I mostly blog about solutions I’ve made for problems I’ve encountered during my workday. The stack we use at Wehkamp is huge, so there’s always an interesting topic to blog about and many programming challenges to deal with. My main specialty is backend (.NET Core / ASP.NET / C#), but I do my fair share of Node.js and Python.
Last week I was working on a Databricks script that needed to produce a Slack message as its final outcome. I lifted some code that used a Slack client that was PIP-installed. Unfortunately, I could not use the package on my cluster. Fortunately, the Slack API is so simple, that you don’t really need a package to post a simple message to a channel. In this blog I’ll show you the simplest way of producing awesome messages in Slack.
As an engineer, I love to parametrise my applications. That’s why I love the widget-feature of Databricks notebooks, which allows me to do this with a nice UI. In this blog I’ll explore how to build a True/False widget and a list widget. I also show how to validate the values of required fields.
At Wehkamp we use AWS Lambda to classify images on S3. The Lambda is triggered when a new image is uploaded to the S3 bucket. Currently we have over 6.400.000 images in the bucket. Now we would like to run the Lambda for all images of the bucket. In this blog I’ll show how we did this with a Python 3.6 script.
I love SVG, but sometimes they are hard to create, especially when you need to visualize diagrams. HTML is way easier to program. So why not combine them? Can we use HTML to generate an SVG? And can we use JsFiddle to generate that HTML?
At Wehkamp we’ve been using machine learning for a while now. We’re training models in Databricks (Spark) and Keras. This produces a Keras file that we use to make the actual predictions. Training is one thing, but getting them to production is quite another!
The main problem we’ve faced was that it was too big to actually fit into a lambda. This blogs shows how we’ve dealt with that problem.
We live in a day and age in which we can choose a data-store that matches the characteristics of our apps and (micro) services. Lately we’ve been looking into Redis as a high performing store for last viewed items. In this blog I’ll look show how to create a POC with the redis-cli and then implement it using .NET Core. We’ll be using the sorted set structure.
What’s the buzz all about? Well, originally it started out as a small children’s game, but now and again I see it being used to detect weak developers in job interviews (I think there are better ways to do this). The assignment has a view nice properties. In this blog I would like to look at some implementations and discuss the pro’s and con’s of each implementation.
In ASP.NET Core we are used to have multiple appsettings.json files with settings that differ per environment. I want to do the same in a Console Application. This makes debugging the application easier.
I can almost hear you thinking: “What super-weird problem are you trying to solve!?” Well… it is kind of an abstract one! Imagine you have a dictionary of objects and a separate list of keys in a certain order. Now suppose you want an ordered dictionary based on the list of keys.
Slack is fully awesome. At Wehkamp we use it for our internal communication and as a tool for our DevOps. The Slack API allows us to build even more advanced integrations. In this blog I’ll explore how to use the API to create powerful progress indicators by updating a Slack message.
