48th Monthly Technical Session (MTS) Report
48th Monthly Technical Session (MTS) was held on July 20th, 2018. MTS is a knowledge sharing event, in which HDE members present some topics and have Q&A sessions, both in English.
The first topic was Introducing Sakura Cloud by Arakawa.
Arakawa works as customer support for mail sending service. He has investigated Sakura Cloud (さくらのクラウド) to build and manage Mail Transfer Agent (MTA). He listed 4 important things of MTA.
- Global IP
- Bandwidth
- Computing Resources
- Flexibility and Redundancy
On Sakura Cloud, we can buy 64 IP addresses, which is good for MTA. As for bandwidth and computing resources, instances on Sakura Cloud can handle one million emails with no problems. They also made it easy to develop services. Docker, Terraform, and Vagrant are supported on Sakura Cloud. His team will try to use Sakura Cloud to develop new products.
The second topic was ECS with EFS by Stephen.
Now Stephen works on new project that prepare warmed up IP addresses. This project uses Docker and Postfix. He tries updating their another service to use Docker and Postfix but there are some problems.
One of them is storage issue. On IP warming project, it doesn’t matter if postfix’s log and mail queue are deleted by stopping or restarting docker container accidentally. But in production service, we must keep them. To solve this issue, He choose EFS, because it’s flexible in terms of size and many containers can access the storage. Also, we can mount the storage like a local file system.
The third topic was Progressive Web Apps by Shinohara.
Shinohara is interested in Progressive Web App (PWA).
PWA is a one of guidelines of web application. It makes your web application mobile friendly. On PWA, it works like native application and users can use the app on poor network condition. Also the app can receive push notification.
According to Shinohara, if one follows the PWA guidelines, there’s no need to build a native application. He showed it with a simple PWA. It worked offline and installed on Android as an app.
The fourth topic was PyCon Kyushu by David.
PyCon Kyushu was held June 30, 2018 at LINE’s office in Fukuoka. He went to Fukuoka by Shinkansen. It took 5 hours.
One of the speakers told Pros and Cons of working as engineer in Fukuoka. They can avoid taking crowded train. On the other hand, there are few study groups.
David met many interesting people and things and he brought a magic spoon that makes curry taste better from the event. However, no one had tried to eat curry with the spoon, so no one knows whether it is true or not.
The fifth topic was Slack by My.
Slack is a good communication tool. But, searching some information like a URL from a long thread history can be tiresome. To solve it, she used Zapier. Zapier is the service to create workflow easily. She created a workflow that copies the posted message from a private channel into her Google Drive. She demonstrated her workflow. She posted rabbit image to her private channel and the image is stored to her google drive.
The sixth topic was AI evolution in video game by Xuxin.
He introduced AI, especially AI for Games. Game AI can be classified into 2 types. Pseudo AI and Real AI.
Pseudo AI is made for human to enjoy the game. Example, in Pacman, there are 4 types of enemy. Each enemies has different strategy and they follow it. Some of enemies escape from pacman, other enemies follows pacman. Players enjoy games with these kind of enemies.
Real AI is made to defeat humans in the game. Example, Deep Blue, it is a chess AI for defeating human chess champion. Deep Blue played against Garry Kasparov in 1997.
The seventh topic was What’s Now in Pixar’s Latest Big Hit: Coco? By Michelle.
She introduced movie technology of Pixar. Pixar creates computer animation film. They also develops rendering technology to generate fantastic scenes.
In Coco, they created a special effects that made a scene realistic. They also used physics simulation to render a scene in which many objects are scattered.
The eighth topic was Introduction of Kubernetes Architecture by Eric.
He introduced Azure IoT edge. Azure IoT edge supports Kubernetes, which is a container deployment and orchestration tool, to manage IoT. Therefore, IoT can be managed the same way as virtual machines, simplifying the DevOps work.
As usual, we had a party afterwards :)
