Author: Maarten Smeets
In the ever-evolving world of software development, efficiency is key. As a developer / software architect, I’ve discovered that incorporating AI tools like ChatGPT into my workflow has been …
‘Kafka is dead’ is a statement that is circulating more and more often. Critics point to a lack of innovation, the complexity of the product and the emergence of …
Explore key lessons in implementing a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) system, balancing innovation with practicality for enhanced AI responses.
Explore the hidden complexities of PaaS services and learn practical strategies to manage them effectively, ensuring simplicity, speed, and efficiency in cloud computing.
Running Large Language Models (LLMs) locally offers enhanced privacy, independence, cost effectiveness, and unrestricted use. This guide covers tools like LM Studio and Ollama for setup and hands-on learning.
Many systems undergo routine maintenance, causing planned downtime usually outside regular working hours, often unnoticed by users. However critical systems can’t afford any downtime due to potential catastrophic consequences, …
To quote Wikipedia (here): “Stable Diffusion is a deep learning, text-to-image model released in 2022. It is primarily used to generate detailed images conditioned on text descriptions, though it …
When using AI models like Stable Diffusion, sometimes input images need to be of a specific size. In case of Stable Diffusion, multiples of 64 are required. Stable Diffusion …
In the IoT world, some devices generate large volumes of events that can be difficult for back-end systems to process in real time. Of course you can use NiFi …
There are several cases where you might want to use Azure Log Analytics to monitor your NiFi instances. An obvious one is when NiFi is running in Azure. Azure …
When you import a new process group or upgrade an existing one, missing parameters contexts and parameters will automatically be added. The new parameters will be filled with values …
Jolt is a Java library which can be used to transform JSON to JSON. A Jolt transformation specification itself is also a JSON file. You can use it in …
Apache NiFi is a powerful open source integration product. A challenge you might encounter when integrating systems is that one system can produce JSON messages and the other has …
Apache NiFi has a powerful web-based interface which provides a seamless experience between design, control, feedback, and monitoring. Sometimes however, you want to automate tasks instead of doing them …
Apache NiFi is an easy to use, powerful, and reliable system to process and distribute data. It has a powerful UI which can be used for both development and …
Previously I wrote about generating random data which conforms to an AVRO schema (here). In a recent use-case, I encountered the situation where there were several separate schema files …
AVRO schema are often used to serialize JSON data into a compact binary format in order to for example transport it efficiently over Kafka. When you want to validate …
Recently I was designing an AVRO schema and wanted to test how data would look like which conformed to this schema. I developed some Java code to generate sample …
Apache NiFi can be used to expose various flavors of webservices. Using NiFi in such a way provides benefits like quick development using a GUI and of course data …
Apache NiFi can be used to accelerate big data projects by allowing easy integration between various data sources. Using Apache NiFi it is easy to track what happened to …
Vagrant can be used to quickly create development environments in for example VirtualBox, VMWare or Hyper-V. I decided to use Vagrant to create a quick Apache NiFi development environment. …
Your customer has a specific challenge and wants to have it solved by means of software. They ask you as a software/solution architect to advise them on this topic …
Quality is something which is hard to define. Different areas of expertise use their own definitions of what quality is. Without an objective standard which carries weight, anyone can …
Sometimes you want to record online presentations to maybe re-watch them later or share them with colleagues. It is not always possible to easily do this from within the …
This is my 200th blog post. Also I reached 1M page-views recently. In those 200 blog posts, I used approximately 325K words. An average non-fiction book is somewhere between …
Jenkins is a solid CI/CD platform which has proven itself over the years. Many organizations use it to build, test and deploy their applications. In Jenkins it is possible …
SonarCloud is a hosted SonarQube SaaS solution which helps you with code quality management. It is free to use for open source projects. You cannot install 3rd party plugins …
GitHub Actions allow you to do most CI/CD tasks for free, directly from your GitHub repository. One of the challenges however is that there is no build-in facility like …
I’m a regular user of GitHub. Recently I discovered GitHub also has a build-in CI/CD workflow solution called GitHub Actions. Curious about how this would work I decided to …
OWASP ZAP (Zed Attack Proxy) is an open source dynamic application security testing (DAST) tool. It is available here and has a website with documentation here. I recently encountered it when looking …
It is often expected of a DevOps team to also take security into consideration when delivering software. Often however, this does not get the attention it deserves. In this …
You might want to change the behavior of a Java application at runtime without having to alter the original sources and recompile them. This can be done by using …
There are a lot of use-cases in which you might want to automate web-browser actions. For example to automate tedious repetitive tasks or to perform automated tests of front-end …
The OWASP Foundation plays an important role in helping to improve security of software worldwide. They have created a popular and well-known awareness document called the ‘OWASP Top 10‘. …
Anchore Engine is a popular open source tool for container image inspection and vulnerability scanning. It is easily integrated in a Kubernetes environment as an admission controller or in …
Kubernetes is a popular platform to run and manage containerized applications. A CI/CD solution is often needed but not always provided. You might need to set this up for …
OpenEBS provides a Kubernetes native distributed storage solution which is friendly on developers and administrators. It is completely open source and part of the CNCF. Previously I wrote about …
There are various options to install a production-like Kubernetes distribution on your laptop. Previously I tried out using the Canonical stack (Juju, MAAS, Charmed Kubernetes) for this. This worked nicely but …
Applications nowadays, are usually deployed inside containers. A container consists of libraries and tools which allow the application to run inside. Since there can be exploitable vulnerabilities, it is …
When giving online presentations, it helps for personal marketing if people can see you on the screen. Various tools provide features which help you achieve that, for example Microsoft …
