Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Aaron Ploetz
Building a Weather App with a Raspberry Pi, Astra DB, and Langflow
To celebrate PI Day this year, we thought it would be fun to build something with a Raspberry Pi that uses Astra DB and/or Langflow. Fortunately, I have just the project in-mind: A weather application! To that end, our goal will be to use the National Weather Service’s (NWS) data API. Essentially, we will call this API to get the most recent weather data, store it in Astra DB, and display it on a simple front-end. Requirements To build our project, we’re going to need a few things.
How to build a chatbot for retail: A guide to leveraging AI for enhanced customer experience Original
The retail landscape has evolved drastically over the past few years, driven by digital transformation and advancements in artificial intelligence (AI). One of the most significant innovations in this realm is the rise of chatbots—AI-powered virtual assistants that can interact with customers, providing assistance and enhancing the overall shopping experience.
Focus on Creativity, Not Clusters: DataStax Mission Control in Action!
While many large enterprises have made use of managed databases, several still have significant workloads being served by self-managed solutions (both on-premises and in the cloud) like DataStax Enterprise (DSE) and Apache Cassandra®. Although a significant amount of those workloads will eventually be migrated to managed database services, there are reasons that many of them will stay in a self-managed paradigm.
Why You Can’t Miss Cassandra Summit
Technology•November 28, 2023 Why You Can't Miss Cassandra Summit Clear your calendars for Cassandra Summit and the AI.dev Open Source GenAI & ML Summit Dec. 12 and Dec. 13 in San Jose, Calif.! Aaron PloetzDeveloper Relations, DataStax
Build LLM-Powered Applications Faster with LangChain Templates and Astra DB
from fastapi import FastAPI from langserve import add_routes from cassandra_entomology_rag import chain as cassandra_entomology_rag_chain app = FastAPI() add_routes(app, cassandra_entomology_rag_chain, path="/cassandra-entomology-rag") if __name__ == "__main__": import uvicorn uvicorn.run(app, host="0.0.0.0", port=8000)
How Vector Search Can Optimize Retail Trucking Routes
Vectors and vector search are key components of large language models (LLMs), but they are useful in a host of other applications across many use cases that you might not have considered. How about the most efficient way to deliver retail goods?
Vector Similarity Search Can Drive Results
With all the buzz about large language models, vectors, and vector search, it's important to take a step back and understand how these artificial intelligence technology advancements translate into results for an organization and, ultimately, its customers. The Problem Today, we met with the Promotions team. They’re looking for our help in making some smarter decisions about customer advertisements, offers, and coupons. Right now, promotions are mainly based on geographic markets.
Building a Product Recommendation Engine
The journey to implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions requires solving a lot of common challenges that routinely crop up in digital systems: updating legacy systems, eliminating batch processes, and using innovative technologies that are grounded in AI/ML to improve the customer experience in ways that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.
How Vector Search Can Optimize Retail Trucking Routes
Vectors and vector search are key components of large language models (LLMs), but they are useful in a host of other applications across many use cases that you might not have considered. How about the most efficient way to deliver retail goods? The Problem While we were looking at our options for scaling-down (and ultimately disabling) the recommendation batch job from the first story in this series, we were invited to a meeting with the Transportation Services team.
Amanda Mitchell
Will Elon Musk actually destroy Twitter? CSAM poster re-instatement, “absolute free speech,” talent-gutting, massive advertiser exodus … What does it take to kill the bird? Yup. He borked it into a death spiral the instant he signed on as CEO. Essentially, yes. It’ll take a while to descend into its radioactive Xesspool destiny, but it’s inevitable it will join the ranks of 4chan, 8chan, Nchan, Xchan … Please yes, and quickly. I’m just done with all this stupid drama over this stupid little app.
Create a Development Environment in Docker Desktop
The Docker Desktop has a number of cool features aimed at making container development more efficient and easier. One such feature is called Dev Environments (still in beta), which allows you to create a configurable development environment using a locally deployed, self-contained container and simplifies the process of sharing code and dependencies with a team and even switching between branches.
Alex Davies
Should JavaScript developers abandon libraries and write directly to the HTML Document Object Model? JavaScript co-founder Douglas Crockford recommends this approach as the best way to build web apps. Yes. Most JavaScript libraries are so bloated that it's easier to write directly to the DOM now. No, it's impractical. The DOM is imperative, not declarative. You need event handlers everywhere. No, because people won't learn the DOM — it's too weird. I dunno, I'm just here for the free beer.
Joanna Suau
Will Elon Musk actually destroy Twitter? CSAM poster re-instatement, “absolute free speech,” talent-gutting, massive advertiser exodus … What does it take to kill the bird? Yup. He borked it into a death spiral the instant he signed on as CEO. Essentially, yes. It’ll take a while to descend into its radioactive Xesspool destiny, but it’s inevitable it will join the ranks of 4chan, 8chan, Nchan, Xchan … Please yes, and quickly. I’m just done with all this stupid drama over this stupid little app.
How Vector Search Can Influence Customer Shopping Habits
With all the buzz about large language models, vectors and vector search, it’s important to take a step back and understand how these artificial intelligence technology advancements translate into results for an organization and, ultimately, its customers. In an earlier article, I told the story of a hypothetical contractor who was hired to help implement AI/ML solutions at a big-box retailer.
Hannah Culver
Should JavaScript developers abandon libraries and write directly to the HTML Document Object Model? CONTEXT: JavaScript co-founder Douglas Crockford recommends this approach as the best way to build web apps. Yes. Most JavaScript libraries are so bloated that it's easier to write directly to the DOM now. No, it is impractical. The DOM is imperative, not declarative. You need event handlers everywhere. No, because people will not learn the DOM — it is too weird. I dunno, I'm just here for the free beer.
Terraform Providers and the Rise of Infrastructure as a Service
Over the past year the team at Firefly has been researching and analyzing Terraform provider adoption and usage, to help build the tooling to support the most popular technologies and stacks in use today. By reviewing the data and charting different trends, we discovered some pretty compelling changes our ecosystem is undergoing.
Cody's Bot Serves Enterprise Info in Slack Workspaces
Like many people in tech, I’ve been writing about AI recently, with a focus on the projects that have been spawned in the wake of Large Language Models (LLMs). I am particularly interested in the business pattern of an AI processing your own data, and then answering questions about it — which led me to look at Cody.
Write to the DOM or Not: When JS Frameworks Are Necessary
“My reasons were that the DOM was poorly designed, poorly implemented, and full of inconsistencies from one brand of browser to the other, and from one version to another. The DOM was a deep source of pain and misery that could be mitigated by a good library. Since then, the web standards community has, for the most part, corrected many of WC3’s failures. The DOM is much less deficient and much more portable and reliable.
The Future of the Enterprise Cloud Is Multi-Architecture Infrastructure
After years of steady declines, the costs of running a cloud data center are now soaring, due to various factors such as aging infrastructure, rising energy costs and supply chain issues. A survey by Uptime Institute showed that enterprise data-center owners are most concerned about rising energy costs and IT hardware costs, respectively. In a recent example, Google announced increases in some of its cloud storage and network egress prices, some of which had previously been free to users.
RISC-V Finds Its Foothold in a Rapidly Evolving Processor Ecosystem
Developers have grown up hearing ARM or x86 being the guts of PCs and servers, but an alternative architecture called RISC-V is emerging. In the next few years, some companies will inevitably ship PCs and servers running on RISC-V processors. Those systems will likely run on Linux as Microsoft is not known to be developing a Windows OS for the architecture. But there are big problems with the software ecosystem — the developer support is pitiful.
5 Common Developer Self-Service Challenges (and Solutions)
How do you enable developer self-service? That’s a question that more enterprises are seeking to answer as they embrace developer self-service — or platform engineering, as it’s sometimes called — as a means of maximizing the productivity and job satisfaction of their software engineers. Developer self-service represents the next evolutionary step for organizations that have already embraced DevOps since it helps their development teams to make DevOps practices more efficient.
In Pursuit of a Superior Server: Oxide Computer Ships Its First Rack
In Emeryville, California, on a quiet street half a mile from Ikea, Oxide Computer Company just achieved a major milestone.
Social Intelligence Is the Next Big Step for AI
What can’t artificial intelligence do nowadays? With the emergence of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and generative AI models that make eerily good-looking art, it seems that the capabilities of AI in some areas have become almost human-like. But as some experts believe, the next big step is developing AI’s social intelligence, which will help it to improve how it interacts with humans.
What Is Clean Code?
This year the global developer community is expected to expand significantly, with estimates projecting a total of 27.7 million developers worldwide. To put this number into perspective, consider a hypothetical scenario where each of these developers writes 10 lines of code on a daily basis. The result would be a staggering total of 277 million lines of code being generated each day, and this doesn’t even account for the impact of generative AI tools.
A New Book about 'The Apple II Age' Celebrates the Users Original
“More software is available for this computer than for any other machine in the world.” That’s a quote from a 1984 computer buyer’s guide about the pioneering Apple II, cited in a new book titled The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. In the book, author Laine Nooney explores those fruitful seven years before Apple released its first Macintosh computers in 1984, when uses cases for these new-fangled “microcomputers” were still very undefined and fluid.
Deploy a Docker Swarm on Rocky Linux
You may have heard recently that Red Hat has, in my opinion, gone against the heart and soul of open source. If you’ve not heard, essentially it is putting up a paywall such that every clone of RHEL cannot access the source without paying up. Because of that, many users are migrating to alternatives, such as Rocky Linux. But as with RHEL, Rocky Linux defaults to Podman as its default container runtime engine.
Dev News: Google Unlearns, Fresh 1.3 and Wix’s AI Plan
There’s a lot of talk about machine learning and large language models, but one related challenge that’s just now getting attention is machine unlearning — the process of removing data from a trained AI. It’s not simply enough to delete the data. It’s a complex problem, as this Google post explains.
Prototype the Path to Keep User Experiences Front and Center
I once read that product development is like inventing a new recipe. The chef has the knowledge and skills to create a new dish and adapt to the available ingredients, but the recipe isn’t expected to be perfect on the first attempt. It’s a learning process. This kind of prototyping is just as important in product development because it allows teams to learn what works and what doesn’t as they move through variations to reach the final version.
DevOps Has Won, Long Live the Platform Engineer
In the world of software development, the concept of DevOps has been so successful that even talking about it as a practice sounds old-fashioned. But while it may be time to declare the old idea of DevOps dead, that speaks less to its demise than to its success. A decade ago, DevOps was a cultural phenomenon, with developers and operations coming together and forming a joint alliance to break through silos.
How We Built an MLOps Platform and the Lessons We Learned
Sometimes the best solutions are the ones that come together unexpectedly. That’s always been true in the open source community. We’ve become accustomed to witnessing some of the most innovative technologies emerge from simple projects originally intended to do one thing but then ended up doing so much more.
What We Learned from Building a Chatbot
It’s clear now that AI chatbots built with ChatGPT can add value for developers. From code generation and debugging to looking up how to do something, there are many ways to use ChatGPT effectively. The outputs it generates might not always be perfect, but developers can use it to get started on coding or learning how to do something complex. At the organizational level, systems and workflows are complicated, specifically with DevOps.
7 Principles and 10 Tactics to Make You a 10x Developer
We’ve all heard about 10x engineers. Whether real or mythical, 10x engineers are supposedly 10 times more productive than their regular peers. The internet is full of advice on how to become a 10x engineer, and most of them include tips on how to improve your expertise or mindset. Brandon Bayer from Flightcontrol offered a somewhat different perspective at the Shift conference in Miami in his talk on 10 ways to improve the way you ship software.
5 Ways to Build out an SRE Function and Why It Matters
Consumers of digital services are more demanding than ever. Applications must work seamlessly on demand, with a high degree of reliability. Increasingly it is the latter that can help organizations to differentiate competitively in a crowded market. But how, when so often the focus is instead put on rushing out new features? This is where site reliability engineering (SRE) comes in.
Catch Performance Regressions: Evolving eBPF Program
This is the third in a five-part series. Read Part 1 and Part 2. Programs in eBPF are in and of themselves completely stateless. Every invocation is a fresh eBPF program. To keep state, report back on its operations or change its behavior, an eBPF program needs to use “maps”. Maps are persistent data structures available to both eBPF and userspace programs. There are several different kinds of eBPF maps: arrays, hash maps, stacks, queues and many more.
Why Clickhouse Should Be Your Next Database
Today, we’re venturing into the riveting realm of databases. Now, I can hear you sigh: “Another database to learn? Seriously?” But before you sprint for the hills, allow me to introduce you to ClickHouse, the Sonic the Hedgehog of the database multiverse. Lightning Quick: Decoding ClickHouse Architecture ClickHouse is an open source, column-oriented database management system (DBMS) designed for running real-time analytical queries and updates on mammoth datasets.
Causal AI: A Solution to Limitations of Correlation-Based ML
Organizations are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to tame the data in their multicloud environments so they can eliminate downtime, improve user experiences and make data-driven business decisions. Often, such machine learning is built on the assumption that the future will look a lot like the past. But in environments that rely on container-based microservices and open source software, AI that relies on machine learning algorithms isn’t keeping pace.
Quick Tips to Make Your SDK More Maintainable in TypeScript
TypeScript, a statically typed superset of JavaScript, has become a go-to language for many developers, particularly when building SDKs that interact with web APIs. TypeScript’s powerful type system aids in writing cleaner, more reliable code, ultimately making your SDK more maintainable. Let’s explore how TypeScript’s type system can be harnessed to better manage API routes within your SDK.
An E-tailer’s Journey to Real-Time AI: Recommendations
The journey to implementing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions requires solving a lot of common challenges that routinely crop up in digital systems: updating legacy systems, eliminating batch processes and using innovative technologies that are grounded in AI/ML to improve the customer experience in ways that seemed like science fiction just a few years ago.
Python and WebAssembly: Elevating Performance for Web Apps
Python developers have long appreciated the language’s versatility and productivity. However, concerns persist about Python’s performance limitations and seamless integration with other languages. The emergence of WebAssembly (Wasm) bridges this gap. Wasm empowers Python users to explore new frontiers of speed, compatibility and language interoperability. In this article, we’ll delve into the world of WebAssembly and its relevance for Python enthusiasts.
Guardrails Can Be the Common Language to Bring Dev and Ops Together
With the rise of Kubernetes adoption and overall expansion of the cloud native landscape, DevOps certainly isn’t dead, but it is definitely changing. The rise of roles like platform engineer is clearly trying to address this strange adolescence that DevOps is going through in the cloud native era.
ACID Transactions Change the Game for Cassandra Developers
ACID Transactions Change the Game for Cassandra Developers sponsor-datastax,sponsored-post-contributed, For years, Apache Cassandra has been solving big data challenges such as horizontal scaling and geolocation for some of the most demanding use cases. But one area, distributed transactions, has proven particularly challenging for a variety of reasons. It’s an issue that the Cassandra community has been hard at work to solve, and the solution is finally here.
The Distributed Data Problem
Today, online retailers sell millions of products and services to customers all around the world. This was more prevalent in 2020, as COVID-19 restrictions all but eliminated visits to brick-and-mortar stores and in-person transactions. Of course, consumers still needed to purchase food, clothing, and other essentials, and, as a result, worldwide digital sales channels rose to the tune of $4.2 trillion, up $900 billion from just a year prior.
Real-Time Recommendations with Graph and Event Streaming
Real-Time Recommendations with Graph and Event Streaming contributed,sponsor-datastax,sponsored,sponsored-post-contributed, Data / Data Science / Software Development How a video service, for example, can architect high-performance persistence to get users happily watching their next movie. Real-time data is becoming increasingly important to enterprise success. Successfully collecting incoming data while reacting both quickly and strategically is paramount.
The Work-War Balance of Open Source Developers in Ukraine
“Many Ukrainians continue working. A very good opportunity is to continue working with them, to buy Ukrainian software products, to engage with people who are working [via] UpWork. Help Ukrainians by giving them the ability to work, to do some paid work,” whether still in the country or as refugees abroad. If you take something from this conversation, Anastasiia Voitova‘s words may be the ones that should stick.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Aaron
Contact Aaron, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack