At Chariot, we’re fans of deploying on Amazon’s Elastic Container Service using Fargate. However, there are a few stumbling blocks for ECS deployments. In this post I cover the common problems that I’ve seen, and some of the techniques that I use to avoid tripping over them.
A Charioteer is a highly skilled engineer that works for Chariot. When discussing the finer details of tuples and wormholes, it is easy to forget that each one of these engineers have a family and a life outside of the code. Every year the Charioteers get together at the Chariot office to show off their technical chops, but also some of my more favorite talks are ones about anything but code. The day starts with a wonderful breakfast to wake…
Dr. Jennifer Shatley, a leading expert in responsible gaming, delivered a powerful talk at SBRA BRIEFING ON RESPONSIBLE AND PROBLEM GAMING. She clearly distinguished between responsible gaming and problem gambling, which framed the rest of the discussion, highlighting the critical need for proactive measures to ensure gambling remains a safe and enjoyable pastime. The difference between responsible gaming and problem gambling can be summed up as follows: Responsible gaming is all about prevention, while problem gambling requires intervention. Think…
Introduction When developers start a new software project, they frequently give a lot of consideration to the choice of programming language or languages, frameworks, and persistence tools; however, they often give little thought to how the services or endpoints will communicate. Projects will automatically select REST, or something REST-like for this communication. There are other options available, each with their own strengths and weaknesses, and one of the more interesting ones is gRPC. What is gRPC? Google developed gRPC as…
In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on diagnosing health issues early to prevent them from escalating into serious problems. This proactive approach has proven effective in maintaining health and well-being, and it can be equally beneficial when applied to software development projects. Recognizing the signs of distress early in a project can help prevent costly setbacks and ensure successful outcomes. Here’s how to diagnose distressed development projects and address their underlying issues. Recognizing the Signs of a…
No matter how rapidly the world of software development may change, one constant is the need to ensure the quality, functionality, and reliability of our software applications. As our demand for more and more complex applications continues to increase, so does the risk, not only that developers might program something incorrectly thereby introducing bugs, but that they might “correctly” build the wrong thing, due to having misunderstood the requirements! Worse than having bugs is having built something that is not…
Data Scientists spend their days working in Jupyter notebooks, which are then passed to an implementation team to prepare for production. This post guides you through that process, emphasizing iterative refinement. I will be using the scikit-learn and XGBoost libraries, but other ML libraries could be swapped in. While scikit-learn offers a comprehensive library of algorithms and tools that simplify data analysis and model building, it doesn’t impose a strict framework for organizing projects. This flexibility can be advantageous, but…
A client recently started building a new machine learning (ML) architecture with a feature store as one of the key pieces. The feature store was already burning through a lot of money on AWS Elasticache and it wasn’t even scaled up in production yet! The project was in danger of being shelved without serious cost reductions so I was asked to take a look and see what could be done. What is a Feature Store? Simply put, a feature store…
We recently explored a project to retrieve data from a third-party service. They didn’t offer any push capabilities such as writing to a Kafka or Kinesis stream, or even a web-hook. But they did offer a WebSocket interface, so we explored whether we could use that as our streaming source. We didn’t go that route, but I was intrigued by the idea enough to make a proof-of-concept.
My motivation for creating tools often stems from a desire to get familiar with new technologies. This project was no different; I wanted to deepen my understanding of Generative AI. However, this wasn’t the primary reason for its creation. The real driving force was a persistent gap in my workflow that I couldn’t ignore any longer. Every so often I’ll encounter a task that makes me think, “If only this one thing was more like this,” or “If I could…
