Coding Blocks By cover art

Coding Blocks

By: Allen Underwood Michael Outlaw Joseph Zack
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  • Summary

  • The world of computer programming is vast in scope. There are literally thousands of topics to cover and no one person could ever reach them all. One of the goals of the Coding Blocks podcast is to introduce a number of these topics to the audience so they can learn during their commute or while cutting the grass. We will cover topics such as best programming practices, design patterns, coding for performance, object oriented coding, database design and implementation, tips, tricks and a whole lot of other things. You'll be exposed to broad areas of information as well as deep dives into the guts of a programming language. While Microsoft.NET is the development platform we're using, most topics discussed are relevant in any number of Object Oriented programming languages. We are all web and database programmers and will be providing useful information on a full spectrum of technologies and are open to any suggestions anyone might have for a topic. So please join us, subscribe, and invite your computer programming friends to come along for the ride.
    Coding Blocks 2022
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Episodes
  • AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!

    AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!
    Jul 7 2024

    It's Water Cooler Time! We've got a variety of topics today, and also Outlaw's lawyering up, Allen can read QR codes now, and Joe is looking at second careers.

    View the full show notes here:
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode238

    News

    As always, thank you for leaving us a review – we really appreciate them! Almazkun, vassilbakalov, DzikijSver

    Atlanta Dev Con
    September 7th, 2024
    https://www.atldevcon.com/

    DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024
    Interested? Submit your talk proposal here:
    https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/

    Water Cooler

    • How many programmers are there now? (statista.com)
      • Are we still growing?
      • What will it be like when we stop growing?
      • What will people be doing instead?
    • AI music generators are being sued! (msn.com)
    • Curse of the Blank Page
      • Naming things is important, gives them power…but also the power to defeat them!
    • Don't make any one specific technology your hammer
    • Client libraries that completely change with server upgrades
    • What's the most important or relevant thing to learn as a developer now?
    • Do you research or learn on vacation?

    Tip of the Week

    • Curated, High-Quality Stories, Essays, Editorials, and Podcasts based around Software Engineering. It's more polished and less experimental than PagedOut (Github)
      Also, there's a new Paged Out, complete with downloadable art. It's more avant-garde than GIthub's Readme project, featuring articles on Art, Cryptography, Demoscenes, and Reverse Engineering. (pagedout.institute)
    • Travel Router - Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is used to pass the authentication information between the supplicant (the Wi-Fi workstation) and the authentication server (Microsoft IAS or other) (Amazon)
      • Comparison of Travel Routers (gi.inet.com)
      • Carrying case for router (Amazon)
      • Travel power cube - 6 power outlets followed by 3 (Amazon)
    • Did you know you that Windows has a built in camera QR code reader?
    • Guava caching libraries in Java (Github)
      • Caffiene is a more recent alternatitive (Github)
    • Generative AI for beginners - "Learn the fundamentals of building Generative AI applications with our 18-lesson comprehensive course by Microsoft Cloud Advocates."
    • Microsoft has a course for getting into generative AI! (microsoft.github.io)
    • Claude is better than Chat GPT? (claude.ai)
    • How to Get the Most out of Postgres Memory Settings - thanks Mikerg! (temb.io)
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    1 hr and 47 mins
  • Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka

    Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka
    Jun 23 2024
    View the show notes on the web: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode237 In the past couple of episodes, we'd gone over what Apache Kafka is and along the way we mentioned some of the pains of managing and running Kafka clusters on your own. In this episode, we discuss some of the ways you can offload those responsibilities and focus on writing streaming applications. Along the way, Joe does a mighty fine fill-in for proper noun pronunciation and Allen does a southern auctioneer-style speed talk. Reviews As always, thank you for leaving us a review - we really do appreciate them! From iTunes: Abucr7 Upcoming Events Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here: https://sessionize.com/devfest-florida-orlando-2024/ Kafka Compatible and Kafka Functional Alternatives Why? Because running any type of infrastructure requires time, knowledge, and blood, sweat and tears Confluent https://www.confluent.io/confluent-cloud/pricing/We've personally had good experiences with their Kafka as a service WarpStream https://www.warpstream.com/"WarpStream is an Apache Kafka® compatible data streaming platform built directly on top of object storage: no inter-AZ bandwidth costs, no disks to manage, and infinitely scalable, all within your VPC"ZERO disks to manage10x cheaper than running KafkaAgents stream data directly to and from object storage with no buffering on local disks and no data tiering.Create new serverless “Virtual Clusters” in our control plane instantlySupport different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructureThings you won't have to do with WarpStream Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of spaceFigure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus groupRebalance partitions in a cluster "WarpStream is protocol compatible with Apache Kafka®, so you can keep using all your favorite tools and software. No need to rewrite your application or use a proprietary SDK. Just change the URL in your favorite Kafka client library and start streaming!"Never again have to choose between reliability and your budget. WarpStream costs the same regardless of whether you run your workloads in a single availability zone, or distributed across multipleWarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storageWarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirelyCan be run in BYOC (bring your own cloud) or in Serverless BYOC - you provide all the compute and storage - the only thing that WarpStream provides is the control plane Data never leaves your environment Serverless - fully managed by WarpStream in AWS - will automatically scale for you even down to nothing! Can run in AWS, GCP and AzureAgents are also S3 compatible so can run with S3 compatible storage such as Minio and others RedPanda Redpanda is a slimmed down native Kafka protocol compliant drop-in replacement for KafkaThere's even a Redpanda Connect!It's main differentiator is performance, it's cheaper and faster Apache Pulsar Similar to Kafka, but changes the abstraction on storage to allow more flexibility on IOHas a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangabilitySimple data offload functionality to S3 or GCSMulti tenancyGeo replication Cloud alternatives Google Cloud - PubSub https://cloud.google.com/pubsub Azure - Event Hubs https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/event-hubs AWS - Kinesis https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/ Tip of the Week Chord AI is an Android/iOS app that uses AI to figure out the chords for a song. This is really useful if you just want to get the quick jist of a song to play along with. The base version is free, and has a few different integration options (YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music Local Files for me) and it uses your phones microphone and a little AI magic to figure it out. It even shows you how to play the chords on guitar or piano. The free version gets you basic chords, but you can pay $8.99 a month to get more advanced/frequent chords. https://www.chordai.net/Pandas is nearly as good, if not better than SQL for exploring data https://pandas.pydata.org/Another tip for displaying in Jupyter notebooks - to HTML() your dataframes to show the full column data https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/how-to-render-pandas-dataframe-as-html-table/Take photos or video and convert them into 3d models https://lumalabs.ai/luma-api
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    1 hr and 5 mins
  • Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka

    Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka
    Jun 9 2024
    Topics, Partitions, and APIs oh my! This episode we're getting further into how Apache Kafka works and its use cases. Also, Allen is staying dry, Joe goes for broke, and Michael (eventually) gets on the right page. The full show notes are available on the website at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode236 News Thanks for the reviews! angingjellies and Nick Brooker Please leave us a review! (/review) Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) Kafka Topics They are partitioned - this means they are distributed (or can be) across multiple Kafka brokers into "buckets"New events written to Kafka are appended to partitions The distribution of data across brokers is what allows Kafka to scale so well as data can be written to and read from many brokers simultaneously Events with the same key are written to the same partition as the original event Kafka guarantees reads of events within a partition are always read in the order that they were written For fault tolerance and high availability, topics can be replicated…even across regions and data centers NOTE: If you're using a cloud provider, know that this can be very costly as you pay for inbound and outbound traffic across regions and availability zonesTypical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas Kafka APIS Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objectsProducer API - used to write events to Kafka topicsConsumer API - used to read data from Kafka topicsKafka Streams API - the ability to implement stream processing applications/microservices. Some of the key functionality includes functions for transformations, stateful operations like aggregations, joins, windowing, and more In the Kafka streams world, these transformations and aggregations are typically written to other topics (in from one topic, out to one or more other topics)Kafka Connect API - allows for the use of reusable import and export connectors that usually connect external systems. These connectors allow you to gather data from an external system (like a database using CDC) and write that data to Kafka. Then you could have another connector that could push that data to another system OR it could be used for transforming data in your streams application These connectors are referred to as Sources and Sinks in the connector portfolio (confluent.io)Source - gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topicSink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic Use Cases Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQMessage brokers are often used for responsive types of processing, decoupling systems, etc. - Kafka is usually a great alternative that scales, generally has faster throughput, and offers more functionalityWebsite activity tracking - this was one of the very first use cases for Kafka - the ability to rebuild user actions by recording all the user activities as eventsHow and why Kafka was developed (LinkedIn) Typically different activity types would be written to different topics - like web page interactions to one topic and searches to another Metrics - aggregating statistics from distributed applicationsLog aggregation - some use Kafka for storage of event logs rather than using something like HDFS or a file server or cloud storage - but why? Because using Kafka for the event storage abstracts away the events from the filesStream processing - taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topicsEvent sourcing - using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or systemCommit log - using Kafka as an external commit log is a way for synchronizing data between distributed systems, or help rebuild the state in a failed system https://youtu.be/IuUDRU9-HRk Tip of the Week Rémi Gallego is a music producer who makes music under a variety of names like The Algorithm and Boucle Infini, almost all of it is instrumental Synthwave with a hard-rock edge. They also make a lot of video game music, including 2 of my favorite game soundtracks of all time "The Last Spell" and "Hell is for Demons" (YouTube)Did you know that the Kubernetes-focused TUI we've raved about before can be used to look up information about other things as well, like :helm and :events. Events is particularly useful for figuring out mysteries. You can see all the "resources" available to you with "?". You might be surprised at everything you see (pop-eye, x-ray, and monitoring)WarpStream is an S3 backed, API compliant Kafka Alternative. Thanks MikeRg! (warpstream.com)Cloudflare's trillion message Kafka setup, thanks Mikerg! (blog.bytebytego.com)Want the power and flexibility of jq, but for yaml? Try yq! (gitbook.io)Zenith is terminal graphical metrics for your *nix system written in Rust, thanks MikeRg! (github.com)8 Big (O)Notation Every Developer should Know ...
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    1 hr and 37 mins
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Featured Article: The Best Audiobooks and Podcasts for Programmers


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Featured Article The Best Audiobooks and Podcasts for Programmers

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Amazing Podcast with Amazing People

I have been listening to this podcast for years. I love every episode. If you are a developer you should absolutely be listening to these guys. Dont trust their math skills (running joke on the show) but everything else they make great points and discussion on technology.

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A must for any developer

Jam packed (pleasure Jo ;) with great information, with the data structure series being my favourite. I use every opportunity to refer colleagues and friends to this podcast. On my list of influential media, I place this podcast up with Clean Code and the DevOps handbook.

Keep up the great work guys!

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Can't get enough of this podcast.

I’ve been listening to these guys for a couple of months and they’re great. Wealth of knowledge and very broad view of the industry. They cover lots of stuff and it’s obvious they are very experienced and well read. All is done with a great deal of dry humor, too. These guys crack me up. I’m glad they have lots of episodes… I consume them like candy. Or beer… probably more like beer. Anyway, keep it up y’all and nice podcast.

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What a wonderful podcast (amazing job you guys!)

I have been listening to this podcast since day 1
And I've got to say it is hands down the best Code-Related podcast out there,
The content is passed with such fluidity in a conversational, "watercooler" manner, that is keeping you engaged.

It is such a fun and interesting way to start your day, learning, laughing, surveying, tipping of the week-ing :-)

I consider Allen, Michael and Joe to be my coworkers that I wish I had,
and this show is our talk-shop coffee time. (only I can only listen, but I feel like my voice is heard because of that back and forth they are dishing out)

Keep up the good work!

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AMAZING for dev at any stage

I'm a junior developer and I love these guys for learning and broadening my perspective, as well as book recommendations. They inspired me to start using docker and that was a huge help (I avoided python virtual env with docker and that alone is worth the hours I've listened to)

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Great information and fun to listen to.

A really knowledgeable Podcast with great information. The group has a good dynamic and I love "Outlaws" tech jokes. Thanks!

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Night DJ Voice or not....

I love listening to you guys! The style of the DJ voice for the reviews doesn't matter to me, but the content and the chemistry do. You guys are great, and I hope to be listening to you well into my 80s....... LOL! (that's a long time away)

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outstanding work, thank you Allen, Michael and JZ!

I have been enjoying this podcast for about 6 months now. I stumbled across them when they were going through devops handbook. they have been entertaining and informative in every episode.

The format is consistent and engaging with breaks for jokes and surveys. You can tell that they have been friends for a long time and while a bit nerdy, it is not really a nerd podcast. its like sitting around and listening in on an intelligent but relatable conversation.

The tip (tips for allen) of the week and resources they talk about and link to are indispensable to someone like me. I am working into the Dev field from manufacturing so all the tools and resources have been much appreciated.

I even lurk in the slack channel for the extra content they and the community provide there.

This is really the only way I am able to give back and I can't believe I am the first to review the podcast on Audible! Thank you; Allen, Outlaw, and JZ for the time and effort on the podcast, show notes and slack!

-devops.rob

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Fun and Informative

This is a great podcast to listen to no matter your level of experience in the field thanks to the wide variety of topics covered. They also do an amazing job on creating show notes with relevant links and resources and a summary.

The best part, however, are the late night DJ voices!

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Amazing developer podcast

This is probably the most well-rounded developer podcast that I've ever heard. You'll hear everything from deep dives into algorithms, to general career advice, and the finest dad jokes. Come for the great content produced by longtime friends and co-workers, and stay for the incredible Slack community.

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