My first UniKernel image for sequence prediction

Introduction Predicting the next item of a sequence over a finite alphabet has important applications in many domains. Since I always wanted to implemented something like that, while I was looking for an interesting approach I found this interesting idea based on tree. And you don’t deal with trees since a lot, be prepared because as usual it seams simple, but it not. Moreover, since I like Golang and I always wanted to try UniK, I decided to implement my version of the CPT using Golang and use this exercise as a source to build my first unikernel image. ...

November 30, 2018 · 8 min

Migrations in modern companies: how to expect the unexpected from a real-life point of view

Prelude Disclaimer this post contains references to real problems, addressed in a disuruptive and totally not informed way. Lot of employees were mistreated to have enough material to write this post. What you will read is played by professionals: dont’t try this in your Company. The truth about companies Today every company in this beautifull world suffers the same problem: the migration problem. Yes, I know you got it and you’re kind of thinking “what the fuck?! Am I NOT alone in this shit?!?!” and the answer is “Yes. You’re not. And most probably is the only good news, if it is”. Yeah, you correctly understood THAT’s The - Problem - (of) TODAY, but it was already yesterday and most probably - and unfortunately - will be even tomorrow. And, of course, this Problem - in memories of all employees became crazy for this, let call it simply The One from now on - doesn’t have a real solution. It’s not like choosing where you want to spend two weeks in the summer - maybe it should. Let’s investigate a little bit why 🧐 ...

November 18, 2018 · 5 min

How my Elman network learnt to count

Introduction This is actually a sort of back-to-the-future post because it’s related to something I completed one year ago: I built this Elman network and it learnt to count. What I shame, I forgot it, now it’s kind of its first birthday so let’s celebrate :D This is Elman, the best in class in adding int32 numbers. For everybody who already knows what I will talk about (what?!), here’s the Github repo. I’m sorry for the name, it’s still go-perceptron-go but that repo contains my GoLang ANN. ...

November 13, 2018 · 7 min

ACT-R by John R. Anderson - Part II

Introduction In my previous post I wrote about the cognitive architecture ACT-R, mainly putting together what I learnt by research over the topic. In this post, I would like to go more in depth about how ACT-R works, the concepts behind and try to provide my interpretation of some technical examples, regarding coding of the modeling and everything related. What really is ACT-R ACT-R is a production system theory that tries to explain human cognition by developing a model of the knowledge structures that underlie cognition. There are two types of knowledge representation in ACT-R: ...

November 7, 2018 · 9 min

ACT-R by John R. Anderson - Part I

Introduction I’ve always been fascinated about cognitive systems and all the theories about them. Unfortunately, I never had the chance to actively work on a cognitive architecture: making experiments over these technologies is difficult because it’s difficult to me even only think about some possible toyproblem to solve. So this article is more about the basics, or at least what I found interesting about the topic. ACT-R One of the most famous cognitive architecture is ACT-R: ACT-R a.k.a. “Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational” is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson at Carnegie Mellon University. If you don’t know Anderson, no worries but from now on keep in mind that he obtained a B.A. from the University of British Columbia in 1968, a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford in 1972 to finally become an assistant professor at Yale in 1972. This in the first 25 years of his life. This is to say: if you don’t understand anything about what you will read, it’s most probably not your fault, neither mine’s…and neither Anderson’s actually - it seems there’s a bug in Matrix. ...

October 30, 2018 · 13 min

DRY, immutable, opinionated, agnostic

Prelude As far as I know there are many ways to create today in IT. What is becoming more difficult is doing it properly and taking the right decisions but (spoiler)… But… I’m starting feeling that my repository is on the right direction to be self.deployable and agnostic. Above the infrastructure, which is provisioned by terragrunt and terraform, one or more actor(s) is placed (i.e. Jenkins, but whoever it is), the actors will be redeployed, the pipelines restored and they will start redeploy applications (even pieces of infrastructure with dependencies) on their behalf to the various parts of the infrastructure. ...

October 21, 2018 · 9 min

Go Erlangen!

A little tool for a small city Here we are!! I recently moved to Germany to join the adidas - platform engineering team. This is a really small piece of GOde (:P) I wrote for Erlangen (my new place) citizens ^^ Needs You will only need an https://www.internationalshowtimes.com/ movie api key. You can get one quite easily by going here Scope You would simply like to be informed about new OV movies on air in cinemas from your shell…here we go! The script in the repo provide you a draft to start from ^^ ...

September 24, 2018 · 1 min

[Not completed yet] Implementing a Blockchain using Kafka

Introduction I recently started interesting about the concept of streaming - not videos, of course - mainly because in the last months I collected several sources to be used as starting point: so, waiting for my Google Home Mini to be shipped, I decided to mix togheter two words I often see surfing the Web. The first is Kafka - that is a distributed streaming platform (ok but what exactly does that mean - for real? Be patience, I will try to introduce the tool in this article) and the second is Blockchain (I don’t like this world, believe me or not I think it’s like Big Data, in the sense that everybody knows the principles but nobody wants to deal with the maths): this two concepts have kind of similarity, I guess 🧐 I have a problem with memory, so I first talk about how Kafka works just to remind me the key concepts for the next month, because I use to forget everything I learn - d***q. ...

April 11, 2018 · 20 min

HAL: AWS s3-sns based single-slack-command bot to handle your VPC

Introduction I recently build a Slack command to help me handle actions on my VPC. The only thing you need is an AWS account - Free Tier it’s ok. I recently wrote about how to maximize resources, with particular focus on the number of hours you have in Free Tier - using specific CloudWatch Rules. In this article, I want to describe how I extended my architecture to invoke actions - potentially, all the action provided by Amazon Web Services official SDK(s) - with a single Slack command. I decided to call this slack command HAL because I think it’s a really dangerous command 😜 ...

March 24, 2018 · 10 min

JarvisButton: how to invoke multiple AWS Lambda with one AWS IoT Button (not Enterprise ed.)

Introduction If you have an AWS account in Free Tier, bla bla bla ok stop: I am a AWS Lambda maniac. I only wrote about them (here, here). In this article, I want to talk about my new purchase that is - of course - related to AWS Lambda: the AWS IoT Button. It first made its appearance on the IoT scene in October of 2015 at AWS re:Invent with the introduction of the AWS IoT service. That year all re:Invent attendees received the AWS IoT Button providing them the opportunity to get hands-on with AWS IoT. So cute. Since that time, AWS IoT button has been made broadly available to anyone interested in the clickable IoT device. Here it is! 😎😎😎 ...

March 18, 2018 · 7 min