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Boulder Startup Week

If you are into the tech scene in Boulder, Boulder Startup Week is a great set of events–it’s coming up May 15-19 this year.  This is a totally volunteer run set of events which highlight various aspects of startup and technology in the Boulder area.  You can learn more at the website.  It’s a great place to network and to learn about new things.

I’m lucky enough to be participating in two events this startup week.  I’ll be hanging out at the Engineering Leadership dinner.  And I’ll be presenting on bootstrapping a startup as a developer with a few other bootstrappers.  Most of my short presentation will cover lessons I’ve learned from joining The Food Corridor.  I’m especially looking forward to hearing about Brian and Inversoft that day, because I’ve been friends with him for a number of years and have followed along with some of his trials and triumphs.

Hope to see you there!

Conferences Jobs Technology | moore | | 1 Comment

AWS Questions: EBS

So, more questions about AWS from students (and my own research/curiosity):

  • What happens when general purpose ebs volumes run out of credit because you’ve used too many IOPS?
    • Your disk performance reverts to the baseline performance: “If your gp2 volume uses all of its I/O credit balance, the maximum IOPS performance of the volume will remain at the baseline IOPS performance level (the rate at which your volume earns credits) and the volume’s maximum throughput is reduced to the baseline IOPS multiplied by the maximum I/O size.”
  • Before you take a snapshot you should quiesce the disk.  Can you do that via an AWS command?
    • You need to use whatever operating system or application command is recommended.  You can use EC2Run to execute that command, but you must determine what that command is.  From the backup and recovery whitepaper: “For this reason, you must quiesce the file system or database in order to make a clean backup. The way in which you do this depends on your database or file system. ”  Note also that the quiescing of the disk can be for only a few seconds, as the EBS snapshot process can be started quickly, though it may take a while to complete.
  • Can you be notified of snapshot completion via an event or do you have to poll?
  • Can you automate your EBS snapshots?
  • Does EBS encryption cost extra?
    • Nope: “This frequently requested feature provides you with seamless support for data encryption on block-level storage, at no additional cost.”
AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

Getting the good content out of a Facebook group

I am astonished at how hard it is to get information out of Facebook groups.

The startup of which I am a part has created a Facebook group for dissemination of information of between commercial kitchen operators.  This was easier to get started than a forum and has the advantage of everyone being a “real person”, or at least real enough to get a Facebook account.  It also benefits from the ubiquity of Facebook–many many folks have it on their phones and get notifications about group activity.

However, it has the detriment of being a “walled garden”, with the content of the group being unavailable for searchers on the web.  Some might argue that privacy actually is a good thing, because it will encourage folks to be more honest, but really, anything you put on Facebook can be cut and pasted and made public, so I’m not sure I buy that argument.

Regardless, I wanted to find an easy, automated way to take the Facebook group content and pipe it elsewhere, where it could be reified and curated.  A human could do that, but I’d like an automated solution. And, other than the Facebook API, I haven’t found many.  Zapier (my go to integration choice) only recently released this as an option (in the last few months).  IFTTT doesn’t have it.  There’s no commercial solution that I could find that does this.  There are, however, some open source solutions.

The Facebook API makes it fairly easy to grab the posts of a group, and from the posts, the comments, but frankly, I really want a solution that doesn’t require coding up the JSON parsing/pagination handling/Oauth access.  I just tried the facebook-export tool and it seems to work just fine (though I had ended up having to update the leveldown/levelup versions to 1.5/1.3 to get past a compile error: leveldown.target.mk:114: recipe for target 'Release/obj.target/leveldown/src/batch.o' failed). It gives you all your posts as JSON.

Javascript Social Media | moore | | Leave a comment

Amazon Machine Learning Video and Book

I’m working on a video series and an ebook about Amazon Machine Learning, or AML.

AML  is a great way to get started with machine learning, since you can focus on the key concepts of building and using a model and not worry about any infrastructure.  AWS takes care of provisioning all the underlying IT infrastructure–you just worry about getting your data to S3, choosing how to build the model, and then using the model.  Which, trust me, is quite enough to tackle if you are a machine learning newbie.

You can use the model to get predictions either in real time (with a default soft limit of 200 requests per second) or via batch processing, where you can upload up to 1TB of predictions to S3.  Like everything in AWS, you can control the entire process via a well documented API or from various SDKs.

AML isn’t a fit for all machine learning needs–it processes text that is in CSV format and supports only supervised learning.  There are other options on AWS (and other places as well).

The book is currently in progress, and I’ll be starting on the video soon.If you’d like to follow along as the book gets written, you can at leanpub: Amazon Machine Learning: An Introduction.

Amazon Machine Learning AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS Questions: Cloudformation

So, more questions from students.  This time about Cloudformation, the very cool way to built AWS infrastructure declaratively.  I would hate to have to pick a favorite AWS service, but if I had to, Cloudformation would be it.

  • By default a stack rolls back on failure.  You can also keep any successful stack elements by setting disable rollback to true.  Can you have some elements of a stack that must have successful creation, and others that may fail without rollback?
    • Nope.  I’d break this up into two stacks and chain them.
  • Why is YAML now supported for Cloudformation templates?
  • Can you a dry run of a cloudformation template?
AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

The Four Types of Slacks

I have been using slack for a few years now, but have really noticed an uptick in the last year or so.  (If you aren’t familiar with slack, here’s an intro to slack usage, and if you are, here’s a great code of conduct for public slacks.)
It seems to me that there are four main types of slack groups.

The first is the company/department slack.  This slack is long lived, contains many channels, and is multi purpose.  There are channels for ops, marketing, etc.  This slack is typically limited to the employees of a company, though contractors are also given access.  The main purposes of this slack are an ad-hoc knowledge base and to reduce email.  Depending on IT, this slack may be under the radar and compete with other solutions like hipchat, wikis or internal mailing lists.

The next type is a project slack. This is related to the company slack, but is less long lived, and has fewer members and channels.  It is used for coordination amongst disparate people, often a set of contractors.  May be maintained by the client or prime contractor, also serves as an ad-hoc knowledge base, but is primarily a means for coordination of effort.

Both of the above slacks may have other integrations with systems (CI/CD, monitoring, etc).  These integrations with external systems can make the slack a one stop shop for corporate knowledge and memory, especially if the members are on paid accounts.

The above types are obviously limited in membership.  The next two types of slacks are more public.

Another type of slack is the event slack.  This slack replaces or augments Twitter as a way for people at a conference to communicate.  May exist between events, but is quiescent while events are not happening.  Here channels may be related to aspects of the event or tracks, and the slack is typically owned by the event coordinator and provided as a service to the conference attendees.

Slack can also be an email list replacement.  I have been a member of several email lists for user groups/meetups in the front range, and it serms much of the activity on some of them have been driven to slack (the BDNT meetup is a good example). In addition, I see a lot of new slacks being created that would, a decade ago been email groups.  (Facebook groups are also a replacement for email groups, depending on your audience, but I have found slack to be far superior in searchability.). The number of channels is typically related to member list size and length of existence.  I have found these slacks be on the free slack plan, with its limits. I have also heard of slacks of this type charging for membership.

What has been your slack experience?  What did I miss?

New Tech Meetup Technology Tips Useful Tools | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS Questions: DynamoDB

Here are some questions and answers about DynamoDB, Amazon’s managed NoSQL database offering.

  • What are options for dynamically scaling DynamoDB provisioned throughput?
    • Hard to beat the options outlined in this StackOverflow post.  You can do it via scripting, the DynamicDynamoDB open source library, a lambda function, cloudwatch–lots of different ways.
  • Do DynamoDB streams support multiple readers?
  • How does optimistic concurrency control work?
    • Nicely outlined here but the long and the short of it is you need to make sure you associate a version with your items, read that version when you prepare to update, and then update if and only if the version is the same as the one you read.
  • Do you have any insight into the internals of DynamoDB?
  • How do you connect to DynamoDB?  Is there an IP address?
    • You use the SDK or CLI which connect to an endpoint in a region that you know no further details of.
  • What is the difference between eventual and strong consistency with respect to DynamoDB reads?
  • Does DynamoDB have any automatic encrypt at rest options?

     

AWS | moore | | Leave a comment

AWS Questions: Elastic Load Balancer

More question answered from an AWS course.

  • Does the AWS ELB have the ability to throttle requests, to stop invalid/illegal traffic – if someone refreshes a page 10 times in 5 seconds and I want to block the unnecessary requests from the refreshes?
  • What is the availability of the ELB component?
    • I couldn’t find firm numbers, but here’s an interesting article about ELB best practices.
  • In a DDOS attack, since there is a lot of traffic to your environment, do you get charged for the additional traffic?
    • Depending on the attack type, not if you are fronted by an ELB or set up your security groups/NACLs to discard the traffic.  From the DDOS whitepaper: “When [an ELB detects certain types of attacks], it will automatically scale to absorb the additional traffic but you will not incur any additional charges.”
  • When an instance is decommissioned from an ASG, does the ELB know not to send new sessions to that ASG because the instance is getting ready to shut down?
AWS | moore |

Testing Dossier Reports in Rails

One of the things I love about developing with rails is the vast array of open source, free components that you can drop in and extend your application.  Want an invoicing system?  Way to run your javascript tests?  Simple admin portal?  Just drop in a gem, run bundle install and you are good to go.

One of the gems I’ve used recently was dossier, which lets you write reports in SQL or active record, and then generate them in HTML or CSV (or JSON, but I didn’t use that). One tip–if you want your CSV results to have the same formatting as your HTML results, you’ll want to follow the steps on this issue.

I wrote up a couple of SQL reports, linked them into the appropriate admin pages, and called it good. Then, the app moved on, and at one point, the schema changed. (Some of you are shaking your head, knowing what is going to happen next.) Then, the reports failed.

I had forgotten the cardinal rule–write the tests first. I confess, I wasn’t sure how to, but a bit of research revealed that it wasn’t that hard. Here’s one of my spec files.

require 'spec_helper'

describe MonthlyHoursClientReport do

  # all this does is test that the SQL is valid
  it "sql valid" do
    report = MonthlyHoursClientReport.new
    sql = report.sql
    sql = replace_placeholders(sql)
    expect{ActiveRecord::Base.connection.execute(sql)}.to_not raise_error
  end

  def replace_placeholders(sql)
    sql = sql.gsub(":kitchen_id",1.to_s)
  end
end

This just gets the SQL from the dossier report and tries to execute the SQL in the test database. Super simple, but enough to catch the error I encountered. If/when I get more time, I could definitely add some more tests with some data in the test db to make sure the SQL is giving correct results, but I tend to be pretty confident in my SQL queries, especially when they don’t have any group by or having clauses.

Anyway, happy testing.

Rails Testing | moore | | 1 Comment