Coding Blocks By cover art

Coding Blocks

By: Allen Underwood Michael Outlaw Joseph Zack
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  • Summary

  • 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 Microsoft.NET is the development platform we're using, most topics discussed are relevant in any number of Object Oriented programming languages. We are all web and database programmers and will be providing useful information on 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.
    Coding Blocks 2022
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Episodes
  • Intro to Apache Kafka

    Intro to Apache Kafka
    May 26 2024
    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 https://www.codingblocks.net/episode235 News Atlanta Dev Con is coming up, on September 7th, 2024 (www.atldevcon.com) 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 processingPermanent 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 languagesLarge 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-timeTracking automobiles and shipments in real time for logistical purposesCapture and analyze sensor data from IoT devices or other equipmentTo 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 eventsCan 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 cloudCan 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 regionsBrokers - these are a portion of the servers that are the storage layerKafka Connect - these are servers that constantly import and export data from existing systems in your infrastructure such as relational databasesKafka clusters are highly scalable and fault-tolerant Clients Allows you to write distributed applications that allow to read, write and process streams of events in parallel that are fault-tolerant and scale These clients are available in many programming languages - both the ones provided by the core platform as well as 3rd party clients Concepts Events It's a record of something that happened - also called a "record" in the documentation Has a keyHas a valueHas an event timestampCan have additional metadata Producers and Consumers Producers - these are the client applications that publish/write events to KafkaConsumers - these are the client applications that read/subscribe to events from KafkaProducers and consumers are completely decoupled from each other Topics Events are stored in topicsTopics are like folders on a file system - events would be the equivalent of files within that folderTopics are mutli-producer and multi-subscriber There can be zero, one or many producers or subscribers to a topic that ...
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    2 hrs and 5 mins
  • StackOverflow AI Disagreements, Kotlin Coroutines and More

    StackOverflow AI Disagreements, Kotlin Coroutines and More
    May 13 2024
    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode234 Reviews iTunes: ivan.kuchin News Atlanta Dev Con September 7th, 2024 https://www.atldevcon.com/ Topics People trying to remove their answers from StackOverflow to not allow OpenAI to use their answers without permission/recognition? https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/stack-overflow-bans-users-en-masse-for-rebelling-against-openai-partnership-users-banned-for-deleting-answers-to-prevent-them-being-used-to-train-chatgpt Obfuscate data dumps with PostgreSQL https://github.com/GreenmaskIO/greenmask/ Kotlin Coroutines https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coroutines-overview.html https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coroutine-context-and-dispatchers.html#dispatchers-and-threads Reminded Outlaw of the Cloudflare Workers we mentioned a while back https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/ Please leave us a review! https://www.codingblocks.net/review You can control if YouTube keeps track of your history (at least that you can see) 100 Things You Didn't Know About Kubernetes https://www.devopsinside.com/100-things-you-didnt-know-about-kubernetes-part-1/ Do the IDE AI's really make you more productive? Random Bits Tesla Las Vegas Loop https://www.lvcva.com/vegas-loop/ What actually happens when you overfill the oil in a vehicle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaTbfvzNbxQ Fisker Ocean totalled after a $900 door ding...really https://jalopnik.com/fisker-ocean-totaled-over-910-door-ding-after-insurer-1851451187 A Ford Mustang painted with the blackest black paint available https://youtu.be/Ll27OkWuE1g Tip of the Week Docker Blog is pretty excellent https://www.docker.com/blog/ Car Research Car reliability information https://www.truedelta.com/ Actual problems logged with car models by year https://www.carcomplaints.com/ Great search engine for finding cars and more metadata about the listing like how long the car has been listed https://caredge.com/ Utilizing wood sheet goods by utilizing cut lists https://www.opticutter.com/cut-list-optimizer Docker's chicken-n-egg problem Use a multi-stage Dockerfile where an earlier stage has the tools you need Manually dearmor a PGP public key (Hint: it's the opposite of: https://superuser.com/questions/764465/how-to-ascii-armor-my-public-key-without-installing-gpg) Download the file using the server suggested name With wget ... --content-disposition https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/wget.1.html Wth curl ... -JO -J, --remote-header-name -O, --remote-name https://curl.se/docs/manpage.html#-J
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    1 hr and 42 mins
  • Llama 3 is Here, Spending Time on Environmental Setup and More

    Llama 3 is Here, Spending Time on Environmental Setup and More
    Apr 28 2024

    Full episode show notes can be found at:

    https://www.codingblocks.net/episode233
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    1 hr and 34 mins
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Profile Image for Joshua

Amazing Podcast with Amazing People

I have been listening to this podcast for years. I love every episode. If you are a developer you should absolutely be listening to these guys. Dont trust their math skills (running joke on the show) but everything else they make great points and discussion on technology.

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A must for any developer

Jam packed (pleasure Jo ;) with great information, with the data structure series being my favourite. I use every opportunity to refer colleagues and friends to this podcast. On my list of influential media, I place this podcast up with Clean Code and the DevOps handbook.

Keep up the great work guys!

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Can't get enough of this podcast.

I’ve been listening to these guys for a couple of months and they’re great. Wealth of knowledge and very broad view of the industry. They cover lots of stuff and it’s obvious they are very experienced and well read. All is done with a great deal of dry humor, too. These guys crack me up. I’m glad they have lots of episodes… I consume them like candy. Or beer… probably more like beer. Anyway, keep it up y’all and nice podcast.

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What a wonderful podcast (amazing job you guys!)

I have been listening to this podcast since day 1
And I've got to say it is hands down the best Code-Related podcast out there,
The content is passed with such fluidity in a conversational, "watercooler" manner, that is keeping you engaged.

It is such a fun and interesting way to start your day, learning, laughing, surveying, tipping of the week-ing :-)

I consider Allen, Michael and Joe to be my coworkers that I wish I had,
and this show is our talk-shop coffee time. (only I can only listen, but I feel like my voice is heard because of that back and forth they are dishing out)

Keep up the good work!

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AMAZING for dev at any stage

I'm a junior developer and I love these guys for learning and broadening my perspective, as well as book recommendations. They inspired me to start using docker and that was a huge help (I avoided python virtual env with docker and that alone is worth the hours I've listened to)

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Great information and fun to listen to.

A really knowledgeable Podcast with great information. The group has a good dynamic and I love "Outlaws" tech jokes. Thanks!

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Night DJ Voice or not....

I love listening to you guys! The style of the DJ voice for the reviews doesn't matter to me, but the content and the chemistry do. You guys are great, and I hope to be listening to you well into my 80s....... LOL! (that's a long time away)

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outstanding work, thank you Allen, Michael and JZ!

I have been enjoying this podcast for about 6 months now. I stumbled across them when they were going through devops handbook. they have been entertaining and informative in every episode.

The format is consistent and engaging with breaks for jokes and surveys. You can tell that they have been friends for a long time and while a bit nerdy, it is not really a nerd podcast. its like sitting around and listening in on an intelligent but relatable conversation.

The tip (tips for allen) of the week and resources they talk about and link to are indispensable to someone like me. I am working into the Dev field from manufacturing so all the tools and resources have been much appreciated.

I even lurk in the slack channel for the extra content they and the community provide there.

This is really the only way I am able to give back and I can't believe I am the first to review the podcast on Audible! Thank you; Allen, Outlaw, and JZ for the time and effort on the podcast, show notes and slack!

-devops.rob

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Profile Image for Jake Tucker

Fun and Informative

This is a great podcast to listen to no matter your level of experience in the field thanks to the wide variety of topics covered. They also do an amazing job on creating show notes with relevant links and resources and a summary.

The best part, however, are the late night DJ voices!

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Amazing developer podcast

This is probably the most well-rounded developer podcast that I've ever heard. You'll hear everything from deep dives into algorithms, to general career advice, and the finest dad jokes. Come for the great content produced by longtime friends and co-workers, and stay for the incredible Slack community.

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