Coding

Introduction In this article I will talk about my experience with AWS Lambda + API Gateway, GoLang (of course) and Grafana to build a sentiment analysis tool over customizable topics. Who should you read this post? Don’t know, maybe a CIO, a CTO, a CEO, a generic Chief or a MasterChef, for sure an AWS and GoLang fan like me. First of all: to better understand how to use Elasticsearch, read my previous post Elasticsearch over My home Network Attached Storage: it’s not so exciting as it seems, but you will have a general idea about what is Elasticsearch and how can you use it. Second: if you don’t know about AWS Lambda, study it. I personally believe that it represents one of the most interesting services currently offered by AWS: as they state, AWS Lambda lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers. You pay only for the compute time you consume and there is no charge when your code is not running. The amazing thing is that with a Free Tier trial you have 1 milions requests for free - O.O - to run code of any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration: you just upload your code - unfortunately the online editor for GoLang is not supported yet - and AWS Lambda1 takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can even set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services - as I have done with API Gateway - or call it directly from any web or mobile app. And…last but definetly not the least, why I’m writing this post!? Because starting from 15 January 2018, AWS Lambda support GoLang!!! ...

Introduction In the last months, I worked a lot with GoLang on several projects. Although I’m certainly not an expert, there are several things that I really appreciate about this language: first, it has a clear and simple syntax, and more than once I noticed that the style of the Github developers is very close to the style used in old C programs. From a theoretical point of view, GoLang seems to take the best of all worlds: there is the power of high-level languages, made simple by clear rules - even if sometime they are a little bit binding - that can impose a solid logic to the code. There is the simplicity of the imperative style, made of primitive types with the size in bits in their name, but without the boredom of manipulating strings as array of characters. However, two really useful and interesting features in my opinion are the goroutine and the channels. ...

Introduction I always owned a lot of hard drives: I don’t know why, I always used and still use to look for space to save my data. In the years, I started using disks, then I assembled a HP Proliant to be a Synology Based System - I don’t want to go the cloud because I’m stupid - and… in the last week, I decided to make order in a huge amount of files. The first thing you have to do when you are handling terabytes and terabytes of both well-ordered and no-ordered-at-all data is literaly pray that someone else, like a magician, or druid comes to you with a magic wand and fixes all the mess for free, in a way you do not know but you will like. This article is the right one if you don’t want to pray, you really don’t believe in miracle but you still need to order your stuff. I have done it using elastisearch and kibana! ...

A beautiful childhood I’ve never been a fan of videogames, neither as a child nor today: do not get me wrong, as many guys of my generation I also owned and played with the legendary PlayStation 1 (1995)1 and PlayStation 22 by Sony and the Nintendo Game Boy3. It was fun, but not so much as playing to videogames born a few years before I was born. In the 80s, there were not yet the powerful graphics chips that today can be found with a few hundred euros. How did the videogames work? It’s simple: without graphics. There were many textual games and in my opinion, for many vintage lovers, they would still be cool today. My generation has lost this advantage of literaly building with fantasy the world around a game. So, some days ago I found my self thinking back to Sheldoon Cooper that plays with the game Dungeon in the Big Bang Theory4, or to the kids of Stranger Things by Netflix, or to my father, to whom I gave an original Playstation 1 with the first TombRaider(s), and I asked myself how it would be possible today to play again one of those text games that were so popular in that decade…to the point of deciding to create one of my own. ...

Merry Christmas by nerds Here we are!! Christmas holidays are coming and it’s time to collect nerd greetings for nerd friends! In this article I have collected some of my favorites: starting from css to the most unhealthy c code in the world, I hope you enjoy these repositories / snippets / gist / sketch! Best wishes for happy holidays! CSS While I was looking for some cool css stuff to share with you, I found this fantastic gist that show the kind of magic a web expert can do with a bunch of css lines. Riddle: what do you see if you use IE as a browser? The answer after the preview! ...

The Doomsday rule A few months ago I came across the name of J. H. Conway: you’re wondering who the hell he is. Well, Conway is an English mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He has also contributed to many branches of recreational mathematics and he is the invention of the Game of Life. Ah, I was forgetting one last thing: he is currently Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University in New Jersey1. Ok. let’s respect this guy but…what would I talk to you about? Well, in this article I will talk about a magic trick: the Doomsday rule. ...

Predix Machine and how to configure them In September, waiting for a contract proposal from the company where I currently work, I wrote a tool for the (more or less) automatic configuration of Predix© Machine. Predix©1 is the platform created by GE for Industry 4.0, powered by CloudFoundry2, to securely connect machines, data, and analytics to improve operational efficiency, help you develop, deploy, and operate industrial apps at the edge and in the cloud. As part of my internship I worked with the predix machine and I shared my work to the GE platform. GE mantains an open repository with predix tool ...