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…
Chariot Solutions is a dedicated partner to operators in the gaming industry, including the social sweepstakes category. We empower our clients to innovate and thrive in a competitive market. This is achieved through our tailored services in custom software development, cloud infrastructure, and data engineering. To gain deeper insights into the technical challenges facing this segment of the industry in 2025, we reached out to Matt Kaufman, Managing Director of Digital & Interactive Gaming at Eilers and Krejcik Gaming (EKG). …
In this post I look at using an Amazon Data Firehose to populate Iceberg tables, with the automatic optimization features that AWS announced in November 2024.
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…
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.
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…
