Searching DynamoDB: An indexer sidecar for Elasticsearch

One thing that I like about the modern world is that large technology companies are a lot more open than they were in the previous century. Many of them contribute to the Open Source ecosystem and frequently share their wisdom on how to use and not to use a particular technology.

Have a look at the recent post from Bitbucket blog: Searching DynamoDB: An indexer sidecar for Elasticsearch, for example.

It’s not your usual marketing nonsense about introducing a new needless service or self-praising review of a product. It’s a rather deep dive into a technical topic that has been getting a lot of attention for the last few years – NoSQL databases. Not only the blog post itself is interesting, but it provides plenty of useful links to other resources. Like this one, which covers database partitioning in depth. Or this one, which lists some of the best practices for designing and using partition keys effectively.

I wish more companies shared their technical insights like this.

API Platform – REST and GraphQL framework to build modern API-driven projects

API Platform is a framework for building API-driven projects. I came across this via this blog post that covers the recent release of v2.4. The list of features and components is quite extensive:

  • Read and write support for MongoDB
  • Read support for Elasticsearch
  • Message queues support via a number of brokers, including Amazon SQS
  • Server Push support for HTTP/2
  • Full compatibility with OpenAPI v3 (Swagger)
  • Automated admin interface and project documentation
  • A variety of components from the Symfony framework

I’m pretty sure that I’ll be taking this for a spin in the nearest future!

Logging best practices

Logging, I think, is one of the least debated subjects in the software development. Everyone does it at least to some degree. Everyone agrees that good logs are important. But beyond that, there’s enough debate on what are the best practices, tools, and options. We need more of blog posts like this one and slides like these.

Paul Le Roux – Criminal Mastermind

Here’s the name I haven’t heard before – Paul Le Roux. He started off as an Open Source software developer, but quickly turned into one of, if not the largest cyber criminals.

Reply All podcast did an episode about him recently, and the story is mind-blowing.

The mention of Paul Le Roux trying to buy a submarine from the North Korea for his drug trafficking affairs reminded me of another crime documentary – Operation Odessa. Here’s the trailer to get you started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpSHbuRC-No

Home Assistant – Open Source Home Automation

One day I will get to this whole subject of home automation. Or office automation. Or some other premises automation. That day, I’ll probably need to look at Home Assistant:

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first. Powered by a worldwide community of tinkerers and DIY enthusiasts. Perfect to run on a Raspberry Pi or a local server.

Open Source, locally hosted, and private – that’s nice. It runs on a variety of hardware, like Raspberry Pie or Amazon Fire HD tablet, which can be mounted on the wall with 3M wall stickers.

There’s also a whole lot of ready components ready to use. And new ones, I hear, are easy to develop in Python.