https://blog.x5ff.xyz/img/main/logo.png https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ 144 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ Recent content in Blog on x5ff Hugo -- gohugo.io en Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/learn-async-rust-liveproject/ Tue, 03 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/learn-async-rust-liveproject/ Do you remember a time when you learned something so quickly because you had an afternoon to experiment and a way to find out whether something worked? Riding a bike? Solving a puzzle? Learning to cook? The publisher Manning has created something like that - but for tech and over the last couple of months I have been working on a Manning LiveProject for async Rust. The testers liked what I built, so I wanted to share it with you. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/sgx-rust-encrypted-computing/ Fri, 28 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/sgx-rust-encrypted-computing/ By adopting cloud computing, us developers place trust in service providers that our code and data is not manipulated once deployed - but how can we make sure? The rise of blockchain finance has shown that we are short one thing on the internet: trust. Although most of the time when we run code on cloud services (PaaS and “lower”) nothing happens, the incentives for attacking systems are growing. Stealing tokens, ransomware, or political interests promise great rewards - and injecting malicious code is becoming a more lucrative avenue (e. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/git-mono-repo-for-beginners/ Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/git-mono-repo-for-beginners/ Monorepos store everything in a single repository, whether it’s code, documentation, or any other asset that has to do with the system you are building. This leads to a large number of commits and stakeholders, so how can you mitigate plunging it into chaos? With the digital transformation picking up steam, large and small manufactures find themselves hiring software teams and producing code. Unlike widgets however, code is infinitely flexible so everything can (and likely will) be changing over time. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/factorio-game-server-azure-terraform/ Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/factorio-game-server-azure-terraform/ Do you remember the good old days when SSH, manual tuning, and shell scripts were considered a solid base for running a Linux server? Often I couldn’t remember how I configured something just a day later… These days we have it better: declaration files have become more descriptive code and ideally they produce a consistent state in hardware and software. One such example is the magnificient Terraform. Together with a containers as a deployment format, deployment and maintenance should be a breeze. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/async-tests-tokio-rust/ Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/async-tests-tokio-rust/ One reason to like the Rust ecosystem is testing. No test runners need to be installed, no reading up on 10 variations of unit testing frameworks, no compatibiltity issues… … or are there? Rust has recently started supporting full async/await abilities after years of development and it looks like there is a missing piece there: tests. How so? Let’s back up a bit In order to work with async code, there are two things you need: https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ai-azureml-python-data-pipelines/ Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ai-azureml-python-data-pipelines/ The AzureML SDK is Microsoft’s machine learning support framework that comes with several examples, docs, best practices etc. However, working on a simple ETL-type scenario, I learned a few key insights that I wanted to share. First, let’s clarify what AzureML Services are. What is AzureML? The concept of the AzureML framework is great. It supports all areas of the machine learning cycle and it’s generic, which means it works with anything that you are willing to call machine learning. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/easy-programming-with-rust-macros/ Fri, 07 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/easy-programming-with-rust-macros/ Hello fellow Rustaceans! Let’s explore a topic that has been quite foreign to me for a long time: macros. After reading this post you’ll be able to automate all kinds of tasks. (Or skip the reading and go to GitHub directly) Like everybody, I dread copy-paste programming of boiler plate code. However I also never looked into macros, partly because the C/C++ macro engine was still in the back of my mind, operating as a fancy search-and-replace step before compilation; partly because Rust’s macros looked complex and I didn’t want to deal with that… . https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/writing-a-book/ Mon, 04 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/writing-a-book/ Humans love stories! In fact, stories of some kind have been a large part of how we retained knowledge across generations - making us successful as groups. Our brains are constructed in a way that we remember things better when they are presented as a plot with characters, places, and relationships. In fact there is a memorization technique that focusses on us doing things in familiar places to recall those things. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/what-makes-rust-awesome-2019/ Tue, 08 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/what-makes-rust-awesome-2019/ During the RustFest 2018 in Rome, Aaron Turon said something that stuck with me, which was that Rust is actually about empowering developers. Personally I think this is a very profound thought, that the goal of a programming language is to help others to do and achieve things they never thought possible. JavaScript empowers developers by being accessible - everyone can start and succeed quickly. It’s great. Rust on the other hand empowers developers by giving them the tools to go deep. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust-ai/ Thu, 25 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust-ai/ Welcome to the wonderful world of Rust … or to be more specific it’s about Rust and WASM Azure Functions Genetic Algorithms Solving a complex optimization problem, fast This is part four in a series of Rust on Azure Functions. The other parts are about performance comparisons (part 1 and part 2), and explaining the PMX algorithm (part 3). If you want to learn more about Genetic Algorithms be sure to read part 3 first). https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/cratedb-iothub-timeseries-prediction/ Wed, 12 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/cratedb-iothub-timeseries-prediction/ This post is the result of a CSE engagement with Crate.io, where I used to work before Microsoft Convenient data science, wouldn’t that be great? When creating or buying an IoT (Internet of Things) type solution, it comes without any further ways to actually make something out of the data - this is left to you, the user. Where to put the data and store only the relevant bits? How can this be made an easy to use and easy to manage solution for your data scientists? https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ai-rust-javascript-pmx/ Sun, 26 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/ai-rust-javascript-pmx/ It is time machines learned something and helped humanity - don’t you think? There are ways to teach them though. We’ll be talking about: Genetic Algorithms The travelling salesman problem and how to solve it PMX - the partially mapped crossover Engineers traditionally don’t understand how salespeople operate - even though we share a fundamental problem: the travelling salesman problem. The Travelling Salesman Salesmen have always been on the road it seems - long enough for this fairly old (mathematical) problem to exist. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust-2/ Mon, 25 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust-2/ Interaction between technology is great! While giving developers from either language the chance to tap into a potentially larger and - in other areas maybe? - useful technology. These interactions have to be explored to know their limits and where they excel. Explore A couple of weeks back I started using WASM on Azure’s FaaS (serverless/Functions as a Services) and unexpectedly the Rust version of my simple Monte Carlo estimation was considerably slower than its JavaScript counterpart. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/servicefabric-sql-multiregion-cloud/ Sun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/servicefabric-sql-multiregion-cloud/ Do you have users around the globe? Have you ever worried about response times or local laws? A major advantage of any cloud provider is that this is usually easy to take care of - however is it worth the extra cost of closer to customers? Commonly - and instinctively - everyone would agree that it makes the experience better. Making it economically viable however is a different story: can startups get into this early on or would the operating expense be too much of a risk? https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/automated-farming-permaculture/ Mon, 28 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/automated-farming-permaculture/ Can one project make a difference? Does code change anything? In a world that increasingly blends virtual and real worlds together, I believe it does. Especially looking at recent events and how their ethical virtual missteps considerably impacted the real world! In this light, its even more important to come up with ideas and projects that empower people to make better decisions and improve their standard of living. Machine learning (AI, to use the marketing term) has a huge potential to provide us with smarter tools, tools that can make small decisions and present their operators with higher level choices. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust/ Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-functions-wasm-rust/ What do you think about serverless? Is it the best thing ever - or just another terrible idea? Regardless if you love or hate the term or technology, I think universal access to it is critical. And since Rust is fast, safe, and simply awesome I’ll give that a try! Node, wasm & Rust As a high-level recap: NodeJS is a runtime for JavaScript applications based on Google’s V8 engine. It’s highly optimized and provides a way to create JavaScript-based (incl. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/machine-learning-in-housing/ Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/machine-learning-in-housing/ With Microsoft I get to travel to interesting places and events around the world - and I get to work with companies to solve whatever they think accelerates their business the most. This time, we invited several companies to work with assigned Microsoft software engineers over several days focussing on two things: Improving their skills on machine learning Trying to solve the problem(s) - or explain what the difficulties are If that sounds strange to you, I encourage you to go read my other post about my work at CSE. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/typescript-bing-search/ Sun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/typescript-bing-search/ A picture I took near the customer’s office in Bordeaux, FR: Pont Jacques Chaban-Delmas This post is about the work I do at Microsoft, read more here. Online retail platforms are strange places, valid information is rare and especially titles seem to be the catch-all. Partly of course, this is encouraged by the platform for SEO reasons and while this is only a slight annoyance for consumers, platform providers struggle a lot more: their goal is to gather structured data about the products (e. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/cse-at-microsoft/ Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/cse-at-microsoft/ tl; dr? Back in September (2017) I joined one of the leading tech companies: Microsoft. Coming from the startup world (Crate.io) I got to start in a newly formed group called CSE - Commercial Software Engineering. The goal of this group is simple: solve the biggest challenges of customers to enable them to go further, higher, and bigger - and share the outcome. This is of course fairly independent of technology, but our center of expertise and resources can be found around Microsoft Azure (which is gearing up to support all kinds of languages, frameworks, OS, etc. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-ci-cd-vsts/ Fri, 02 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-ci-cd-vsts/ Since I started at Microsoft about 6 months ago, I had to catch up on their (our) tech: Azure, .NET, Visual Studio. Yet as an avid GitHub user I overlooked one thing completely: Visual Studio Team Services! Turns out it’s quite the hidden gem and after a colleague showed me some of its power, I had to look into it more deeply. Turns out it’s an easy and free resource for any project. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/a-journey-into-rust-2018/ Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/a-journey-into-rust-2018/ That image is amazing by the way and CC0 licensed. Thanks! In 2017 a lot has changed and it has been a great year for Rust. The compiler became a lot more mature, libraries/crates stabilized, and many Rust-related talks showed up on (non-Rust) conferences… but let’s start at the beginning. When I started off my journey with Rust it was (and still is) driven by my curiousity and willingness to go the ’extra mile’ to find out how things work. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-mqtt-azure-iothub/ Tue, 19 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-mqtt-azure-iothub/ More Microsoft cloud? Yes! Keep reading to see why I believe that Rust is a great language for IoT - I have posted about making your sensors speak Rust, spoken at conferences and meetups about containerized deployments for Rust, but I felt like there was something missing. Often I felt that I couldn’t leverage existing solutions to go further and build models on top of that temperature data, build a fancy dashboard… . https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/neosegment-pi-api/ Sun, 29 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/neosegment-pi-api/ (Disclaimer: this is not a sponsored post. I bought everything myself, I just like a good product.) With a cool hardware like this, the question is: what should it show? Temperature data? Boring. A clock? Even more boring. Twitter feeds? Too long. What could it be? Use this API to create something cool and let me know on twitter. Let it shine! Raspberry Pis have been used to collect information many times; several of my talks have featured temperature drivers, web API consumptions, and I even ran a database on it. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-app-services/ Fri, 13 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/azure-app-services/ “Is this another piece of Internet propaganda? Microsoft is just trying to get me to pay for their expensive cloud. I’ll stick with AWS!!11!” We have all had these thoughts about the other cloud provider. However, technology should be for everyone to choose whatever fits their needs. Does Azure fit yours? Read and find out. Regardless of any personal preferences, I thought that Microsoft’s developer tools always were impressively automated and advanced. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-sensors/ Wed, 20 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-sensors/ Rust really loves strict typing, it makes the language efficient, fast and free of a noisy garbage collector. It’s great. Unfortunately though, dealing with the real world is - as usual - less well-defined. Enter the messy world of sensors and electronics! Like videos better? Look no further! As a Developer … Within IT, there is often a friendly dispute between hardware and software people. The former insist on efficiency and have a low-level angle to things, whereas the latter - including me - enjoy a rather abstract view of the actual devices involved. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/typescript-interval-iot/ Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/typescript-interval-iot/ “… but not everything is bad about JavaScript” This is a sentence I heard a lot in the past, but not so much recently. Could JavaScript have gotten better? Or is it just the frameworks that iron out the bad stuff? Or the different flavors that came out over the years? In any case there certainly is some bad stuff left and for me - as a backend developer - the garbage collection seems to be pretty odd and while TypeScript is a fun language you still have to deal with it a lot. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-cratedb/ Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/rust-cratedb/ With the 1.0 release of my Rust driver for CrateDB, I decided to share how the driver works as well as document some of the decisions around its creation. Check out the repository for the driver on Github. CrateDB CrateDB is a distributed SQL database and BLOB store that is particularly well suited for anything that generates a large volume of data and requires analysis - sensor data being a prime example. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/nas-raspberry-pi/ Sun, 27 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/nas-raspberry-pi/ The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful device and since its hardware is quite bored being a music server alone, I decided that it’s time to bake more functionality into it. Coincidently, my NAS’ hard disks are beginning to fail and since I am in need of a hobby, I decided to give my Raspberry Pi a chance. From a specification perspective, my NAS is quite satisfying featuring 2 3.5" hard disk bays, RAID, USB3. https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/init-scala-jdbc-and-cratedb/ Sun, 07 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.x5ff.xyz/blog/init-scala-jdbc-and-cratedb/ This being my first post and all: Welcome! I hope that you find some interesting content here, if not - I am open for suggestions. Let’s start off with some more tech-related stuff: Other than Python, I mostly prefer Scala for personal (and sometimes professional) projects since I really like its (although complex) elegance, static typing, and the functional approach to programming. So to get on top of current frameworks and patterns I decided to use Scala once again.