March 2017 – The Tech Check

Tech

Create an animated GIF of your screencast on Linux

Sunny SrinidhiMarch 13, 20172 Views0

Animated GIFs of screencasts are everywhere today. How do you go from taking a screenshot of your desktop with the "Print Screen" button and recording a video of your desktop to creating an animated GIFs of your screencast to share on the internet? It's actually easier than you think. I'm going to tell you how to do it on a Linux machine, specifically Ubuntu, because I use an Ubuntu machine. The commands here are for Ubuntu, but they can very easily be ported to other *nix machines as well. First, you'll need to install a few tools: ImageMagick, MPlayer, and RecordMyDesktop. We'll be using RecordMyDesktop to record the activities on your screen or a portion of your screen as a video file. We'll use MPlayer to convert that video into a bunch of JPEG images. We'll then use ImageMagick...

Tech

Use Config Caching to Speed Up Your Laravel App

Sunny SrinidhiMarch 13, 20173 Views0

As web developers, we're always looking for ways to speed up our app. It's all about milliseconds today. There are several ways by which a web app or a web service could be optimised for speed. Being one of the most used and popular PHP frameworks, Laravel has a few tricks up its sleeves to make this happen. One of them is config caching. Obviously, this is not going to make tremendous improvement, but significant enough to be written about. So what is config caching? Well, it's exactly what it sounds like, you cache all your configuration so that you don't have to go looking for it every time you want to read a configuration. Laravel, as usual, has an artisan command for this: php artisan config:cache What does this command do? It's common to have all sensitive configuration (such

Apache Kafka Streams and Tables, the stream-table duality

In the previous post, we tried to understand the basics of Apache’s Kafka Streams. In this post, we’ll build on that knowledge and see how Kafka Streams can be used both as streams and tables. Stream processing has become very common in most modern applications today. You’ll have a minimum of one stream coming into […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Getting started with Apache Kafka Streams

In the age of big data and data science, stream processing is very significant. So it’s not at all surprising that every major organisation has at least one stream processing service. Apache has a few too, but today we’re going to look at Apache’s Kafka Streams. Kafka is a very popular pub-sub service. And if […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Put data to Amazon Kinesis Firehose delivery stream using Spring Boot

If you work with streams of big data which have to be collected, transformed, and analysed, you for sure would have heard of Amazon Kinesis Firehose. It is an AWS service used to load streams of data to data lakes or analytical tools, along with compressing, transforming, or encrypting the data. You can use Firehose […]

Sunny Srinidhi

How to Query Athena from a Spring Boot application?

In the last post, we saw how to query data from S3 using Amazon Athena in the AWS Console. But querying from the Console itself if very limited. We can’t really do much with the data, and anytime we want to analyse this data, we can’t really sit in front of the console the whole […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Query data from S3 files using Amazon Athena

Amazon Athena is defined as “an interactive query service that makes it easy to analyze data directly in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) using standard SQL.” So, it’s another SQL query engine for large data sets stored in S3. This is very similar to other SQL query engines, such as Apache Drill. But unlike […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Use Apache Drill with Spring Boot or Java to query data using SQL queries

In the last few posts, we saw how to connect Apache Drill with MongoDB and also how we can connect it to Kafka to query data using simple SQL queries. But when you want to move this to an actual real world project, you can’t sit around querying data from a terminal all day long. […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Apache Drill vs. Apache Spark – Which SQL query engine is better for you?

If you are in the big data or data science or BI space, you might have heard about Apache Spark. A few of you might have also heard about Apache Drill, and a tiny bit of you might have actually worked with it. I discovered Apache Drill very recently. But since then, I’ve come to […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Analyse Kafka messages with SQL queries using Apache Drill

In the previous post, we figured out how to connect MongoDB with Apache Drill and query data with SQL queries. In this post, let’s extend that knowledge and see how we can use similar SQL queries to analyse our Kafka messages. Configuring the Kafka storage plugin in Apache Drill is quite simple, very similar to […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Getting Started with Apache Drill and MongoDB

Not a lot of people have heard of Apache Drill. That is because Drill caters to very specific use cases, it’s very niche. But when used, it can make significant differences to the way you interact with data. First, let’s see what Apache Drill is, and then how we can connect our MongoDB data source […]

Sunny Srinidhi

Integrate AWS DynamoDB with Spring Boot

Here is another POC to add to the growing list of POCs on my Github profile. Today, we’ll see how to integrate AWS DynamoDB with a Spring Boot application. This is going to be super simple, thanks to the AWS Java SDK and the Spring Data DynamoDB package. Let’s get started then. Dependencies First, as […]

Sunny Srinidhi