We dive back into Designing Data-Intensive Applications to learn more about replication while Michael thinks cluster is a three syllable word, Allen doesn’t understand how we roll, and Joe isn’t even paying attention. For those that like to read these show notes via their podcast player, we like to include a handy link to get to the full version of these notes so that you can participate in the conversation at&nbsp;. Sponsors  &nbsp;– &nbsp;Sign up today for a free 14 day trial&nbsp;and&nbsp;get a free Datadog t-shirt after creating your first dashboard. &nbsp;– Sign up for $100 in free credit and simplify your infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines. &nbsp;– Learn in-demand tech skills with hands-on courses using live developer environments. Visit&nbsp;&nbsp;to get an additional 10% off an Educative Unlimited annual subscription.  Survey Says          How important is it to learn advanced programming techniques?    Take the survey at: .       News  Thank you to everyone that left us a new review:  Audible: Ashfisch, Anonymous User (aka András)     The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair Douglas Adams Douglas Adams  In this episode, we are discussing Data Replication, from chapter 5 of “Designing Data-Intensive Applications”. Replication in Distributed Systems  When we talk about replication, we are talking about keeping copies of the same data on multiple machines connected by a network For this episode, we’re talking about data small enough that it can fit on a single machine Why would you want to replicate data?  Keeping data close to where it’s used Increase availability Increase throughput by allowing more access to the data   Data that doesn’t change is easy, you just copy it 3 popular algorithms  Single Leader Multi-Leader Leaderless   Well established (1970’s!) algorithms for dealing with syncing data, but a lot data applications haven’t needed replication so the practical applications are still evolving  Cluster&nbsp;group of computers that make up our data system Node&nbsp;each computer in the cluster (whether it has data or not) Replica&nbsp;each node that has a copy of the database   Every write to the database needs to be copied to every replica The most common approach is “leader based replication”, two of the algorithms we mentioned apply One of the nodes is designated as the “leader”, all writes must go to the leader The leader writes the data locally, then sends to data to it’s followers via a “replication log” or “change stream” The followers tail this log and apply the changes in the same order as the leader Reads can be made from any of the replicas This is a common feature of many databases, Postgres, Mongo, it’s common for queues and some file systems as well  Synchronous vs Asynchronous Writes  How does a distributed system determine that a write is complete? The system could hang on till all replicas are updated, favoring consistency…this is slow, potentially a big problem if one of the replicas is unavailable The system could confirm receipt to the writer immediately, trusting that replicas will eventually keep up… this favors availability, but your chances for incorrectness increase You could do a hybrid, wait for x replicas to confirm and call it a quorum All of this is related to the CAP theorem…you get at most two: Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance  Site Note: Can you ever have Consistent/Available databases?&nbsp;   The book mentions “chain replication” and other variants, but those are still rare  Example: Chain replication in Mongo:&nbsp;    Steps for Adding New Followers  Take a consistent snapshot of the leader at some point in time (most db can do this without any sort of lock) Copy the snapshot to the new follower The follower...

Designing Data-Intensive Applications – Single Leader Replication

With Game Ja-Ja-Ja-Jamuary coming up, we discuss what makes a game&nbsp;engine, while Michael’s impersonation is spot-on, Allen may really just be Michael, and Joe already has the title of his next podcast show at the ready. The full show notes for this episode are available at&nbsp;. Sponsors  &nbsp;– Sign up for $100 in free credit and simplify your infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines.  Survey Says          What's your container management of choice? Take the survey at: .           Game Jam ’22 is coming up in&nbsp;Ja-Ja-Ja-Jamuary News  Thanks for the reviews!  Podchaser: Jamie Introcaso   Game Ja-Ja-Ja-Jamuary is coming up, sign up is open now! ()  What is a Game Engine?  What’s a…  Library, Framework, Toolkit, … Engine?   Want to see terrible explanations of a thing? Google “framework vs engine”. Other types of engines: storage engine, rendering engine, for example.  Q: Why do people use game engines? Well, they reduce costs, complexities, and time-to-market. Consistency! Q: Why do so many AAA games create their own custom engines? Common Features of Game Engines  2D/3D rendering engine  Basic shapes (planes, spheres, lines), Particles, Shaders, Masking/Culling, Progressive enhancement (either by distance or by some other means)   Physics engine  Collision detection,   Mass, Gravity, Torque, Force, Friction, Springiness, Fluid Dynamics, Wind   Sound  Multiple sounds at once, looping, spatial settings, etc.   Scripting AI Networking  Ever thought about how this works? Peer to peer, dedicated servers?   Streaming  Streaming assets, as in, the player hasn’t installed your game.   Scene Management Cinematics UI Often engines also include development tools to making working with these various systems easier … like an IDE.  Some Really Cool Things About Unity  Asset Store and Package Management, ProBuilder (), Terrain, Animation Manager, Ad Systems and Analytics, Target multiple platforms: Xbox, Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS, iOS, PSX, Switch, etc.  About the Industry  How big is the industry?  $150B in 2019, estimated $250B for 2025 () How does it compare to other industries?  Movies are $41B, Books are $25B, Netflix is $7B … that’s about half of Nintendo, HBO is $2B     How many companies and employees?  2,457 companies and 220k jobs … in 2015! ()   What’s the breakdown on sales?  Mobile $90B, PC $35B, console $49B ()   How many games released in a year?  About 10k a year, on Steam ()   How long does it take? 1 – 10 years? The 10 Best Games Made By Just One Person&nbsp;()  Commentary on Popular Game Engines Unity  Publish for 20+ platforms 50% of games are made with Unity () List of Unity games () Pricing range: Free to $2,400. You can use the free plan if revenue or funding is less than $100k! Program in C# Great learning resources ()  Unreal  Many AAA games built with Unreal. Basically think of the top 10 biggest, most beautiful, AAA games; those are probably all Unreal or custom (RAGE, Frostbyte, Last of Us) Pricing: from free to “call for pricing”, 5% royalty after $1mm List of Unreal Engine games () Originally came out of the Unreal series of games, and a new one is coming out soon! () Program in C++  Godot  Open Source Growing in popularity You can program in a variety of languages, officially C/C++ and GDScript but there are other bindings ()  Custom Game Engines:  GameMaker RPG Maker Specialized: Frostbyte, Cryo, etc. Korge libGDX   Final Question Game Jam sign-up is live … what are you thinking for technology and mechanics?  Allen: VR / Escape Room Michael: Something web based Joe: Going 3D, wanting to focus on level design and physics this time  Resources We Like  Splitgate, where&nbsp;Halo&nbsp;meets&nbsp;Portal&nbsp;() Mythic Quest&nbsp;() What’s wrong with TikTok?&nbsp;() Blood, Sweat, and Pixels&nbsp;by Jason Schreier ()  Tip of the Week  ProBuilder is a free tool available in Unity that is great for making polygons and great for mocking out levels or...

What is a Game Engine?

Full episode show notes can be found at:  &nbsp;

Llama 3 is Here, Spending Time on Environmental Setup and More

Reviews    iTunes: ivan.kuchin    News   Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024    Topics    People trying to remove their answers from StackOverflow to not allow OpenAI to use their answers without permission/recognition?   &nbsp;  Obfuscate data dumps with PostgreSQL   &nbsp;  Kotlin Coroutines     &nbsp;  Reminded Outlaw of the Cloudflare Workers we mentioned a while back     Please leave us a review!     You can control if YouTube keeps track of your history (at least that you can see)  &nbsp;  100 Things You Didn't Know About Kubernetes   &nbsp;  Do the IDE AI's really make you more productive?    Random Bits    Tesla Las Vegas Loop   &nbsp;  What actually happens when you overfill the oil in a vehicle?   &nbsp;  Fisker Ocean totalled after a $900 door ding...really   &nbsp;  A Ford Mustang painted with the blackest black paint available     Tip of the Week   Docker Blog is pretty excellent        Car Research    Car reliability information   &nbsp;  Actual problems logged with car models by year   &nbsp;  Great search engine for finding cars and more metadata about the listing like how long the car has been listed     Utilizing wood sheet goods by utilizing cut lists        Docker's chicken-n-egg problem    Use a multi-stage Dockerfile where an earlier stage has the tools you need  &nbsp;  Manually dearmor a PGP public key (Hint: it's the opposite of:&nbsp;)    Download the file using the server suggested name With wget ... --content-disposition    Wth curl ... -JO -J, --remote-header-name -O, --remote-name

StackOverflow AI Disagreements, Kotlin Coroutines and More

We finally start talking about Apache Kafka! Also, Allen is getting acquainted with Aesop, Outlaw is killing clusters, and Joe is paying attention in drama class.   The full show notes are available on the website at        News    Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 ()    Intro to Apache Kafka   What is it?   Apache Kafka is an open-source distributed event streaming platform used by thousands of companies for high-performance data pipelines, streaming analytics, data integration, and mission-critical applications.   Core capabilities    High throughput - Deliver messages at network-limited throughput using a cluster of machines with latencies as low as 2ms.  Scalable - Scale production clusters up to a thousand brokers, trillions of messages per day, petabytes of data, and hundreds of thousands of partitions. Elastically expand and contract storage and processing  Permanent storage - Store streams of data safely in a distributed, durable, fault-tolerant cluster.  High availability - Stretch clusters efficiently over availability zones or connect separate clusters across geographic regions.    Ecosystem    Built-in stream processing - Process streams of events with joins, aggregations, filters, transformations, and more, using event-time and exactly-once processing.  Connect to almost anything - Kafka’s out-of-the-box Connect interface integrates with hundreds of event sources and event sinks including Postgres, JMS, Elasticsearch, AWS S3, and more.  Client libraries - Read, write, and process streams of events in a vast array of programming languages  Large ecosystem of open source tools - Large ecosystem of open source tools: Leverage a vast array of community-driven tooling.    Trust and Ease of Use    Mission critical - Support mission-critical use cases with guaranteed ordering, zero message loss, and efficient exactly-once processing.  Trusted by thousands of organizations - Thousands of organizations use Kafka, from internet giants to car manufacturers to stock exchanges. More than 5 million unique lifetime downloads.  Vast user community - Kafka is one of the five most active projects of the Apache Software Foundation, with hundreds of meetups around the world.    What is it?    Getting data in real-time from event sources like databases, sensors, mobile devices, cloud services, applications, etc. in the form of streams of events. Those events are stored "durably" (in Kafka) for processing, either in real-time or retrospectively, and then routed to various destinations depending on your needs. It's this continuous flow and processing of data that is known as "streaming data" How can it be used? (some examples)  Processing payments and financial transactions in real-time  Tracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposes  Capture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipment  To connect and share data from different divisions in a company    Apache Kafka as an event streaming platform?    It contains three key capabilities that make it a complete streaming platform  Can publish and subscribe to streams of events  Can store streams of events durably and reliably for as long as necessary (infinitely if you have the storage)  To process streams of events in real-time or retrospectively    Can be deployed to bare metal, virtual machines or to containers on-prem or in the cloud  Can be run self-managed or via various cloud providers as a managed service    How does Kafka work?    A distributed system that's composed of servers and clients that communicate using a highly performant TCP protocol    Servers    Kafka runs as a cluster of one or more servers that can span multiple data centers or cloud regions  Brokers - these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layer  Kafka Connect - these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databases  Kafka clusters are highly scalable and...

Intro to Apache Kafka

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&nbsp;       News    Thanks for the reviews! angingjellies and Nick Brooker   Please leave us a review! ()    Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 ()    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 zones  Typical replication configurations for production setups are 3 replicas      Kafka APIS    Admin API - used for managing and inspecting topics, brokers, and other Kafka objects  Producer API - used to write events to Kafka topics  Consumer API - used to read data from Kafka topics  Kafka 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 ()  Source - gets data from an external system and writes it to a Kafka topic  Sink - pushes data to an external system from a Kafka topic        Use Cases    Message queue - usually talking about replacing something like ActiveMQ or RabbitMQ Message 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 functionality  Website 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 events  How and why Kafka was developed ()  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 applications  Log 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 files  Stream processing - taking events in and further enriching those events and publishing them to new topics  Event sourcing - using Kafka to store state changes from an application that are used to replay the current state of an object or system  Commit 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...

Nuts and Bolts of Apache Kafka

View the show notes on the web:  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:&nbsp;Abucr7 Upcoming Events Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024  DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here:  Kafka Compatible and Kafka Functional Alternatives Why? Because running any type of infrastructure requires time, knowledge, and blood, sweat and tears  Confluent   We've personally had good experiences with their Kafka as a service   WarpStream   "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 manage 10x cheaper than running Kafka Agents 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 instantly Support different environments, teams, or projects without managing any dedicated infrastructure Things you won't have to do with WarpStream  Upscale a cluster that is about to run out of space Figure out how to restore quorum in a Zookeeper cluster or Raft consensus group Rebalance 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 multiple WarpStream's unique cloud native architecture was designed from the ground up around the cheapest and most durable storage available in the cloud: commodity object storage WarpStream agents use object storage as the storage layer and the network layer, side-stepping interzone bandwidth costs entirely Can 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 Azure Agents 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 Kafka There'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 IO Has a Kafka compliant wrapper for interchangability Simple data offload functionality to S3 or GCS Multi tenancy Geo replication  Cloud alternatives  Google Cloud - PubSub     Azure - Event Hubs     AWS - 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. ...

Alternatives to Administering and Running Apache Kafka

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:        News   As always, thank you for leaving us a review – we really appreciate them! Almazkun, vassilbakalov, DzikijSver   Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024    DevFest Central Florida on September 28th, 2024 Interested? Submit your talk proposal here:    Water Cooler    How many programmers are there now? ()  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! ()  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 () 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. ()  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) ()   Comparison of Travel Routers ()  Carrying case for router ()  Travel power cube - 6 power outlets followed by 3 ()    Did you know you that Windows has a built in camera QR code reader?  Guava caching libraries in Java ()   Caffiene is a more recent alternatitive ()    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! ()  Claude is better than Chat GPT? ()  How to Get the Most out of Postgres Memory Settings - thanks Mikerg! ()

AI, Blank Pages, and Client Libraries...oh my!

For the full show notes please visit: https://www.codingblocks.net/episode239

How did We Even Arrive Here?

Grab your headphones because it's water cooler time! In this episode we're catching up on feedback, putting our skills to the test, and wondering what we're missing. Plus, Allen's telling it how it is, Outlaw is putting it all together and Joe is minding the gaps!   View the full show notes here:        Reviews   Thank you again for taking the time to share your review with us!    iTunes: Yesso95  Spotify: Auxk0rd, artonus    News   Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024    DevFest Central Florida September 28th, 2024    Two water coolers walk into a bar...    Several folks share their origin stories in the Coding Blocks slack - especially in episode-discussion  Example of dealing with legacy code / hiring people that will work on it ()  Intentional architecture…what's the worst that could happen?  What's the sentiment like on Hacker News? ()  Cat8 is not small! Why isn't anything easy?  Kubernetes trivia, where are your blind spots? ()  Ask Claude: Can you give me an example of the kinds of competitions that might exist in a humorous version of the Olympics for programmers?  Data gathering and parsing - it doesn't seem to have gotten much better in decades…are we wrong?    Tip of the Week    8 Top Docker Tips and Tricks for 2024 ()  Have you tried Eartlhy, like Dockerfiles for all of your builds that you can run locally? ()  Java's JavaAgent Explained ()  Mirrord is an alternative to Telepresence that makes working with Kubernetes easier ()  Kubernetes + Skaffold + Telepresence + K9s = Winning, it's a great combination of tools that work great together!

Two Water Coolers Walk Into a Bar

For the full show notes head over to:  &nbsp;

Things to Know when Considering Multi-Tenant or Multi-Threaded Applications

Well, this is awkward.  Coding Blocks is signing out for now, in this episode we'll talk about what's happening and why. We have had an amazing run, far better than we ever expected. Also, Joe recommends 50 games, Allen goes for the gold, and Outlaw's not crying (you're crying!)   Thank you for the support over the last 11 (!!!) years. It's been a wild ride, and the last thing we ever expected when starting a tech podcast was getting to meet so many fantastic people.   View the full show notes here:        Tip of the Week    UFO 50 is an odd collection of 50 pseudo-retro video games made by a small group of game developers, most notably including Derek Yu of Spelunky. It's a unique and specific experience that reminds me of spending the night at your friend's house who had some console gaming system that you'd only ever heard rumors about. The games seem small and simple at first blush, but there is surprising depth. Favorites so far are Kick Club, Avianos, Attactics, and Mortol. ()  Use JSDoc annotations to make VSCode "understand" your data ()  Can you change your password without needing current password? ()  Did you know you can use VS Code for interactive rebasing?    How to enable VS Code Interactive Editor ()  GitLens ()

When to Log Out

We discuss what boxing and unboxing is in .NET programming and while our discussion is primarily tied to .NET and the CLR, the same basic principals exist for other OO languages such as Java that run in a virtual machine.  For detailed show notes, please visit:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode2

2. Boxing and Unboxing in .NET - Understanding Variable Storage

This week we tackle the SOLID principles in .NET and discuss the eternal struggle between perfect code and looming deadlines.
Detailed show notes and additional resources can be found at:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode7

7. SOLID Programming Principles

We gather around the Festivus pole this holiday season and before we get into the Airing of Grievances, we discuss our favorite tools. No, not people. Actual tools. Srsly.

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode21

21. Our Favorite Tools

Organizing your code, moving from school-work to work-work, the future of Silverlight, and lots of poo-pooing!

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode22

22. Organizing Code, From School to Work, Future of Silverlight

It's time to get back to basics.  It's easy as a software developer to be working on the latest and greatest frameworks, using the best methodologies, trying out new things.  Sometimes it's a good idea to get a refresher on the very basic fundamentals.  In this episode we go over the access modifiers that are common in C# and Java as well as ways to emulate these types of behaviors in Javascript.  And let's be honest - encapsulation is only effective if you're providing programmers that come after you with a roadmap of how things should work.  For that reason we also discuss Command Query Separation and some other ideas and practices that are a part of good programming practices.

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode23

23. Back to Basics - Encapsulation

This week we tackle one of life's great questions, does Jack Bauer give high fives? Also, we go over everything you need to know about delegates, events, callbacks and closures in .NET.

Big thanks to @kappelcodesalot for being the inspiration for this episode!

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode24

24. Delegate all the things!

This week we give away Joe's stuff, we break up with IE8 like a big boy, Joe and Allen get excited about readme files, and we argue about which is worse: bad code or bad architecture. That and more in this week's episode where we explore the new bits in ASP.NET 5.

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode25

25. ASP.NET 5 - It's Basically Java

In this, Episode 27 of the Coding Blocks Podcast, we are answering several questions / comments from our listeners regarding:  more frequent episodes, naming of classes / assemblies, Test Driven Development, the differences between MVC and MVVM and a number of other side conversations such as aliasing tables in SQL.  

See the full shownotes here:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode27

27. Your Questions Our Answers - SYN-ACK with Packet Loss

Part 4 of our design patterns series, this time up it's Adapters, Facades, and Mementos. Oh, and which tech luminary would make the best head of state!

See these notes on the web:
http://www.codingblocks.net/episode30

30. Design Patterns - Adapter, Facade, Memento

This week on Coding Blocks, Joe changes a different kind of string, Allen drools over the Hellcat, and Michael shares his random thoughts. We span a collection of topics including GraphQL framework envy, bash on Windows, and whether it takes two to Django.

Dev Talk: Django, VB vs C#, and Bash on Windows

Joe learns of our harebrained idea, Michael learns of Eisenhower's matrix, and&nbsp;Allen explains polyfills as we begin our dive into Uncle Bob's latest book, Clean Architecture.

Clean Architecture - Fight for Architecture

Michael forgets what his favorite part of the show is, Joe makes us wait to learn what his favorite part is, and Allen pronounces it "pair-a-dig-'ems" as we continue our deep dive into Uncle Bob's latest book: Clean Architecture.

Clean Architecture - Programming Paradigms

We dig into the details of the basic tools while continuing our journey into The Pragmatic Programmer while Joe programs by coincidence, Michael can't pronounce numbers, and Allen makes a point.

The Pragmatic Programmer - Know Thy Tools

The Pragmatic Programmer teaches us how to use tracer bullets versus prototyping while Joe doesn't know who won the Game of Thrones, Allen thought he knew about road numbers, and Michael thinks 475 is four letters.

The Pragmatic Programmer - Tracer Bullets and Prototyping

It’s time to learn about SSTables and LSM-Trees as Joe feels pretty zacked, Michael clarifies what he was looking forward to, and Allen has opinions about Dr Who. These show notes can be found at&nbsp;&nbsp;where you be a part of the conversation, in case you’re reading this via your podcast player. Sponsors  &nbsp;– Sign up today for a free 14 day trial&nbsp;and&nbsp;get a free Datadog t-shirt after install the agent. &nbsp;processes &gt; 200,000 API calls per minute. You like things that scale? Give their corporate page a visit! They are looking for new team members! Apply now at&nbsp;. &nbsp;– One of the top 50 nationally ranked universities, UCI offers over 80 certificates and specialized programs designed for working professionals. Spring registration is&nbsp;NOW OPEN!&nbsp;&nbsp;and reserve your seat today!  Survey Says          Do you leave your laptop plugged in the majority of the time? Take the survey at: .          News  Thank you for all of the great reviews:  iTunes: devextremis, CaffinatedGamer, Matt Hussey, index out of range Stitcher: Marcos Sagrado, MoarLiekCodingRokzAmirite, Asparges69   Sadly, due to COVID-19 (aka Coronavirus), the 15th Annual Orlando Code Camp &amp; Tech Conference has been cancelled. We’ll keep you informed of your next opportunity to kick us in the shins. ()  During this unprecedented time, TechSmith is offering Snagit and Video Review for free through June 2020. ()    SSTables and LSM-Trees SSTables  SSTable&nbsp;is short for “Sorted String Table”. SSTable requires that the writes be sorted by key.  This means we cannot append the new key/value pairs to the segment immediately because we need to make sure the data is sorted by key first.    What are the benefits of the SSTable over the hash indexed log segments?  Merging the segments is much faster, and simpler. It’s basically a&nbsp;mergesort&nbsp;against the segment files being merged. Look at the first key in each file, and take the lowest key (according to the sort order), add it to the new segment file … rinse-n-repeat.  When the same key shows in multiple segment files, keep the newer segment’s key/value pair, sticking with the notion that the last written key/value for any given key is the most up to date value.   To find keys, you no longer need to keep the entire hash of indexes in memory. Instead, you can use a&nbsp;sparse index&nbsp;where you store a key in memory for every few kilobytes from a segment file  This saves on memory. This also allows for quick scans as well.  For example, when you search for a key,&nbsp;Michael&nbsp;and the key isn’t in the index, you can find two keys in the sparse index that&nbsp;Michael&nbsp;falls between, such as&nbsp;Micah&nbsp;and&nbsp;Mick, then start at the&nbsp;Micah&nbsp;offset and scan that portion of the segment until you find the&nbsp;Michael&nbsp;key.     Another improvement for speeding up read scans is to write chunks of data to disk in compressed blocks. Then, the keys in the sparse index point to the beginning of that compressed block.  So how do you write this to disk in the proper order?  If you just write them to disk as you get them, they’ll be out of order in an append only manner because you’re likely going to receive them out of order. One method is to actually write them to disk in a sorted structure. B-Tree is one option. However, maintaining a sorted structure in memory is actually easier than trying to maintain it on disk though, due to well known tree data structures like red-black trees and AVL trees.  The keys are sorted as they’re inserted due to the way nodes are shuffled during inserts. This allows you to write the data to memory in any order and retrieve it sorted.   When data arrives, write it to the memory balanced tree data structure, such as a red-black tree. This is also referred to as a&nbsp;memtable. Once you’ve reached a predefined size threshold, you dump the data from memory to disk in a new SSTable file. While the new...

Designing Data-Intensive Applications - SSTables and LSM-Trees

We dig into all things Python, which Allen thinks is pretty good, and it’s rise in popularity, while Michael and Joe go toe-to-toe over a gripe, ahem, feature. We realize that you _can_ use your podcast player to read these notes, but if you didn’t know, this episode’s show notes can be found at&nbsp;. Check it out and join the conversation. Sponsors  &nbsp;– &nbsp;Sign up today for a free 14 day trial&nbsp;and&nbsp;get a free Datadog t-shirt after creating your first dashboard. – Sign up today to get $300 in credit with promo code&nbsp;CODINGBLOCKS&nbsp;and make something amazing with Cassandra on any cloud. &nbsp;– Sign up for $100 in free credit and simplify your infrastructure with Linode’s Linux virtual machines.  Survey Says          What's your favorite Python feature? Take the survey at: .    &nbsp;       News  The Coding Blocks Game Jam 2021 results are in! () Our review page has been updated! () Ergonomic keyboard reviews:  Kinesis Advantage 2 Full Review after Heavy Usage&nbsp;() Ergonomic Keyboard Zergotech Freedom Full Review&nbsp;()    Why Python? A Brief History of Python. Very Brief.  Python is a general-purpose high-level programming language, which can be used to develop desktop GUI applications, websites, and apps that run on sophisticated algorithms. Python was created in 1991, before JavaScript or Java, but didn’t make major leaps in popularity until 1998 – 2003, according to the Tiobe index.  Coincidentally, this lines up with the early days of Google, where they had a motto of&nbsp;“Python where we can, C++ where we must”.   In 2009, MIT switched from Scheme to Python, and others in academia followed.  Some Python Benefits, But Only Some  It’s an easy language for new developers as well as those who don’t consider themselves developers, such as data scientists or hobbyists, but have a need write some code. Python has a great standard library when compared to languages like JavaScript that largely rely on third party libraries to provide depth in functionality. It’s cross platform. As long as we’re talking OS.  Mobile? Not really, as that space is consumed with Swift, Java, and Objective-C. But with things like Pythonista, you can write and execute Python on mobile. Web? No, at least not on the client side. That space is dominated by JavaScript. But with frameworks like Django and Flask, you can use Python on the server side.   In addition to the standard library, there are also many great/popular third party libraries, like NumPy, that are available on PyPi.  The Downsides to Python  Performance when compared to a natively compiled application because it’s a dynamic, interpreted language.  Which brings up the late binding type system.   The lack of mobile and web presence as previously mentioned. Legacy issues when dealing with v2, which is still in use. Language features that haven’t aged well, such as PEP-8. Quirks like&nbsp;self, or&nbsp;__init__, private functionality, and immutability.  Resources We Like  The Python Programming Language&nbsp;() Heavy usage of Python at Google&nbsp;() The Incredible Growth of Python&nbsp;() 2020 Developer Survey, Top Paying Technologies&nbsp;() What makes Python more popular than Ruby?&nbsp;() 2020 Developer Survey, Most Loved, Dreaded, and Wanted&nbsp;() Top 10 Python Packages For Machine Learning&nbsp;() 56 Groundbreaking Python Open-source Projects – Get Started with Python&nbsp;() Top 10 Python Packages Every Developer Should Learn&nbsp;() Choosing the right estimator&nbsp;aka the&nbsp;scikit-learn algorithm cheat-sheet&nbsp;()  Previously discussed as a Tip of the Week during episode 92,&nbsp;Azure Functions and CosmosDB from MS Ignite&nbsp;()   Introduction to Celery&nbsp;() Is it possible to compile a program written in Python?&nbsp;() Pythonista 3 – A Full Python IDE for iOS&nbsp;()  Previously discussed as a Tip of the Week during episode 88,&nbsp;What is Algorithmic Complexity?&nbsp;()   Flask – Web development,...

Why is Python Popular?

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 C# and Microsoft.NET are our preferred development platform, most topics discussed are relevant in any number of Object Oriented programming languages such as Java, Ruby, PHP, etc.. We are all web and database programmers so we discuss Javascript, HTML, SQL and 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. 

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