49th Monthly Technical Session (MTS)
On August 24, 2018 (Friday), we at HDE, Inc. held our 49th mini-conference known as Monthly Technical Session (MTS). As in previous sessions, developers from different teams shared thoughts and ideas on various topics ranging from monitoring to game development. The following is the summary of the talks presented in the session.
“Revenge of the Prometheus Alerts” by Toshi
Toshi has always been interested in monitoring tools for infrastructures (Sensu, Nagios, etc.). In the previous MTS, he gave us a brief introduction on Prometheus but he was not happy with the presentation. So he decided to give a better one. In this talk, Toshi went into details about the metric types that are available in Prometheus: counter, gauge, histogram, and summary. He also showed us how to add instrumentation to Python code using the provided library, how to query the collected metrics in Prometheus in a meaningful way.
“Power BI Embedded” by Kodama
Power BI is a powerful business analytics tools provided by Microsoft. Kodama has been trying out Power BI Embedded in one of his projects to build a customer facing (multitenancy) service. However, he quickly found out that the tool does not fit the project’s use case. In this talk, he explained about why Power BI does not work for him:
- One of the requirement of the project is to provide near real-time streaming of data and this become difficult to be realized in Power BI Embedded when the data size becomes too big.
- Another hiccup that Kodama had was that Power BI does not provide incremental update feature. This means that the whole data set has to be imported at every refresh.
“Why do I love now.sh” by David
Zeit’s Now is a cloud platform as a service that focuses on developer experience. In David’s demo, he showed us:
- how easy is to deploy and serve a project on Now from a simple Dockerfile,
- how to manage application’s secrets with Now’s feature,
- how Now handles logging,
- and how to scale your web application on Now.
Now provides “free tier” plan and David encourages us to give it a try which I definitely will!
“Azure Functions” by Arakawa
Azure Functions is a function as a service (FaaS) provided by Microsoft. It allows developers to deploy and run their applications without needing to worry too much about maintaining infrastructure. In Arakawa’s talk, he talked about the differences between Azure Functions and AWS Lambda while going through the steps to create an Azure Function. Compared to AWS Lambda, it seems that it is easier to create a HTTP endpoints with Azure Functions as we do not need to manage additional services such as Amazon API Gateway. Azure Functions also have a timer feature which means that we do not need additional service such as Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) to create a scheduled task. Currently, Azure Functions support JavaScript, C#, etc. In his presentation, Arakawa also showed us how to update code dependencies from the console!
“Open Source Summit Japan 2018” by Xudong
Xudong gave a brief report about Open Source Summit Japan 2018 which he attended few months ago. He shared about a few interesting sessions he attended at the event which are related to open source practices, Linux kernel developments, cloud technologies, blockchains, and Kubernetes.
“HTML5 Game Development” by Sacha
Sacha started his talk with the fundamental of game development: which is analogous to stop-motion animation and it is basically the loop of handling user input → move stuffs around → react to collisions → draw everything. According to him, there are three main ways of making games for browser:
- using DOM (HTML, JavaScript, CSS),
- using HTML5 Canvas (a native way to render animate),
- and using WebGL
He recommends beginners to start with canvas. He also showcased the simple games that he created with canvas during the presentation. Sacha promised to write a blog article about this talk, so stay tuned.
That’s all the talks we had on the 49th MTS. As always, we had beer bash after the mini conference 🍻!
