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Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is an automated approach in which incremental code changes are made, built, tested and delivered. Organizations want to get their software solutions to market as quickly as possible without sacrificing quality or stability. While CI/CD is often associated with application code, it can also be beneficial for managing changes to PostgreSQL database clusters. By Bob Pacheco.

Crunchy Postgres is the first commercially available open source relational database management system to receive Common Criteria certification. Turnkey Monitoring. Easily deploy Kubernetes native open source PostgreSQL - powered by Crunchy Postgres Operator (PGO).

GitOps plays an important part in enabling CI/CD. If you are unfamiliar with GitOps, I recommend starting with my previous post on Postgres GitOps with Argo and Kubernetes. The article covers:

• Prerequisites
• Self test container
• ArgoCD
• Create an ArgoCD repository
• Create an ArgoCD project
• Create the ArgoCD applications
• Deploy the Crunchy Postgres for Kubernetes cluster

The declarative nature of the manifest combined with the power of GitOps and ArgoCD makes creating a CI/CD pipeline easier than ever. This blog only covers a segment of a full end to end pipeline. In my next blog we will look at how to apply new images to an existing application using ArgoCD Image Update. Nice one!

ChatGPT-3.5 is useful. ChatGPT-4 can be very useful. But, for the most useful version of ChatGPT to date, you need to add, implement, and use ChatGPT-4 with plugins. By Steven Vaughan-Nichols.

Plugins add more search capabilities to the chatbot and integrate it with third-party services. Extensions, like any Chrome extensions, are just added via the Chrome Web Store. Plugins are trickier. Here’s how you find and install them. Further in the article:

• How to install ChatGPT-4 plugins
• How to use ChatGPT Browse with Bing
• Select your AI model and feature
• How to use ChatGPT plugins
• Explore the plugins
• What are the caveats of ChatGPT-4 plugins?

Once installed, you simply choose to use the model with them activated. That’s all there is to it. Under the hood, the ChatGPT application programming interfaces (API)s are being invoked, but you don’t have to worry about the tech details. Just write your prompt and go. Good read!

User Experience, commonly called UX, is an all-encompassing term that refers to a user’s overall perception of and response to using a product, system, or service. In the context of software development solutions, it is the quality of the interaction a user has with a software product. By Naveen Joshi.

This article explores the importance of UX design in software development. Amongst others it explains:

• Components of UX
• The difference between UX and UI
• How does UX impact custom software development?
• Incorporating UX into custom software development solutions
• Challenges in integrating UX
• The future of UX in custom software development

… and more. The field of UX is evolving rapidly, driven by technological advancements and changes in user behavior. One significant trend is the growing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in UX design. AI and machine learning algorithms can analyze large amounts of user data to deliver personalized experiences, predict user behavior, and make intelligent recommendations. Good read!

A design pattern is a repeatable solution to solve common problems in a software design. When building apps with the Ruby on Rails framework, you will often face such issues, especially when working on big legacy applications where the architecture does not follow good software design principles. By Paweł Dąbrowski.

The article then explains:

• Advantages of using design patterns
• Commonly used design patterns in Rails applications
  • Service
  • Value object
  • Presenter
  • Decorator
  • Builder
  • Form object
  • Policy object
  • Query object
  • Observer
  • Interactor
  • Null object

Any design pattern should be used with caution. When using them not correctly, we can harm our architecture and overcomplicate the code, which leads to longer development time and higher technical debt. Interesting read!

In today’s digital era, it is essential for businesses to stay competitive by modernising their legacy processes. By updating outdated process flows, software systems and data models, businesses can strengthen their competitive edge in the marketplace, develop new business capabilities and focus on growth into new and developing areas rather than on continually maintaining rigid and inefficient business fundamentals. By Tobias Moeglich.

For most organisations however, it is tricky to know where to begin. Staggeringly, 70% of digital transformations fail, deterring some companies from taking the leap of faith.

This process can be divided into four layers:

• Business strategy
• System architecture
• Operational architecture
• Data models

The first fundamental layer is business strategy. Business strategy determines the three to five-year vision for the business and operations in order to apply this to the IT strategy. The goal of business-IT alignment is to integrate the IT roadmap with business goals in order to lower costs, increase agility, and boost return on investment. This vision should consider the impact of technology on business operations, customer experience, and revenue growth. Good read!

Since serverless is designed to scale to infinity, one of the questions we get asked very often is whether a DDoS attack on the serverless application can result in a hefty Cloud Bill. One way to prevent this is to have rate limiting on API Gateway in place so that the serverless application doesn’t scale to unexpected levels and end up using all underlying resources. By Vishwasa Navada K.

Other than rate limiting at the API Gateway level, AWS offers a service called WAF (Web Application Firewall) that is dedicated to protecting the internet-facing services of AWS like API Gateway, AppSync, App Runner, Application Load Balancer, CloudFront, and Cognito.

WAF offers various predefined configurations to protect the applications from known threats like DDoS, SQL Injection, and XSS. WAF calls these configurations Managed Rules. You could write up your own Rules, or use various rules that are available to use on the WAF Console. A few of these are free to use and provided by AWS, while you could find advanced rules from third-party providers through AWS Marketplace. For details follow the link to full article. Nice one!

Discover how businesses can harness the potential of AI-powered digitization while mitigating risks related to data governance, ethics, workforce adaptability and cybersecurity to drive optimization and achieve unprecedented growth. By Alon Ghelber.

To gain maximal value from the information they already possess, a growing contingent of enterprises is attempting to leverage AI-powered digitization to streamline operations and drive growth and development. However, this brings with it a range of potential risks and challenges. Further in the article:

• The benefits of digitization
• Overcoming the challenges of AI-powered digitization
• Data governance
• Ethics
• Workforce adaptability
• Cybersecurity

AI-powered digitization presents modern enterprises with enormous opportunities for optimization and growth. To fully reap the rewards of this digitization, however, these businesses must mitigate the risks of relying on AI-powered data systems. Good read!

In the last 40 years, I’ve seen three truly disruptive technologies: the world wide web in the early 1990s, Steve Jobs’ introduction of the iPhone in 2007, and ChatGPT a few months ago, now the fastest growing app in history. By By Peter Pezaris.

All three of these technologies share one common trait: they are limitless innovation fractals. In other words, the closer you look and the more you think about how they can be applied to different industries, businesses, and use cases, the larger the number of ideas that are generated, and the ideas seem to go on forever.

Generative AI refers to artificial intelligence models that can generate new data based on existing patterns. These models can create anything from realistic images to coherent text, opening up a world of possibilities across various industries. Here are two key ways generative AI will reshape the observability industry:

• Generative AI will change the way we deliver actionable insights
• Companies will need to develop their own AI strategies to stay competitive

To meet the coming demand, observability solutions must be equipped to handle the complexity and scalability of AI systems. And they must ensure ethical and responsible AI use, which will require a new set of tools and frameworks to implement governance. Nice one!

ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI to respond to human queries about anything from cake recipes to math problems and drafting emails, seems like it can do it all. By Jackson Ryan.

ChatGPT is based on a large language model, or LLM, built to understand human language using machine learning algorithms. It can find patterns in text and spit out confident (but sometimes completely wrong) answers in response to a user prompt. It’s the hottest commodity in tech right now.

“How will ChatGPT play a role in tree health?” The headline led into a pitch about a device built by Californian tech firm ePlant: a solar-powered device known as a “TreeTag.” The TreeTag, a tiny box about the size of a Roku, is affixed to the trunk of a tree and has a suite of five sensors that enable it to capture information about the tree’s health. The sensors record light, moisture and temperature. It can tell you how much the tree is moving or leaning via an accelerometer. There’s also a roundabout way to understand the water and nutrient flow, which is determined by dendrometry – measuring the size of the plant’s inner structures. Good read!

It’s funny how a seemingly meaningless event in one’s life can lead to an unexpected change. For me, one of those events happened in July 2021 when my flight home was delayed by so much that I paid for my very first Uber. For this article, I wanted to see how easy it is for a web2 developer to use Java in order to perform some Fintech transactions using web3 and USDC over the Ethereum blockchain. My plan is to use the Circle Java SDK, Java 17, and a Spring Boot 3 RESTful API. By John Vester.

USD Coin (USDC) is a digital currency that is fully backed by U.S. dollar assets. USDC is a tokenized U.S. dollar, with the value of one USDC coin pegged 1:1 to the value of one U.S. dollar. The value of USDC is designed to remain stable, making USDC a stablecoin.1

The article then describes:

• About Circle and USDC
• Using USDC to make and receive payments with Java? Yes, please!
• Creating a Spring Boot service
• Externalizing Circle configuration
• Adding a Circle integration service
• Creating RESTful URIs

In the article author was able to leverage Java and Spring Boot to integrate a RESTful API into the Circle platform and start making real-time, online, secure payments. All code together with explanation is attached. Good read!