A message queue is a service that allows producers to place serialized messages onto a highly reliable queue from which one or more consumers can read those items. …

In more than a decade in a variety of settings I’ve observed a few dos and don’ts reappear in several domains. In this post I share the anti-patterns and best practices I feel are most valuable to consider. Anti-pattern: Sending Requirements Over the Fence It’s not uncommon for product development to be partitioned by department or…

How to Leverage Docker in the Cloud — This post explores another sufficiently complex example, this time leveraging Docker in the cloud. Similar to the last post, let’s start with a seemingly trivial ffmpeg command and see what it takes to build a similar solution in the cloud. # Splits audio from input.mp4 into a file called output.mp3 ffmpeg…

What is a Fire Drill? At NoRedInk we recently conducted a fire drill with Team Zamboni, a team responsible for “smoothing over the ice” for internal departments by providing engineering tooling and automation solutions. A fire drill is a deliberately introduced problem in production caused by a couple members of the team. The idea is…

How to Provide Reliable Estimates to Stakeholders — What is a Story Point? Finding a concrete definition for story points is no easy task. Different sources tend to have somewhat nebulous definitions. One post at Mountain Goat Software describes story points as “a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a ……

How Neural Networks Creatively Generate Data — GANs are an incredibly interesting evolution of neural networks. Before getting into what a GAN is let’s start with the basics and get an understanding of what a neural network is. A Conceptual Look at Neural Networks Neural networks can be very intimidating. Below is a representation of a neural network and it demonstrates only a…

What are with* functions? — With* functions are functions that take the shape of withProperty : Prop -> CustomType -> CustomType. When several are chained together using the pipeline operator they tend to produce terse, yet legible, code and a pleasant API. Let’s consider some code that is a good candidate to refactor to use…

Building a Video Stabilization Service Backed By AWS — Sufficient Complexity One of the best ways to learn something is to build a sufficiently complex example and teach it to others. In this post we’re going to cover nearly everything it takes to build a video stabilization service. …

Moving Beyond Unit Tests — What is a fuzz test? A fuzz test, also called an invariant test, is a test where random inputs are provided to a test and the developer asserts that some property, some invariant, holds true. This is best understood by example. Consider a function that accepts a list as input and returns a reversed list.