stiitch

[stiitch]

Khajiit has wares If you have coin

[stiitch]

Frank Bernard Dicksee (English, 1853-1928)

The Sensitive Plant

[stiitch]

Adopting More Open-Minded Approaches to Databases

Recently, I was introduced to time series databases such as InfluxDB. It made me realize that I haven't really broadened my understanding on databases and available options too much at all since I learned SQL in college. I don't have an in-depth grasp on time series databases, but after playing with the open source version of InfluxDB I was pretty impressed.

Features

InfluxDB offers a fairly well thought out product. As a NoSQL database, it doesn't have standard tables. Instead, it stores datapoints at a specific timestamp. That timestamp identifies a point in any given data series. Your writes can choose how granular you want your timestamp to be (ie. attribute data to a minute, second, millisecond, etc.).

BUCKET - you can create multiple buckets to write data to

MEASUREMENT - you name what kind of measurement this is

Now, you could have multiple measurements happening at a single timestamp. In this case, you would have different tags separating your data.

Lets say you saw a litter of like 8 cats. They were really fucking cute and you weren't gonna let them just rot on the street. Alright, you bring them home and you gotta feed them. You make an auto-feeding IoT device. You suspect your hoodlum street cats of stealing from the source though. So, you log the food your device spits out. Suppose your device has cat detection too. Each time a cat comes, you can tell which cat it is.

You can have the tag name along with the measurement of how many kibbles dispensed. This might look like this:

food_dispensed,name=luna pellets=28 1434055562000000000

So the measurement is called "food_dispensed", the name tag is set to "luna", and the field "pellets" has a value of 28.

Limitations

Of course InfluxDB isn't perfect. There's rarely a one-size-fits-all solution in tech. InfluxDB offers create and retrieve operations that are very easy and nice to use along with your choice of many client libraries and 2 query language options. However, if you need to use Update and Destroy operations, you're out of luck. They're very optimized for speed so they offer none.

Another known issue is data with high cardinality. Luckily, there are other options to choose from such as TimescaleDB which offers promising benchmarks over InfluxDB with regard to cardinalty.

Polyglot Persistence

As more unique services come out more frequently then ever, it feels like applications need to start leveraging every small piece of innovation wherever they can. To this end, we see applications broken into smaller microservices so that different services can use different tools to improve the work they do. Why would databases be any different? I'm no the first person who thought of this and it's an idea that's been around for quite a while. The first I read about it was here on Martin Fowler's blog.

With developers using a lot of distributed systems, it makes sense that each part of the whole may have different databasing needs. I was genuinely subscribed to the idea that Postgresql was enough and I would be good. And Postgresql is powerful, but there are situations where NoSQL databases make sense even if it's just for convenience sake. Maintainability is also an issue to consider to ensure a longer lifetime for your app.

Although it may seem intimidating keeping services outputting to different databases, it's worth looking into message brokers. Many databases can integrate well with message brokers like Kafka in order to provide excellent data replication or near real-time updates between different systems.

Conclusion

So there's a lot out there to explore and understand better. As a developer, I'm trying to figure out where to best spend my time to improve my skillset. I don't want to get bogged down to the minute details but I also don't want to gloss over learning opportunities either. Seeing some of the things I've been looking into this week along with my own thoughts written out helps me get more perspective. If you stayed till the end of this, I hope that this helps you in some way.

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I think I’ve built up too much of a reliance on ORMs and am gonna rewrite my queries to raw SQL to build that skill up again. Writing this here so I see it and hold myself accountable 😅

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My laptop is ready for pick up so I will be programming personal projects again soon ‼️ I’ve been doing a lot of GCP Pub/Sub stuff at work so I think I’m going to try to take some of those concepts and apply them to my personal project with Apache Kafka instead. I’ll have to find an actual use-case to use it though.

[stiitch]

Fred Appleyard (1874-1963, British) ~ The Artist and His Muse, n/d

[Source: LotSearch]

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Study of Helen painted by Gustave Moreau (1826 - 1898)

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Edward Okuń (Polish, 1872-1945) • Four Strings of a Violin • 1914

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He work hard for his money

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“This is the house that built me and I’m gonna burn it down. This is the river I crawled from and I refuse to drown here. And bless the strippers but fuck the men. And bless the berries but fuck the farm. And bless the daughter but fuck the family. What is a home if not the first place you learn to run from? You’ve got to bite the hand that starves you, and in doing so Praise the place that birthed you. Birthed you fucked up. Birthed you ugly, and interesting, and ready to scream.”

— Courtney Love Prays To Oregon, Clementine von Radics

[stiitch]

Plenty of 3D games in the past several years have in game meters/kilometers or other real world distance measurements. For lack of a better term, are they accurate? Consistent between games? How do you set what a meter even is in a virtual world?

They're accurate... kind of. Units of measure within 3D game worlds are actually arbitrary. We can choose to make one unit be a kilometer, a meter, an inch, or even something more relative, like one character height/width. As long as we remain consistent with our assets and environments in terms of relative size, things will look ok. If we can't remain consistent, things break.

Let's say, for example, that character modeler Neelo builds a character model where one unit is set to one inch. This means that a six-foot-tall person would be 72 units tall and maximum width and depth of roughly the same. Neelo's finished character would comfortably fit within a 72 x 72 x 72 unit cube.

Now imagine that the environment artist Desmal misread the memo and creates the fighting arena using one unit set to one foot, rather than one inch. The fighting arena is 100 feet wide, 20 feet deep, and 20 feet tall because that's what the lead designer wants the arenas to be. Thus, Desmal's finished fighting arena would fit within a 100 x 20 x 20 unit block.

What happens if we put Neelo's character into Desmal's arena? Well, Neelo's character is over 3x the height of the arena and almost as wide, so we'd probably see Neelo's feet and lower legs in the arena, and not much else. In order for things like relative size to work, we need to make sure they're built with the same consistent unit size in mind. We can scale Neelo's character down or we can scale Desmal's arena up (or they can meet halfway), but we need to establish some kind of consistent scale or nothing will work.

One benefit to having this consistent unit size is that we can extrapolate out relative sizes. If we establish that our protagonist is 180 cm tall, it means that 1 kilometer (100,000 cm) within the virtual world is the equivalent of (100,000 / 180) = 555.555 protagonist heights. As long as everything works out in terms of relative size, the virtual world feels like sizes of in-game things map to the real world.

PS. It's actually quite rare for different games to use the exact same scale for their assets! This is one of the major problems with the NiFTy enthusiast talking point about taking an item or skin or whatever from one game and bringing it into another. On the last game I worked on, one unit was one meter. On the current game I'm working on, one unit is one inch. Bringing assets from the other game over to my current game would mean they would be tiny in comparison!

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[stiitch]

Since my account is p new and I have no one to tag I'll just quote reblog xd. I don't really do playlists, but these songs have been on repeat for the last few weeks

Spillin - Destroy Lonely Fake Plastic Trees - Radiohead I've Seen Footage - Death Grips Just - Radiohead 15 Step - Radiohead La la lost you - NIKI (acoustic version) The Fever - Death Grips 17250 - Glaive Talking in my sleep - Elroy Purple heart ski - lucki

@funnyunnie omg you...you with the chuu pfp...I wondered what you listen to XD ty for tagging💛

Rules: shuffle your repeat playlist and post the first ten tracks, then tag ten people.

Official - Charli XCX Me and Michael - MGMT 열기 - LOONA Monster - Irene&Seulgi Glory and Gore - Lorde Epitah - King Crimson Of Moons, Birds & Monsters - MGMT Which a Star - Dreamcatcher Perfect Love - LOONA Savage - aespa

I dunno who to tag because I haven't been on tumblr long enough to have friends but XD...I'll tag those who's posts I've enjoyed recently! @stiitch, @letsmegadestinyuniverse-blog, @c9ffea, @seekerwithsneakers, @ipsl0re, @milocki no pressure ofc c; take it as a compliment hehe

[stiitch]

Jesus christ.

[stiitch]

LiftMore Update 9.04.2023

I was posting updates on my Medium (see the pinned post), but lately I haven't had time to make a thorough post. Instead, I want to update on a few things in a more informal post here.

API Updates

Finally went through and added all of the endpoints I'll need. There are a few endpoints on this list that I'm still in the process of refining permissions and making more secure.

Unit Testing ...ayup.. I came this far into the project without writing a single unit test. I really do want to strive for best TDD practices, but when there's no code at all in my application, it feels really unsatisfying to start working on tests before my code is capable of doing anything. Moving forward in the project, I will definitely strive to do TDD well.

Security Currently, the API just processes users via Basic Authentication. In this upcoming week, I'm planning on creating an identity server and using that server to issue my own OAuth2.0 tokens. I'm not sure yet how I want to set up my IDP service and OIDC Identity Providers.

Deployments Before moving onto the Front-End for this project, I want to make sure that my app is as secure and robust as possible. For this, I want to create 3 different environments (Development, Test, and Production), use a secret manager to inject secrets into the application, and have all of my deployments automated with GitHub Actions. In addition to all this, I want to make sure my application is set up properly between GitHub Actions and AWS so that I can manage dashboards and collect usage/cost information before having any users.

Finally, I'm happy to say that I've acquired the domain name "liftmore.app". After I get through some of the things I mentioned here, I'll push out a landing page and more information of LiftMore from a user perspective in case anybody wants to use it :)

Lastly, little brief preview of my Project board in GitHub at the moment.

[stiitch]

Scott Pilgrim takes off (2023) dir. Abel Góngora

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ig: alvaroescbr