Coding

Preamble I recently bought 4 small smart bulbs - the latest one you most probably decide to buy for your smart home 😂😂 I think it’s useless talk about what you can do: I will only focus on the important things. They DON’T need an hub; They support Alexa; They support Google Assistant; They support IFTTT; There is an app, called Smart Life (iOS, Android) But most important you can build your small SPA in your bathroom. If you are interested, go ahead! ...

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. ...

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. ...

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! 😎😎😎 ...

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. ...