Posts

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. ...

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. ...

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 ^^ ...

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. ...

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 😜 ...

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! 😎😎😎 ...

Prelude Ok, first of all: I know, I have already used the yoda picture below in the past, but even if I am not at all a fan of the Star Wars saga, I like it. ATTENTION! This is a deeply desperate post: don’t judge me, I’m sad, I’m alone, it’s raining, I don’t feel to have any perspective but there’s a positive thing: I’m still learning. So… let’s divide the complaints by sectors. ...

Introduction If you have an AWS account in Free Tier, you have (updated: March, 13th 2018) 750 hours/month to run EC2 (small ones) in your VPC. You also have a lot of other resources, such as AWS Lambda functions (I wrote about them here and here) and CloudWatch Events. In this article, I talk about smart resources handling and some trick - actually, not so smart XD - I setup to take the best from the services. Attention!!! Picture Spoiler ...

Introduction Recently I worked with AWS Lambda and API Gateway to extend my set of personal APIs and collect information from several sources. I wrote an article on that (if you want to have a look). In this article I will talk about the AWS Step Functions service that enable create finite states machines to easy coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Why AWS Step Functions? Because they let me create a tool to gather movie titles in teather, search for reviews about each of them and make a basic sentiment analysis over the review to help me decide what’s worth watching at teather and what’s worth waiting for on Netflix :D More in general, with AWS Step Functions, you can build applications made of individual components that each perform a discrete function: this lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application. They provides a graphical console to arrange and visualize the components of your application as a series of steps. This makes it simple to build and run multistep applications. Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected. Step Functions logs the state of each step, so when things do go wrong, you can diagnose and debug problems quickly. ...

Much more than a post What is the quantum theory? As said by quantumexperience official site by IBM, it’s an elegant mathematical theory able to explain the counterintuitive behavior of subatomic particles, most notably the phenomenon of entanglement. In the late twentieth century it was discovered that quantum theory applies not only to atoms and molecules, but to bits and logic operations in a computer. This realization has been bringing about a revolution in the science and technology of information processing: I decided to write some notes to better explain, from a physics-agnostic computer scientist’s point of view XD, what I understood - and it is certainly wrong - about Q until now and why I think it’s an amazing field for computer science. For skilled guys, here latex source (and here pdf pre-compiled version) that collect my personal notes about IBM Q platform, in general the quantum-computing world. I was also invited in Verona by the Quantum Research Group of the Department of Computer Science - why? don’t know, maybe the coolest guys were sick 😂 - to talk about the platform and we had a really interesting brain-storming conversation about a quantum version of the Tris game I am working on 😎 ...