Afterweb

AWS Solution Architect Certification Thoughts and Reflections Just received a AWS Solution Architect Certificate and want to share some of my observations of the test (in no particular order): If you used AWS for a few projects, passing the test will be easy. Compare to the amount of time and effort that it took me to pass Sun Enterprise Architect, it is probably 1/100 or 1/1000  To my surprise, almost all questions were around S3, IAM, and EC2. It is much more to AWS, and I was thinking that they have more questions around RDS/EMR/Redshift Tricky questions were "select 3 correct answers out of 6" or "2 out of 5" and it feel more like a lottery. It was almost half all questions that are in "multiple correct choice" category. When answering these questions, please read every word of it as they often put "sort-of-right answer" and "right answer" and unless all options are read fully it is easy to choose "sort-of-right...

Wearable Sensors + Google Glass Wearable sensors  are a lot of fun! I played with them for some time by now, both professionally (at work), and for the coding pleasure. This post is about my latest weekend project - native google glasses app showing heart rate. The idea is to continuously measure hear rate using the sensor and to show pulse rate in real time, for example, while running or exercising. Honestly, I did not find running with Google Glasses to be much fun (as they tend to fell off when I am running), but to see what makes my heart beat faster is an interesting and educational experience. Google Glass (GG) Turns out to be a nice piece of hardware that is a fun to work with: reasonably fast processor, Android 4.0.1, wide range of sensors, WiFi, and Bluetooth interface! Ingredients GG ( http://www.google.com/glass/start/ ) Google glass SDK ( https://developers.google.com/glass/gdk ) Android SDK ( http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html ) Zephyr ...

I’v seen a lot of discussions around bitcoins lately: how long they will be around, if this is a new bubble,   how “fixed” they are. For me, another question is more interesting, how will people make money on bitcoins ? I can see these money-making opportunities:       Bitcoin Mining.  I think that the prime time for mining is over for bitcoins. There is an opportunity in mining for alternative virtual currencies but it’s risky as it is unknown what alternatives will be around in a few years        Making tools for bitcoin mining . There are several major players in this space and it is amazing how fast technology is progressing        Conferences and publications . That’s guaranteed to work for the few people with experience in that space       Developing software . There is a need for plug-ins into major web store fronts, end user wallets, point-of-sale devices, etc. May be ...

Spent a day at the Appnation conference and want to share my notes from my favorite presentation - wearable technology. I'v been a big fan of wearables for some and it's exciting to see how the technology that was used by a few geeks taking the central stage. Anyway, here are my quick notes from the presentation. DEC 4, 2013  SESSION LEADER: REDG SNODGRASS, FOUNDER, STAINED GLASS LABS ERIC MIGICOVSKY, FOUNDER AND CEO, PEBBLE JEF HOLOVE, FOUNDER AND CEO, BASIS REMI EL-OUAZZANEEl, CEO, MOVIDIUS Q. Why now?  sensor technology becomes affordable cloud is ready, sensor data can be uploaded to the cloud  big companies are making huge investments Q. Why wearables? wearables provide value now, helping solve problems in daily live Pebble watch can provide contextual information (ex: runkeeper app that is active when user is running). My understanding is that sensors can be used to  determine current user's context, if user is walking/runnin...

You may wonder what brings people together to work all weekend (nights included) writing code instead of spending time outside on these beautiful weekend? Do they have nothing else to do? Are they here for prize money or junk food? Any logic it it?  I think that the answer is outside of logic - people get together to Google for the emotional experience , dream of building next Google, experience of been around  people like themselves. In my opinion, this is exactly what brings people to sport competition and this is yet another invention of Silicon Valley - making a sport out of software development. Looking forward for the time when it becomes part of Olympics and having people watching the competition (on Google TV?) voting for the wining team.

Had fine time yesterday watching MTV's Deadliest Warrior on big TV screen and Loyalize's servers on my laptop screen crunching numbers from users' vote during the show. Personally, I have more passion for software then for Zombies or Vampires, so I found it to be much more fun watching my laptop screen then TV. What struck me is that just a few years back, numbers that I saw on my laptop will be if not impossible but extremely difficult to achieve. So, I am glad to report, that common (open source) technology is finally is at the level that it allows a relatively small team of good engineers to write an application that works for TV-audience scale. What worked for us is the combination of: Nginx Tornado Server with epoll Redis EC2 and CloundFront Of cause, it's a lot of work to make them work together in scalable and reliable fashion but, at least, finally, we do not need to mix sand and clay to make bricks first if we want to build a house - all bricks are are read...

This morning Amazon announced availability of a bulk email delivery service called " Simple Email Service ". Anyone who knows how much pain is it to set-up scalable email solution (and it is not just spammers who need it!) should celebrate the occasion. I know of a company that spent several years cleaning ip addresses it sends email and found itself locked into the contract with internet provider since it would take forever to reach required level of email deliver ability anywhere else. Anyway, this evening I decided to check the Amazon claim that the service is "simple". Found out that it is indeed simple! Since there is not much in terms of the documentation yet, here is my code where I used AWS PHP library : // Enable full-blown error reporting. http://twitter.com/rasmus/status/7448448829 error_reporting (- 1 ); // Set plain text headers header ( "Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8" ); // Include the SDK require_once '../sdk.class.php' ...