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Kick the tires with faasd today, for a lightweight serverless experience that doesn’t require Kubernetes. Instead it uses containerd and the existing OpenFaaS ecosystem. By Alex Ellis.

You can run faasd anywhere, even on a Raspberry Pi, but why would you want to do that? faasd offers many of the benefits of containers and OpenFaaS, but without the complexity and operational costs of Kubernetes. containerd is a low-level tool for automating containers, and a CNCF project.

Compute is compute, and OpenFaaS with containerd makes it easy to both consume and provide.

The article briefly covers:

• Before we start and installation
• Post-install
• How to build a new container image
• Deploy your new container

faasd brings a lightweight experience to your Raspberry Pi, cloud infrastructure and to bare metal, all without the need for Kubernetes. Nice read!

An in-depth guide to some important console API functions other than console.log. By Deepak Gupta.

The Console API’s most commonly used method is undoubtedly console.log. However, it also comes with several other useful methods that can improve our debugging efficiency.

The article describes some other interesting methods:

• console.table(data[, properties])
• console.group(label) & console.groupEnd(label)
• console.dir(object) & console.dirxml(object)
• console.profile([, label]) & console.profileEnd([, label])
• console.time([, label]) & console.timeEnd([, label])

… and more. All described here methods are available in NodeJS as of version 10.0.0 and in almost every major browser. For the rest the link to original article. Nicely put together!

Carlos Caballero published this story about fundamental tips and advice to generate clean code focusing on the element that allows us to reuse our code: the functions.

Some tips to generate good code applied specifically to the variables:

• Use default arguments instead of short circuiting or conditionals
• Function arguments (2 or fewer ideally)
• Avoid side effects – Global Variables
• Avoid side effects – Objects Mutables
• Functions should do one thing
• Favor functional programming over imperative programming
• Use method chaining

The design of functions applying clean code is essential because the functions are the basic element to decouple the code. Good read!

This article is part of Demystifying AI, a series of posts that (try to) disambiguate the jargon and myths surrounding AI. By Ben Dickson.

Before becoming too excited about advances in computer vision, it’s important to understand the limits of current AI technologies. While improvements are significant, we are still very far from having computer vision algorithms that can make sense of photos and videos in the same way as humans do.

The article focuses on:

• Commercial applications of computer vision
  • Image search
  • Image editing and enhancement
  • Facial recognition applications
  • Data efficient home security
  • Interacting with the real world
• Advanced applications of computer vision
  • Medical image processing
  • Playing games
  • Cashier-less stores
• Creepy applications of computer vision
  • Surveillance
  • Autonomous weapons

… and much more. Worth to notice that renowned computer scientist and AI researcher Stuart Russell has founded an organization dedicated to stopping the development of autonomous weapons. Good read!

An article by Antoine Hachez about Jobandtalent experience with applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to real business problems.

One of the key metrics in this industry is obviously the length of the contracts as it is proportional to the revenue per contract, which is compared to the fixed and variable costs of managing it.

The article describe how their data team tackled a challenge:

• The modeling process
• Modeling over time
• Probabilistic programming – the simple model
• Probabilistic programming – the time-dependent approach
• Project evolution and conclusion

They describe how their approach is flexible and how they quickly iterated to create the KPIs that would fit our needs (actionable and unbiased by outliers). The Bayesian approach offers many advantages in this regard. Great read!

John Rampton wrote this article about how focusing on one thing at a time is a very good start to your productivity.

If you’ve recently launched a startup, author is sure that you’ve heard a lot about being “lean.” This article is not about the methodology popularized by the likes of Eric Ries. It is actually about the term and concept of “lean” that was originally developed by Toyota executive Taiichi Ohno during the reconstruction period in Japan following World War II.

The article captures:

• The lean principles from a Toyota exec
• Applying “lean” to productivity in startups
• Improve your workplace using the five principles of lean
  • Value, Value stream, Flow, Pull, Perfection
• Use the concept of 5S to get yourself organized
• Standardize your work to become more efficient

… and much more in this eyes opening article. We liked:

Start by keeping a time log to see when you’re most productive and how you’re spending your time. You may notice that you’re most productive in the mornings. If so, that’s when you should work on your most important task.

One way you can improve flow in your startup is by focusing on one thing at a time. Great read!

An article by Kevin about Hans. Hans is a small Node application for faking APIs - but not just a single REST API using HTTP. It allows for creating multiple APIs using different ports and protocols (like native WebSockets or even GraphQL). It supports multi-port/app API mocking, Express, Socket.io and native WebSocket.

On top of that it is written entirely in TypeScript which allows for some neat abstractions and sharing models between your real application and your fake API. And, of course, everything is licensed under MIT.

The article then quickly dives into details:

• Basic example
• How to use Adapters
• Requests, Responses
• Middleware
• State

Small, nice library. Hans integrates Faker by default, providing useful methods for generating fake data. Link to repository provided.

Robert J. Berger wrote this piece about a template of how to create a basic Re-Frame SPA with authentication from AWS Amplify with almost not coding and without having to set up your own backend authentication infrastructure.

The goal of this project is to show how to be able to use AWS Amplify with Clojurescript / Re-Frame Web Apps.

AWS Amplify makes it super simple to build Web and Mobile Apps that use the entire suite of AWS Services with minimal coding by the app developer. Clojurescript and Re-Frame make creating SPA apps a joy.

The article goes over:

• Re-Frame / Clojurescript / Shadow-cljs
• Assumptions, and initial setup
• Ensure the basics are working
• Set up AWS Amplify
• Update the code to enable the Authenticator

Code is also provided together with detailed explanation. You can continue with this to use other AWS Amplify authentication features (Social Provider Federation, Multi-factor auth, etc) as well as the other Amplify services such as graphql access to DynamoDB, Push notifications, etc.). Nice one!

A tutorial from the pen of Roy Derks. Learn how to handle authentication and authorization of a GraphQL server using Node.js and JWTs.

GraphQL has grown from a new technology into a mature API specification, which is used by both small and big tech companies worldwide. Using a type system, it lets you query and mutate data using a simple and understandable format.

You will learn how to build a GraphQL server and consequently secure it using Auth0. The article covers:

• Prerequisites
• What is GraphQL?
• Building a GraphQL Server with Node.js
• Securing a GraphQL Server with Auth0

In this tutorial, you will create a GraphQL server with Node.js, that uses a mock MongoDB instance for its data and Auth0 for authorization and authentication. Detailed code examples are provided. Excellent read!

Pivotal Web Services (PWS) is a great place to set up push button deployments. It’s cheaper than Heroku and has some great features. Typical Node application could cost you less than $3.00 to run per month. By Austin.

And there is an effortless way to get SSL up and running for free using CloudFlare. The article then quickly guides you through deployment of your first app:

• Deploy something to PWS
• Setup a custom route
• DNS stuff

Code example for a super simple SpringBoot Kotlin application is also included. Short, but sweet!