Blog

HealthTech Data Infrastructure Trends

|

HealthTech Data Infrastructure Trends The future of healthcare is deeply connected to the pace and effectiveness of groundbreaking new technologies like wearable devices, artificial intelligence, and robotic surgery that are redefining clinical outcomes.  For the innovators behind this new tech, data is key. In tandem with these advances, data analytics can help detect disease, facilitate the transition to value-based care models, improve physician performance, even predict possible outbreaks. Timely, relevant, actionable data is the fuel that powers HealthTech and enables…

Read More

What’s the point of Lambda SnapStart?

|

Lambda SnapStart is intended to improve the cold start time for a Lambda function. It’s been available for Java workloads since 2022, and was recently released for Python and .Net workloads. It works by running the initialization code of your Lambda function when you release a version, and then storing an image of the Lambda execution environment. Cold starts load this image rather than running the initialization themselves. Given that cold starts happen unpredictably, and may be measured in seconds, this seems like a win-win situation.

The reality, as usual, is more nuanced. SnapStart introduces its own cold start delays, as it loads the image into the runtime. And it increases the time and effort of deployment. In this post I drill down into the nuance, so that you can decide whether it’s a worthwhile choice fo your project.

Read More

Chariot Day Recap 2024

|

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…

Read More

SBRA Briefing Writeup

|

  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…

Read More

What, Why, and How of gRPC

|

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…

Read More

How to Diagnose Distressed Development Projects

|

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…

Read More

Getting Started with Burpless: Writing Cucumber Tests in Clojure

|

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…

Read More

An ML tale: From notebook to production

|

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…

Read More

Cost Optimizing an ML Feature Store

|

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…

Read More
1 2 … 53

How can we help your company with your development needs?

Contact Us