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Pipeless API
From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
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Search - "service and databases"
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Hey everyone,
We have a few pieces of news we're very excited to share with everyone today. Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot to cover!
First, as some of you might have already seen, we just launched the "subscribed" tab in the devRant app on iOS and Android. This feature shows you a feed of the most recent rant posts, likes, and comments from all of the people you subscribe to. This activity feed is updated in real-time (although you have to manually refresh it right now), so you can quickly see the latest activity. Additionally, the feed also shows recommended users (based on your tastes) that you might want to subscribe to. We think both of these aspects of the feed will greatly improve the devRant content discovery experience.
This new feature leads directly into this next announcement. Tim (@trogus) and I just launched a public SaaS API service that powers the features above (and can power many more use-cases across recommendations and activity feeds, with more to come). The service is called Pipeless (https://pipeless.io) and it is currently live (beta), and we encourage everyone to check it out. All feedback is greatly appreciated. It is called Pipeless because it removes the need to create complicated pipelines to power features/algorithms, by instead utilizing the flexibility of graph databases.
Pipeless was born out of the years of experience Tim and I have had working on devRant and from the desire we've seen from the community to have more insight into our technology. One of my favorite (and earliest) devRant memories is from around when we launched, and we instantly had many questions from the community about what tech stack we were using. That interest is what encouraged us to create the "about" page in the app that gives an overview of what technologies we use for devRant.
Since launch, the biggest technology powering devRant has always been our graph database. It's been fun discussing that technology with many of you. Now, we're excited to bring this technology to everyone in the form of a very simple REST API that you can use to quickly build projects that include real-time recommendations and activity feeds. Tim and I are really looking forward to hopefully seeing members of the community make really cool and unique things with the API.
Pipeless has a free plan where you get 75,000 API calls/month and 75,000 items stored. We think this is a solid amount of calls/storage to test out and even build cool projects/features with the API. Additionally, as a thanks for continued support, for devRant++ subscribers who were subscribed before this announcement was posted, we will give some bonus calls/data storage. If you'd like that special bonus, you can just let me know in the comments (as long as your devRant email is the same as Pipeless account email) or feel free to email me (david@hexicallabs.com).
Lastly, and also related, we think Pipeless is going to help us fulfill one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from the community. Now, it is going to be our goal to open source the various components of devRant. Although there’s been a few reasons stated in the past for why we haven’t done that, one of the biggest reasons was always the highly proprietary and complicated nature of our backend storage systems. But now, with Pipeless, it will allow us to start moving data there, and then everyone has access to the same system/technology that is powering the devRant backend. The first step for this transition was building the new “subscribed” feed completely on top of Pipeless. We will be following up with more details about this open sourcing effort soon, and we’re very excited for it and we think the community will be too.
Anyway, thank you for reading this and we are really looking forward to everyone’s feedback and seeing what members of the community create with the service. If you’re looking for a very simple way to get started, we have a full sample dataset (1 click to import!) with a tutorial that Tim put together (https://docs.pipeless.io/docs/...) and a full dev portal/documentation (https://docs.pipeless.io).
Let us know if you have any questions and thanks everyone!
- David & Tim (@dfox & @trogus)53 -
When you see a web service API accepting a SQL query in one of its JSON fields and the evil starts growing within you..
DROP ALL DATABASES
Just because you can!4 -
Sooooo me and the lead dev got placed in the wrong job classification at work.
Without sounding too mean, we are placed under the same descriptor and pay scale reserved for secretaries, janitors and the people that do maintenance at work(we work for a college as developers) whilst our cowormer who manages the cms got the correct classification.
The manager went apeshit because the guidelines state that:
Making software products
Administration of dbs
Server maintenance and troubleshooting
Security (network)
And a lot of shit is covered on the exemption list and it is things that we do by a wide fucking margin. The classification would technically prohibit us from developing software and the whole it dptmnt went apeshit over it since he(lead developer) refuses (rightfully so) to touch anything and do basically nothing other than generate reports.
Its a fun situation. While we both got a substantial raise in salary(go figure) we also got demoted at the same time.
There is a department in IT which deals with the databases for other major applications, their title is "programmers" yet for some reason me and the lead end up writing all the sql code that they ever need. They make waaaaay more money than me and the lead do, even in the correct classification.
Resolution: manager is working with the head of the department to correct this blasphemy WHILE asking for a higher pay than even the "programmers"
I love this woman. She has balls man. When the president of the school paraded around the office asking for an update on a high priority app she said that I am being gracious enough to work on it even though i am not supposed to. The fucking prick asked if i could speed it up to where she said that most of my work I do it on my off time, which by law is now something that I cannot do for the school and that she does not expect any of her devs to do jack shit unless shit gets fixed quick. With the correct pay.
Naturally, the president did not like such predicament and thus urged the HR department(which is globally hated now since they fucked up everyone's classification) to fix it.
Dunno if I will get above the pay that she requested. But seeing that royal ammount of LADY BALLS really means something to me. Which is why i would not trade that woman for a job at any of my dream workplaces.
Meanwhile, the level of stress placed my 12 years of service diabetic lead dev at the hospital. Fuck the hr department for real, fuck the vps of the school that fucked this up royally and fuck people in this city in general. I really care for my team, and the lead dev is one of my best friends and a good developer, this shit will not fucking go unnoticed and the HR department is now in low priority level for the software that we build for them
Still. I am amazed to have a manager that actually looks out for us instead of putting a nice face for the pricks that screwed us over.
I have been working since I was 16, went through the Army, am 27 now and it is the first time that I have seen such manager.
She can't read this, but she knows how much I appreciate her.3 -
Man, I think we've all gotten way too many of these.
Normally most interactions that I have are through email. Eventually some would try to contact me via phone. These are some:
"Hey! We are calling you from <whatever company name> solutions! (most of them always seem to end on solutions or some shit like that) concerning the Ruby on Rails senior dev opportunity we were talking about via email"
<niceties, how are you doing, similar shit goes here...eventually>
So tell us! how good/comfortable would you say you are with C++?"
Me: I have never done anything serious with c++ and did just use it at school, but because I am not a professional in it I did not list it in my CV, what does it have to do with Rails?
Them: "Oh the applications of this position must be ready to take in additional duties which sometimes happen to be C or C++"
Me: Well that was not anywhere in the offer you sent, it specifically requested a full stack Rails developer that could work with 3 different frontend stacks already and like 4 different databases plus bla bla bla, I did not see c++ anywhere in it. Matter of fact I find it funny, one of the things that I was curious about was the salary, for what you are asking and specifically in the city in which you are asking it for 75k is way too low, you are seriously expecting a senior level rails dev to do all that AND take additional duties with c++? cpp could mean a billion different things"
Them: "well this is a big opportunity that will increase your level to senior position"
Me: the add ALREADY asks for a senior position, why are you making it sound that I will get build towards that level if you are already off the bat asking for seniors only to begin with?
Them: You are not getting it, it is an opportunity to grow into a senior, applicants right now are junior to mid-level
ME: You are all not making any sense, please don't contact me again.
=======
Them: We are looking for someone with 15 years experience with Swift development for mobile and web
Me: What is up with your people not making these requirements in paper? if I knew from the beginning that you people think that Swift is 15 years old I would have never agreed to this "interview"
Them: If you are not interested in that then might we offer this one for someone with 10 years experience as a full stack TypeScript developer.
Me: No, again, check your dates, this is insulting.
===
* For another Rails position
Them: How good are you with Ruby on Rails in terms of Python?
Me: excuse me? Python has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.
Her (recruiter was a woman) * with a tone of superiority: I have it here that Python is the primary technology that accompanies Rails development.
Me (thinking this was a joke) : What do you think the RUBY part of Ruby on Rails is for? and what does "accompanies Rails development" even means?
Her: Well if you are not interested in using Rails with Python then maybe you can tell us about your experience in using Javascript as the main scripting platform for Rails.
Me: This is a joke, goodbye.
====
To be fair this was years ago when I still didn't know better and test the recruiters during the email part of being contacted. Now a days I feel sorry for everyone since I just say no without even bothering. This is a meme all on itself which no one has ever bothered to review and correct in years for now. I don't know why recruiters don't google themselves to see what people think of their "profession" in order to become better.
I've even had the Java/Javascript stupidity thrown at me by a local company. For that one it was someone from their very same HR department doing the rectuiter, their shop foreman was a friend of the family, did him the service of calling him to let him know that his HR was never going to land the kind of developer they were looking for with the retarded questions they had and sent him a detailed email concerning the correct information they needed for their JAVAscript job which they kept confusing with Java (for some reason in the context of Spring, they literally wanted nothing with Spring, they wanted some junior to do animations and shit like that on their company's website, which was in php, Java was nowhere in this equation)
I think people in web development get the short end of the stick when it comes to retarded recruiters more than anywhere else.3 -
Inherited a simple marketplace website that matches job seekers and hospitals in healthcare. Typically, all you need for this sort of thing is a web server, a database with search
But the precious devs decided to go micro-services in a container and db per service fashion. They ended up with over 50 docker containers with 50ish databases. It was a nightmare to scale or maintain!
With 50 database for for a simple web application that clearly needs to share data, integration testing was impossible, data loss became common, very hard to pin down, debugging was a nightmare, and also dangerous to change a service’s schema as dependencies were all tangled up.
The obvious thing was to scale down the infrastructure, so we could scale up properly, in a resource driven manner, rather than following the trend.
We made plans, but the CTO seemed worried about yet another architectural changes, so he invested in more infrastructure services, kubernetes, zipkin, prometheus etc without any idea what problems those infra services would solve.2 -
Rant about IT teacher
(This happened a few months ago)
I go to highschool and in ninth grade you learn about Excel and databases in general. In the first half of the year we learned how to use excel and in the second part of the year we learned about SQL databases.
So we learned SQL and how to set up a database using LibreOffice Base. At the end of the year we had to do one final project which was setting up a database and writing some queries.
We had to do it in groups of two and we had to choose for what we wanted to make a database.
We had like 5 minutes time to discuss it in the groups and me and my friend decided to do something like GitHub, so a database with tables for all the users, repositories, etc.
Then we had to tell our teacher what we wanted to do. Others made databases for hospitals, shops, netflix, app stores. The teacher asked the other groups, they told him what they wanted to do and he wrote it down. Here is how it went down with my group:
Teacher: So what do you want to do?
Me: A database for something like GitHub
Teacher: For what?
Me: GitHub
Teacher: what?
Me (very slowly): G I T H U B
Teacher: what is github?
Me: ...
(I was very surprised that he didn't know GitHub)
Me: well, you can upload files and work on them together with other people. There are also things like branches...
Teacher: Ah ok, so a cloud service
(I was done and wanted to end the conversation)
Me: Yes... it's a cloud service...
(Me in my mind: why do i have to be here)
We named our project 'GitGud', a little bit passiv aggresive.
Yeah so apparently my IT teacher doesn't know GitHub, however he installed Ubuntu on some of the school computers so I guess that's nice
We got an A so that's good.14 -
I just officially graduated from a web dev program and it feels...
Very underwhelming.
Learned ES6, React, Webpack, service workers, offline databases, accessibility, (...bla bla bla)
And my knowledge with data structures and algorithms isn't even that great yet.
I look at the stuff I still don't know and wonder if I'll ever be comfortable with my level of expertise.13 -
So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.
I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".
But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.
The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".
Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.
It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.
It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.
But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.
THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!
So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.
Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...2 -
I've been assigned lots of database work the last couple of weeks. Managing old databases are what make or break people surely.
The customers have this proprietary mess of a Visual FoxPro database manager.
I spent the entire day navigating what I should and shouldn't export for them (as they're fortunately trying to rid themselves of the service)
When I was supposed to do the export, the proprietary hardware only allowed exports of 25 rows at a time with the free version this big company is using... I ehr... I just regret not converting it into SQL to begin with.2 -
Everytime you tell yourself "This time I'm going to make them stop putting the cart before the horse again!!! No more forced shit implementations!!! NO MORE ! I'm strong!!"
The last hour in the next week:
- Selinux: off
- Firewall: Any-Any
- Application data: Everything installed on OS disc.
- Documentation: At best, someone remembers the server supposed-to-be dns record
- Service Accounts: Your domain admin account and sysadmin for databases.
- Patching: DON'T EVER THINK ABOUT IT..AND NO REBOOTING! I have set very important runtime variables.
- Backup: Maybe someone else will set this up.
- Monitoring: Not needed since clients will create tickets if system fails.
- Production Status: vague at best. Sort of silently transitioned to production.
- Handover status: Probably, but I quit before the project closed.
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So, in Germany apprentices at companies need to file a "Berichtsheft".
It's a thing where you have to file, for each day that is, what you did at work or in job college and how long you did it.
Basically every company keeps records of their employees activities in their CRM or other management system and all schools use services for keeping timetables that include lesson duration and activity.
So why the fuck do we apprentices have to write that shit ourselves when we could literally just acces the databases and SELECT THE SHIT FROM FILED_ACTIVITIES, I thought.
So I'm writing scripts to acces our CRM database and a puppeteer script now that scrapes the Untis (online timetable service for schools) timetables to extract everything, group it by date and format it nicely as CSV.
I'm sick of this: Digital system & Digital system = write it yourself bullshit.
Once I'm done I'll make a github repo for the Untis scraper.
Also, I'll be making the tools usable for the other apprentices at my company to spare them the suffering.9 -
I get some error when deleting an azure service so I put a support ticket asking for help. Just as I am about to close my computer for the day I receive an email saying:
"Product team will disable the account xxxxx from backend".
The xxxxx is our subscription number. The subscription that hosts not only that service but also production servers and databases, storage accounts containing backups, etc.
I replied to the email so hopefully disaster is avoided otherwise tomorrow wont be a happy day.6 -
//rant
So i ordered myself a web server and am trying to get access to phpmyadmin.
I got generated username and password for the phpmyadmin login.
So i created mysql databases and database users, outside the interface, but that's fucking it, i need to create tables as well, can't do that without the interface, cuz NO ACCESS!
Fucking piece of shit service provider, they had one thing to do and they can't even fucking do it right. How dare they call themselves web hosts at all...
It's probably a badly configured config file but i can't access the file myself to start sorting this shit out, so i got to wait at least 12 hours till work hours to be able to contact with them and sort this shit out.1 -
Anybody here know that shitty service called Birthday Reminder? Yeah? Fuck them.
Never signed up for the bullshit, but because some kiddo's I was in class with 10+ years ago (I think it started when i was ~12 yrs old) did, I keep on getting their spam. They have an unsubscribe button in their emails, directing me to a page that says I can only unsubscribe if I log in.
FUCK YOU.
I NEVER SIGNED UP FOR YOUR SHITTY SERVICE AND I REALLY DONT WANT TO DO NOW EITHER.
Ofc I emailed them politely to remove both my email addresses from their databases.
And they are politely ignoring me.
Fuck you.
PS yes I know I can mark them as spam, but I prefer just not receiving their shit at all. I have a very clean spam folder.5 -
Sooo, turns out, management and senior PMs, technical PMs, service managers and you name it forgot an entire system.
A complete eco-system of applications, queues, services, load-balancers, deploy pipelines, databases, monitoring solutions, etc, etc, that if not handled correctly could effectively put the entire production line to a standstill.
So, waaay too late they make this discovery. In their ignorance. Just utter incompetence. Huge project. Millions of $. And they forget it. Months of meetings probably. Workshops and gettogethers at cozy hotel complex discussing ”the project”? And they do not understand some of the fundamental building blocks…
Basic engineering for these guys must mean something completely different.
I can’t even.
I am so fed up with this organization. It does not stop either.
How is this possible…
Do they even have half a brain? -
So.
I just sat here and listened to some awful gibberish that sounded kind of like the language a person would use to describe logistics or construction, but that still lacked so much filler language that a straight spew of jargon doesn't seem likely.
reminds me of every single time I hear someone describe new technology that ends up bombing.
like the push towards graph databases which I personally can't understand the underlying storage mechanism which would make them work
of someone describing locks to your house that can be unlocked from a cellphoen over the internet.
or 2 form factor authentication and what happens if you lose your phone and there is no customer service ?
on that last maybe they could take a sample of every customers voice every year or a fingerprint or a blood sample :P1 -
I manage the infrastructure of an application. Responsible for setup, maintenance and upgrades of all the associated servers, databases, filesystems and tuning. The business area is responsible for maintaining the content and structure of the app.
A couple of weeks ago, the business area started asking me for the system admin passwords in an attempt to integrate a remote service. The reason was because he didn't want to store his own credentials in Jenkins. Imagine the shock when they were told no.
Then a week ago, they asked for the password again so they could update a properties file. Again, the answer was no.
We sent them an email yesterday asking for their change management number so we could make the change to the properties file. They were absolutely shocked to find out that we hadn't already updated the file because they had already deployed their code changes to go with the properties file last Thursday. They submitted the request to us on Friday.
Getting real tired of people screwing up and pointing the finger back at me. -
Why is it so difficult to tell the people to not use the same passwords everywhere? I thought of a service which searches all leaked databases and predicts a password based on that as a warning for the user... Having the program told you that your password the user is likely to enter would be XY, because the adobe OR MySpace OR Dropbox passwords for the email OR username entered was that password could be a bit more aggressive but useful to let the users at least think of secure passwords.1
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AWS offers a wide range of services that can be used to automate your IT operations. Some of the most popular services for automation include:
*AWS Systems Manager Automation: This
service allows you to automate tasks such as
provisioning servers, deploying applications, and
configuring security policies.
*AWS Lambda: This service allows you to run
code without provisioning or managing servers.
This can be used to automate tasks such as
sending emails, updating databases, and
processing data.
*AWS CloudFormation: This service allows you
to create and manage infrastructure as code.
This can be used to automate the deployment
of complex IT environments.
*AWS CodePipeline: This service allows you to
automate the software development lifecycle.
This can be used to automate the build, test,
and deploy of applications.2