aggregated on: 2025-04-25 11:28:30

In this post, I'd like to talk a little about scalability from a system design perspective. In the following paragraphs, I'll cover multiple concepts related to scalability—from defining what it is, to the tools and approaches that help make the system more scalable, and finally, to the signs that show whether a system is scaling well or not. What Is Scalability? First things first: I’m pretty sure you know what scalability is, but let’s have a brief look at the definition just to be safe.

The Role of Functional Programming in Modern Software Development

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 22:58:30

Functional programming is one approach used in modern software development due to technological advancements. It enables developers to write code that is clean, efficient, and easy to maintain. In addition, programming methods that are focused on pure functions, immutability, and declarative style make it easy for developers to create applications. This article analyzes the major principles of functional programming and their importance in modern software development.

5 Best Node.js Practices to Develop Scalable and Robust Applications

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:30

Since the software industry is evolving at an incredibly fast speed, there have been many developments in terms of frameworks and different component libraries to enhance the performance, functionalities, and features of applications. And the name Node.js has come among the top ones as it has taken the app development world by storm. Just to clarify, Node.js is not a framework, but it is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment that can be operated on Linux, Unix, macOS, and Windows as well. After its initial release in 2009, Node.js has dominated the software industry.

Apache Doris vs Elasticsearch: An In-Depth Comparative Analysis

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:30

In the field of big data analytics, Apache Doris and Elasticsearch (ES) are frequently utilized for real-time analytics and retrieval tasks. However, their design philosophies and technical focuses differ significantly. This article offers a detailed comparison across six dimensions: core architecture, query language, real-time capabilities, application scenarios, performance, and enterprise practices. 1. Core Design Philosophy: MPP Architecture vs. Search Engine Architecture Apache Doris employs a typical MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) distributed architecture, tailored for high-concurrency, low-latency real-time online analytical processing (OLAP) scenarios. It comprises front-end and back-end components, leveraging multi-node parallel computing and columnar storage to efficiently manage massive datasets. This design enables Doris to deliver query results in sub-seconds, making it ideal for complex aggregations and analytical queries on large datasets.

Scaling in Practice: Caching and Rate-Limiting With Redis and Next.js

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

As someone who loves shipping products and tools for people to experiment with and use, it was only a matter of time before scalability issues caught up with me. I always knew what scaling meant and how to scale in theory. I was familiar with vertical and horizontal scaling, and the intricacies of each, but again, in theory. I had actually never needed to implement any of them, as my user base was usually modest. This is until I built a faucet that exceeded my expectations in terms of usage. But this massive traction came with its own set of issues. The TL;DR of the issue was that even though I restricted the frequency with which a wallet address could claim funds to once a day, a user could simply spin up new addresses and keep claiming. This resulted in my faucet being drained frequently.

Reinforcement Learning for AI Agent Development: Implementing Multi-Agent Systems

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

The field of AI has advanced at a breathtaking pace, and reinforcement learning (RL) is now fast emerging as the leading paradigm for the development of intelligent AI agents. You make RL much more powerful when correctly combined with multi-agent systems. That enables agents to compete, coordinate, and train in dynamic environments. This article introduces the concept of reinforcement learning in building AI agents, and more specifically, how to develop multi-agent systems.

Auto-Instrumentation in Azure Application Insights With AKS

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

Monitoring containerized applications in Kubernetes environments is essential for ensuring reliability and performance. Azure Monitor Application Insights provides powerful application performance monitoring capabilities that can be integrated seamlessly with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This article focuses on auto-instrumentation, which allows you to collect telemetry from your applications running in AKS without modifying your code. We'll explore a practical implementation using the monitoring-demo-azure repository as our guide.

CRDTs Explained: How Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types Work

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

In today's post, I would like to dive deeper into one of the newest—relatively speaking— topics in the distributed systems domain. As you may have guessed already, the spotlight is on Conflict-free Replicated Data Types or CRDTs for short. I will explain what they are and what role they play in the larger landscape of distributed systems. Let’s start our journey from explaining what Strong Eventual Consistency (SEC) means in this context.

Key Considerations in Cross-Model Migration

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

With the rampant development and release of AI models every few days, ML engineers are expected to conduct comprehensive experiments with different models to choose the best-performing one. However, this is often not a straightforward process — it requires both art and structured methodology. Modifying the underlying prompts while ensuring best practices is a key challenge that is often not discussed much. Moreover, while it may seem straightforward to simply “swap out” the underlying model and its associated prompt, there are several more nuances to consider — tokenizers, context window sizes, instruction-following abilities, sensitivity to prompt formatting, structured response generation, latency-throughput tradeoff, etc.

Power BI Embedded Analytics — Part 1: Introduction and Power BI Authoring Overview

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

Note: This is a multi-part series exploring Power BI Embedded Analytics. The other parts of the series are listed below: Part 1.1: Power BI Authoring Data Federation Part 2: Power BI Embedded Overview Part 3: Power BI Embedded Demo Analytics Analytics is all about making sense of data — finding patterns, uncovering insights, and using that information to make smarter decisions. It involves various techniques and tools to interpret data, create visualisations, and simplify complex information. Whether it’s businesses optimizing operations or researchers making discoveries, analytics is crucial in improving efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness.

Optimizing AI Model: A Guide to Improving Performance (3 of 3)

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

In the rapidly evolving world of Artificial Intelligence (AI), having a working model is not enough. What really matters lies in optimizing that model to perform efficiently across a multitude of scenarios. Performance optimization plays a vital role in unlocking the full potential of your AI system, whether you are fine-tuning hyperparameters, refining your data pipeline, or leveraging advanced evaluation metrics. This guide, the last of our three-part series about AI, offers insights to help you optimize methods and step-by-step implementation instructions for enhancing AI performance. The first two articles are linked below:

Why Testing is a Long-Term Investment for Software Engineers

Aggregated on: 2025-04-24 20:43:29

In the world of software engineering, we’re constantly racing against the clock—deadlines, deployments, and decisions. In this rush, testing often gets sidelined. Some developers see it as optional, or something they’ll “get to later.” But that’s a costly mistake. Because just like documentation, testing is a long-term investment—one that pays off in quality, safety, and peace of mind. Testing is crucial. It’s about ensuring quality, guaranteeing expected behavior, and enabling safe refactoring. Without tests, every change becomes a risk. With tests, change becomes an opportunity to improve.

Failure Handling Mechanisms in Microservices and Their Importance

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 18:28:29

Microservices architecture has gained significant popularity due to its scalability, flexibility, and modular nature. However, with multiple independent services communicating over a network, failures are inevitable. A robust failure-handling strategy is crucial to ensure reliability, resilience, and a seamless user experience. In this article, we will explore different failure-handling mechanisms in microservices and understand their importance in building resilient applications.

AI Model Evaluation: Metrics, Visualization and Performance (2 of 3)

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 17:28:29

An Artificial Intelligence (AI) model, despite going through constant and rigorous training, may not function as intended. It is important to observe strict and continuous evaluations to measure its accuracy and reliability in real-world applications. Assessing key metrics such as precision, recall, and F1-score allows the AI model to apply its learned patterns across different datasets successfully. Without sufficient evaluation, even advanced AI models may not reach their full potential. The effectiveness of an AI model is evaluated through a combination of measurement techniques, visual representation, and analysis of failures. These include the following:

The Role of AI in Enhancing DevOps Processes

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 16:43:29

An Introduction to DevOps and AI Integration DevOps is this awesome mix of teamwork and tech that’s all about getting software developers and IT operations on the same page. It’s less about silos and more about chatting openly, working together, and using automation to pump out top-notch software faster than ever. In today’s wild, fast-moving digital world, DevOps is your ticket to staying ahead, cranking out products quicker, and always tweaking them to be better. But here’s the thing: as software delivery gets fancier with microservices, cloud setups, and slick CI/CD pipelines, DevOps teams are stuck wrestling with mountains of data, crazy-complex systems, and stuff that needs to happen right now. That’s where artificial intelligence (AI) swoops in like a superhero sidekick. With AI in the mix, teams can ditch the repetitive grunt work, spot trouble brewing before it hits, and keep everything flowing smoothly. The payoff? Software drops faster and works like a dream.

How to Build Local LLM RAG Apps With Ollama, DeepSeek-R1, and SingleStore

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 15:28:29

In a previous article, we explored how to use Ollama and DeepSeek-R1 with SingleStore for a simple example. In this article, we'll build on that example by working with a PDF document from the internet. We'll store the document and its vector embeddings in SingleStore, then use DeepSeek-R1 to identify blockchain investment opportunities. The notebook file used in this article is available on GitHub.

Python curses, Part 3: Working With Windowed Content

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 13:13:29

Welcome back to the third — and final — installment in our series on how to work with the curses library in Python to draw with text. If you missed the first two parts of this programming tutorial series — or if you wish to reference the code contained within them — you can read them here: "Python curses, Part 1: Drawing With Text" "Python curses, Part 2: How to Create a Python curses-Enabled Application" Once reviewed, let’s move on to the next portion: how to decorate windows with borders and boxes using Python’s curses module.

A Modern Stack for Building Scalable Systems

Aggregated on: 2025-04-23 13:13:29

In software engineering, we have a lot of tools—tens or hundreds of different tools, products, and platforms. We have SQL DBs, we have NoSQL DBs with multiple subtypes, we have queues, data streaming platforms, caches, orchestrators, cloud, cloud versions of all the previous. We have enough .... In this article, I want to describe a “basic” modern stack that will allow you to build robust and scalable systems. They are language agnostic and can be easily integrated into most of the modern day programming languages.

Build Your First AI Model in Python: A Beginner's Guide (1 of 3)

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 19:28:28

Artificial Intelligence (AI) brings fundamental changes to healthcare, finance, manufacturing and customer service through automatic information processing and data-driven insights that lead to smarter business decisions. Artificial learning systems and machine learning models power this shift, identifying patterns and large datasets even without direct human intervention. In order to enhance AI models and optimize solutions, it is important to grasp the fundamentals of AI model development and have a basic understanding of pre-trained AI models. Hands-on experience in building AI systems allows professionals and aspiring AI developers like you to refine your skills, enabling you to customize models based on specific needs or requirements, solve problems more efficiently and achieve better model performance.

From Concept to Cloud: Building With Cursor and the Heroku MCP Server

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 18:13:28

I’ve been experimenting with Cursor as a development tool, and it’s been surprisingly helpful in my day-to-day workflow. It’s not just that it writes code — it understands context, offers suggestions in the right moments, and even anticipates what I’m about to do next. When I saw the announcement about the Heroku MCP Server, I got curious. Could I use Cursor to go beyond just writing code, and actually build and deploy an app to Heroku, primarily via chat prompts and responses? I decided to try it out.

Why Documentation Matters More Than You Think

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 17:28:28

Software engineers love to ship. There’s something exhilarating about writing code, pushing it to production, and watching it solve real-world problems. But in the rush to build, we often overlook one of the most powerful tools in our engineering toolbox: documentation. Documentation isn’t just about writing things down. It’s about building a system that others can understand, improve, and trust — even when the original developers have moved on. And when documentation is missing or poorly maintained, the consequences can be devastating.

Mastering Fluent Bit: Installing and Configuring Fluent Bit Using Container Images (Part 2)

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 16:28:28

This series is a general-purpose getting-started guide for those of us wanting to learn about the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) project Fluent Bit. Each article in this series addresses a single topic by providing insights into what the topic is, why we are interested in exploring that topic, where to get started with the topic, and how to get hands-on with learning about the topic as it relates to the Fluent Bit project.

Software Bill of Materials (SBOM): Enhancing Software Transparency and Security

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 15:13:28

Abstract This article explores the concept of a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) as an essential tool in modern software development and cybersecurity frameworks. The SBOM acts as a detailed inventory of all software components, dependencies, and associated metadata within an application. By providing transparency, facilitating risk mitigation, and supporting regulatory compliance—particularly for software products intended for U.S. federal agencies—the SBOM strengthens software security. Through a detailed examination of SBOM implementation, benefits, and associated technologies—such as composition analysis and binary detonation—this article highlights the SBOM's role in fostering a secure development environment. Introduction The Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a comprehensive list detailing every software component, dependency, and metadata associated with an application. By cataloging software parts, it enables organizations to manage software more effectively and enhances visibility into potential security risks. The significance of SBOMs lies in their ability to offer transparency, build trustworthy software, and address cybersecurity challenges—especially relevant in compliance-heavy environments. This article aims to provide an in-depth analysis of SBOMs, their roles in cybersecurity and compliance, and how they integrate into modern software frameworks.

How to Restore a Transaction Log Backup in SQL Server

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 14:28:28

Restoring a transaction log backup in SQL Server is a crucial step in database recovery. It allows us to roll forward changes to a specific point in time. Whether you're recovering from failure, migrating data, or testing scenarios, the transaction log restore process ensures data consistency by applying committed transactions up to a specific point in time. In this article, we will learn the key steps, common errors, and best practices to restore transaction log backups in SQL Server successfully.

Python curses, Part 2: How to Create a Python curses-Enabled Application

Aggregated on: 2025-04-22 13:13:28

In the first part of this programming tutorial series, "Python curses, Part 1: Drawing With Text," we learned how to install and setup the Python curses module, which is related to the C ncurses library. Today, we will continue that discussion as we create our first “Hello, World!” example using the curses library. Creating a Hello, World! Application With Python curses With all of the formalities concluded, it is now time to create a simple program that will demonstrate basic ncurses functionality via a Python curses-enabled program. The code below will write a customary “Hello, world!” message to the terminal:

Unlocking AI Coding Assistants Part 1: Real-World Use Cases

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 21:43:28

Do you think that AI coding assistants are not working for you? Do you constantly get the wrong responses and now you have given up using them? This blog will cover some use cases where AI coding assistants are helpful and will help you during your daily work. Enjoy! Introduction Nowadays, many AI coding assistants are available. These are demonstrated during conferences, in videos, described in blogs, etc. The demos are often impressive and it seems that AI is able to generate almost all of the source code for you, and all you need to do is review it. However, when you start using AI coding assistants at work, it just seems that it is not working for you and it only costs you more time. The truth lies somewhere in between. AI coding assistants can save you a lot of time for certain tasks, but they also have some limitations. It is important to learn which tasks will help you and how to recognize when you hit the limits of AI. Be aware that AI is evolving at a fast pace, so the limitations of today may be resolved in the near future.

Stateless vs Stateful Stream Processing With Kafka Streams and Apache Flink

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 21:28:28

In data-driven applications, the rise of stream processing has changed how we handle and act on data. While traditional databases, data lakes, and warehouses are effective for many batch-based use cases, they fall short in scenarios demanding low latency, scalability, and real-time decision-making. This post explores the key concepts of stateless and stateful stream processing, using Kafka Streams and Apache Flink as examples. These principles apply to any stream processing engine, whether open-source or a cloud service.

Platform Engineering for Cloud Teams

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 20:13:28

Platform engineering has emerged as a key practice for cloud teams, providing self-service capabilities, automation, and governance to streamline software delivery. This practice has evolved out of scaling out DevOps at a large scale. In this blog, we will explore the role of platform engineering, its benefits, and how Cloud teams can successfully implement it. What Is Platform Engineering? Platform engineering is the practice of designing and building internal developer platforms (IDPs) that enable software teams to develop, deploy, and manage applications efficiently. These platforms integrate tools, infrastructure, and workflows to reduce cognitive load on developers, allowing them to focus on writing code rather than managing complex cloud environments and learning the processes to manage them.

Securing Your Infrastructure and Services During the Distribution Phase

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 19:28:28

In the previous article, we discussed how to incorporate security during the design phase of the software development life cycle. Some of the strategies included threat modeling, static analysis, and code reviews. Now it is time to move past the design phase to the distribution phase. The distribution phase involves three different steps again.

The Rise of Shadow AI: When Innovation Outpaces Governance

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 18:28:28

As technologies evolve and become accessible to non-technical users, companies are increasingly confronted with practices that remain invisible yet very real: Shadow IT yesterday, Shadow AI today. Two sides of the same phenomenon: the appropriation of innovation flying under the radar, a need for agility that comes before governance, and a growing disconnect between users and control over their own information systems. What happens when employees get a head start on their own IT department?

Simplifying Vector Embeddings With Go, Cosmos DB, and OpenAI

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 17:13:28

When working on applications that require vector, semantic, or similarity search, it's often useful to have a quick and easy way to create vector embeddings of data and save them in a vector database for further querying. This blog will walk you through a simple web application that allows you to quickly generate vector embeddings for various document types and store them directly in Azure Cosmos DB. Once stored, this data can be leveraged by other applications for tasks like vector search, part of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) workflow, and more.

Python curses, Part 1: Drawing With Text

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 16:28:28

Most user interaction with Linux is done from afar via SSH connections and console applications. This, of course, is the continuing legacy of Linux’s “text only” roots, and many of these console applications tend to be “boring” workhorses which spit out line after line of output, with the occasional user input breaking up the monotony. However, there is no reason console applications cannot be “spiced up” with windowed interfaces that feature colors, formatted text, and text placed — and updated‚ at various locations in a terminal window.

AI Interview Analysis

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 15:13:28

TL, DR: AI Interview Analysis When you step into a new role as Scrum Master or agile coach for a team under pressure, you’re immediately confronted with a challenging reality: you need to understand the complex dynamics at play, but have limited time to process all the available information. This article explores how AI interview analysis can be a powerful sense-making tool for agile practitioners who need to quickly synthesize unstructured, qualitative data, particularly when joining a team mid-crisis.

Thumbnail Generator Microservice for PDF in Spring Boot

Aggregated on: 2025-04-21 14:28:28

In this article, we will delve into converting a PDF to individual PNG image files for each page. Typically, if we have a PDF document shared with our customers and need to preview the first page for users in push notifications, this article will help us create a preview thumbnail image from the PDF document. In this article, we will cover the Spring microservice for converting PDF documents to PNG images.

Distributed Systems 101

Aggregated on: 2025-04-18 19:13:26

Distributed systems are all around us: Facebook, Uber, Revolut — even the Google search engine is one of them. One search in Google can trigger tens (or hundreds) of calls to different microservices owned by Google. What is more, they are the core of what we work with: multiple services working together, or maybe a database, or just a service or two with some cache layer, or even some service that connects via an async message queue.

Vision AI on Apple Silicon: A Practical Guide to MLX-VLM

Aggregated on: 2025-04-18 18:28:26

Vision AI models have traditionally required significant computational resources and complex setups to run effectively. However, with Apple's MLX framework and the emergence of efficient vision-language models, Mac users can now harness the power of advanced AI vision capabilities right on their machines. In this tutorial, we'll explore how to implement vision models using MLX-VLM, a library that leverages Apple's native Metal framework for optimal performance on Apple Silicon.

Docs That Write Themselves: Scaling With gRPC and Protobuf

Aggregated on: 2025-04-18 16:13:26

In this article, we’ll explore how gRPC and code generation can help you: Write documentation that people actually read and use, Standardize communication between microservices, Avoid code duplication across services. Nowadays, many developers are already familiar with gRPC. It’s no longer surprising that service-related teams prefer it for inter-service communication and even for documentation purposes.

Is the Model Context Protocol a Replacement for HTTP?

Aggregated on: 2025-04-18 14:28:26

With the rise of AI-native applications and agentic systems, a community of developers is being introduced to new techniques, abstractions, and architectural patterns that didn’t exist a few years ago. One term gaining traction — especially in the LLM and Generative AI ecosystem — is the Model Context Protocol. With its rise and attention, it's also generating confusion and raising the following question:

Zero Trust Isn't Just for Networks: Applying Zero-Trust Principles to CI/CD Pipelines

Aggregated on: 2025-04-18 12:28:26

Zero trust has emerged as a cornerstone of modern enterprise security. It is mainly applied to networks, user identities, and endpoints of most organizations. However, the single layer left undersecured is the CI/CD pipeline. These systems orchestrate code validation for production deployment and do so with persistent credentials and system privileges. This contradiction is fundamentally inconsistent with the rest of the zero-trust model, in which, by default, there should be no trust in any service, identity, or connection. But in our environment, we realized that our pipelines had been quietly left out of security scrutiny. Jobs had long-lived secrets, and build containers were reused. The amount of access reached a level beyond what should be expected for any single job. We recognized these risks, and so we deemed that our pipelines should be treated as untrusted by default. This decision radically altered how we would approach automation and access.