Sunday, March 3, 2019

TWID March 3, 2019: Death by GPS, Python tool vs code, Alexa + Jenkins, Job Red Flags, Game of Thrones Fantasy League

This is a post detailing some stuff I did, learned, posted and tweeted this week, I call this TWID (This week in Denis). I am doing this mostly for myself... a kind of an online journal so that I can look back on this later on. Will use the label TWID for these

This Week I Learned

Finished the Pluralsight course Applying SQL Server 2016 Features to Real-world Data Problems by Ana Voicu

Death by GPS refers to the death of people attributable, in part, to following GPS directions or GPS maps. Death by GPS has been noted in several deaths in Death Valley, California; a lost hiker at Joshua Tree National Park in southeastern California; and incidents in Washington State, Australia, England, Italy and Brazil.

Got to the wikipedia entry after reading some comments on this link on hackernews: The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans


This Week I Tweeted

Python in Visual Studio Code – February 2019 Release

Test Explorer
This release includes the ability to visualize, navigate and run unit tests through a test explorer, a feature that is commonly requested by our users.

Validated breakpoints when debugging
This release also includes an enhancement to the debugger: validation of breakpoints targets. If a breakpoint is set on a line where breakpoints are invalid (e.g. blank lines, pass statement, lines in the middle of a multi-line statement), then it’s automatically moved to the nearest preceeding valid line

The team keeps cranking out more awesomeness every month


Jenkins + Alexa: Say Hello to Voice Controlled CI/CD 

Alexa (named after the ancient library of Alexandria) is Amazon’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered intelligent voice assistant that runs in the cloud. Software engineers make Alexa smarter by creating apps, called skills. From the time that I developed my first Alexa skill, I dreamed of deploying my Java projects to the cloud via voice. For me, telling Alexa to deploy my code is the ultimate level of cool! I recently made my dream a reality when I devoted a weekend to developing my newest Alexa skill, DevOps Pal. In this blog, I will show you how I developed DevOps Pal and hopefully inspire you to build your own version.


LOL, I have Alexa at home.. but I mostly use it to listen to Music. I am just wondering if they did this because they could and not because this is actually useful. Our builds build upon checkin (on dev, qa/test is scheduled), not sure why you would want to initiate it


Red Flags in Software Developer Job Descriptions

For some reason I’ve been reading a lot of job descriptions for junior devs lately and that has naturally left me with an inordinate number of opinions. I have, with great effort, condensed them here for you, dear reader.

The following aren’t pulled from any specific listings because these types of awfulness transcend the individual - and because that would be dickish. But their spirit should ring true to anyone in the trenches of the job search process.

“Technologies: Coldfusion + jQuery”
Your job search shouldn’t be driven by what’s fashionable in tech, but popularity and the market for a skill are important factors, since they influence a career track’s employability and profitability. The market for Coldfusion devs isn’t too hot (or even a thing) and jQuery simply doesn’t have the complexity or potential power of a full JS MVC. Companies advertising outdated stacks open you up to the risk of building the wrong sorts of skills, which can have far-reaching effects on your career.


One thing that caught my eye was  Coldfusion + jQuery, this is the stack that DJindexes website was built on so had to go and troll my ex co-workers  haha. One reply I got was: All of these jobs sound very interesting to me. Do they have any COBOL and JCL openings?

See also the comments on hackernews here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19268989



By now, it's not much of a secret that Motorola is working on a folding phone of its own: A patent for such a device surfaced late last year, and a subsequent report in The Wall Street Journal basically confirmed the company's plans. Despite the ensuing hype, Motorola has mostly kept quiet about its progress, but in an interview with Engadget this week, Motorola VP of Global Product Dan Dery shed some additional light on the company's ambitions.

"We started to work on foldables a long time ago," Dery said. "And we have been doing a lot of iteration."

Oh man.. now everyone is jumping on this bandwagon??  What happens when you only crack one screen? This still seems idiotic to me, especially at that price point that Samsung has.



This CTP 2.3 preview brings the following new features and capabilities to SQL Server 2019:

Big data clusters
Submit Spark jobs on SQL Server big data clusters from IntelliJ
Application deployment and management experience for deploying a variety of data-related apps including operationalizing machine learning models using R and Python, running SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) jobs, and more
Database engine
Accelerated database recovery to provide constant time recovery and instant rollback for long running transactions
Performance enhancements in query plan recompilations, transaction log management, and Query Store
SQL Graph enhancement to enable cascaded deletion of edges upon the deletion of nodes
SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)
Calculation groups in tabular models that reduce the number of measures by reusing calculation logic


Installed on Sunday morning..checking out what is new and shiny. One thing that Brent Ozar noticed was the is_result_set_caching_on as a new column in sys.databases. So far I haven't heard yet how to turn it on

Some cool stuff you might enjoy

Finished The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine by Charles Petzold. a little dry at times.. but if you like math or want to learn about Turing machines, this book is for you


There is a Game Of Thrones fantasy league? 

I signed up and created a league with a bunch of co-workers
Here is how some of the scoring works


Violence:

10 Kill Random Character / White Walker / Wight (capped at 50pts)
15 Kill White Walker
25 Kill Known or Drafted Character
150 Kill Dragon
5 Incapacitate Random Character (not killed)
10 Incapacitate Known or Drafted Character (not killed)
25 Exit Bonus for Drafted Character Dying Memorably


Status/Power:

200 Take the Iron Throne
25 Sack a City / Lead a Battle Victory (must be present at victory)
25 Get a Seat on the High Council
50 Magic Use (1x Episode / Character)
50 Gain ownership of Valyrian Steel (Must keep through end of episode)
20 Have a Vision/Prophecy (1x / Episode / Character)
15 Take up a Weird/New Religion
10 Get Engaged
20 Get Married
15 Get Pregnant/Get Someone Pregnant
-20 Lose a Baby
25 Official Promotion
-25 Official Demotion
50 Come Back from the Dead
15 Act of Betrayal
15 Form / Join existing alliance
20 Ride or Control Dragon (1x / Episode)
20 MVP of Episode (Scorekeeper's Choice)
50 Revealed as Azor Ahai


I just love Times Square, here is a panorama I took'

Times Square Panorama

No comments: