A quick introduction into what pointers are, why they exist & how to use them
Arguably one of the more complicated aspects of any low level programming language is the subject of pointers. If you’ve ever struggled with the concepts behind them and how they work, you’re not alone!
I first became fully aware of pointers when I was working on an embedded C project using Atmel chips. There, memory was tight and I had to use it sparingly. It was a great introduction into the benefits of using pointers.
What problem do they solve?
When computers run code, they pass around variables like ints…
A quick, hands-on introduction into Docker and containerization.
In this Article, we’ll go over what the tool is, what purpose it serves as well as working through an example to containerize a simple python application.
Docker
What is it
Docker is a tool to pull together a set of resources for your application to run anywhere. It pulls everything from a base OS to the language runtime to the frameworks and libraries your app needs to run, and puts them in a self-contained box, a container. A bit like a VM but without the user interface. …
A quick guide on how to get up and running locally using Docker-compose.
If you’ve made it here you probably already have an app that you want to add some metrics to and have displayed. This is a good idea, mainly because:
- Having to kubectl into the pod all the time to ascertain how your apps performing can be a pain.
- It’ll impress the project manager with some fancy graphs.
- You can quickly see what's going on in your app when sysadmin won’t give you access to the DB (probably for the best).
How to connect data being distributed via a web-socket to Kafka and then onto an S3 bucket.
If you’ve made it here you’ve probably exhausted stack-overflow and just want to know how to stream data into an S3 bucket. Fear not, the code is included below.
But first, a couple of helpful resources (other than stack-overflow) that i came across on my quest for real-time data storage.
- The Confluent Slack group: You may have to put up being bombarded with sales emails but the first hand help you’ll get to specific problems is second to none.
- If you’re completely unfamiliar…
Alex
Software Engineer, Architect and General Polyglot
