Blogs|Dec 15, 2021

Azure: Grids, Hubs, Busses, Topics, and Queues… Oh My!

Messaging between application components and devices is why engineers invented computer networks. The ultimate computer network is the Internet, which has practically connected all the world’s devices to a single network where any one device can send a message to another device. For this reason, there are tons of solutions that provide messaging infrastructure to…
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Blogs|Dec 13, 2021

Azure Databricks Series - Part 6
Batch and Streaming Pipelines

One of the best features of Databricks is that it facilitates transitioning batch pipelines to streaming pipelines. Depending on your transformation logic it may be as easy as changing two lines of code. In this post we will review some batch and streaming concepts and show how to write a notebook that can be run…
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Blogs|Oct 11, 2021

Azure Databricks Series - Part 4
Databricks Clusters

This is a continuation of my series of posts on Databricks where we most recently reviewed the Workspace & Notebooks. Now let’s get more familiar with the concept of clusters. Clusters Databricks breaks clusters into multiple categories: All-Purpose Clusters Job Clusters Pools Spark clusters consist of a single driver node and multiple worker nodes. The…
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Video|Oct 6, 2021

Tech on Fire: Kubernetes Secrets

Managing sensitive data such as passwords, certificates, and connection strings for application configurations used to be hard without a secrets management solution. Now though, many application environments provide this as a service and make it easy. Kubernetes is no exception. In this video, we will look at how to easily create secrets and then access…
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Blogs|Sep 28, 2021

Azure Databricks Series - Part 3
Workspaces & Notebooks

Now that you’ve instantiated the Databricks service within Azure, let’s take a tour of the workspace & become familiar with Notebooks. Workspace The above image shows the Databricks homepage of this workspace. The left menu provides the majority of your options (outside of administration). Clicking on Workspace expands to the following: The workspace is divided…
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Blogs|Aug 31, 2021

Using GitHub Actions to Manage Certbot (Let’s Encrypt) Certificates

GitHub Actions is an excellent source for all things automation. For personal accounts, there’s a limited free offering that allows you to run automation jobs. I use GH actions to update my websites. I don’t think I would have written this if no existing solution worked with GitHub Actions. But after a search, I did…
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Blogs|Aug 25, 2021

Azure Migrations - Part 4
Database Migration Assistant Assessment

Azure offers a lot of options for moving SQL databases from SQL Server to Azure. Knowing which choice is the best choice for your database can sometimes be challenging. Microsoft provides a tool, the Database Migration Assistant, that assesses your database to show you if it is compatible or not. And what changes you may…
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AI|Aug 9, 2021

ML & AI for Software Developers - Part 12
PCA-Based Anomaly Detection

Anomaly detection is a branch of machine learning that seeks to identify anomalies in datasets or data streams. Airbus uses it to predict failures in jet engines and detect anomalies in telemetry data beamed down from the International Space Station. Credit-card companies use it to detect credit-card fraud. The goal of anomaly detection is to…
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AI|Aug 5, 2021

ML & AI for Software Developers - Part 11
Principal Component Analysis

Principal Component Analysis, or PCA, is one of the minor miracles of machine learning. It’s a dimensionality-reduction technique that reduces the number of dimensions in a dataset without sacrificing a commensurate amount of information. While that might seem underwhelming on the face of it, it has profound implications for engineers and software developers working to…
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Windows 11
Blogs|Jul 16, 2021

Windows 11 — Initial Reactions and Thoughts

Windows 11 made a big splash with the announcement of the new version of the OS that was supposed to never have another version again. In any case, as part of the Windows Insider Program (WIP), I got my hands on the latest preview version of the OS, installed it, and poked around in it…
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AI|Jun 29, 2021

ML & AI for Software Developers - Part 9
Multiclass Classification

The three previous posts in this series introduced binary classification and provided working examples of its use, including sentiment analysis and spam filtering. Now it’s time to tackle multiclass classification, in which there are n possible outcomes rather than just two. A great example of multiclass classification is performing optical character recognition: examining a hand-written…
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