Part #1 — How to connect your first device to IoT Core — Everything is getting connected. Even people who don’t really want to own connected devices are likely to have a few in their homes, because smart metering is popular and it’s hard to buy a TV that is not “smart” nowadays. Alexa is natively fitted in a number of cars and the…

How to safely share and reuse your code across multiple projects — Every programmer who follows the basic principles of coding ends up with a lot of reusable code. To make the most out of it and streamline maintenance, such code needs to be distributed through a centralized source. Every programmer also uses dependency packages on a daily basis. So it’s easy to…

Respond to connection events and make the data actionable — As I developed my first IoT project on the Google Cloud Platform I quickly realized that I could not find any reliable indicator of MQTT connection status of devices in Google Cloud IoT Core. The get REST Resource from the Cloud IoT Core API returns a lastHeartbeatTime timestamp from which I…

An uncharted path to a powerful ingestion tool for Big Data — If you deal in Big Data, Cloud migrations, application modernization and system integration projects, chances are that you need move and import huge amounts of data across different systems. The BigQuery Data Transfer Service (DTS) offered by the Google Cloud Platform facilitates the ingestion of big data from a number…

How to fix “Error 400: Failed to find a valid credential” and “Service Account does not exist” for Scheduled Queries — The Google Cloud Platform loves Terraform. So do I. Yet, as I wrote in a previous article, fully automating infrastructures on GCP sometimes requires a little creativity to work around some limitations of the platform API or extra steps to make up for the lack of documentation in the Terraform…

How to retroactively run Big Data analytics jobs in BigQuery — I love BigQuery and I used it in a number of Big Data projects. I like its flexibility, the powerful query language (including the possibility to query external sources) and the many built-in functionalities. I am also fond of the Data Transfer Service, because it makes it so easy (and…

A workaround to a known Google Cloud API catch-22 issue — The folks at Google Cloud Platform seem to love Terraform. They embraced it so much to advertise it in their own documentation, providing tutorials, courses, reference modules, validation and import tools. Also, I haven’t heard a lot about their native Cloud Deployment Manager lately. So it feels like Terraform has…

Make Software an Asset and your Life easier as a Developer — Every seasoned developer has been there: the production system crashing during the holidays. The late-night calls. The turnover without handover. The legacy code that nobody dares to update because it’s not documented. The new privacy laws wreaking havoc on long-standing workloads. Writing good software is a huge investment and building…

A Primer On Modern PHP In Containers — I haven’t touched PHP in a long while. Since I started focusing on IoT, Cloud architectures and Infrastructure-as-Code (kudos, HashiCorp!) some 7 years ago I dedicated my time and efforts to other languages and tools. …