How to Create a Dystopian Future at Home with Python, OpenCV, and Microsoft Azure

Derek Andre Articles, Azure, Cloud, Development Technologies & Tools, Python, Tutorial 2 Comments

Facial recognition is both amazing and horrifying. Some amazing things it can do is the ability to find missing children or seniors, using your face to unlock your phone, and being able to board an airplane faster.

In this blog post, I want to highlight some powerful tools and platforms that allow you to create distributed facial recognition systems with OpenCV and Azureโ€™s Cognitive Services. By the end of this post, you will have a working face detector using OpenCV that can communicate with Azureโ€™s Cognitive Services.

I used Python 3.7.4 and pip 19.2.3 for this project. You can view the code from this blog at https://github.com/dcandre/Dystopian-Future-At-Home.

Using Docker + AWS to Build, Deploy and Scale your App

Brandon Klimek Articles, AWS, Cloud, DevOps, Docker, Python, Spring, Spring Boot, Tutorial 8 Comments

I recently worked to develop a software platform that relied on Spring Boot and Docker to prop up an API. Being the only developer on the project, I needed to find a way to quickly and efficiently deploy new releases. However, I found many solutions overwhelming to set up.

That was until I discovered AWS has tools that allow any developer to quickly build and deploy their application.

In this 30 minute tutorial, you will discover how to utilize the following technologies:
– AWS CodeCommit – source control (git)
– AWS Code Build – source code compiler, rest runner
– AWS Codepipeline – builds, tests, and deploys code every time the repo changes
-AWS Elastic Beanstalk – service to manage EC2 instances handling deployments, provisioning, load balancing, and health monitoring
-Docker + Spring Boot – Our containerized Spring Boot application for the demo

Once finished, you will have a Docker application running that automatically builds your software on commit, and deploys it to the Elastic beanstalk sitting behind a load balancer for scalability. This continuous integration pipeline will allow you to worry less about your deployments and get back to focusing on feature development within your application.

Programming With Stenography

Garrett Hopper Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Programming, Python 8 Comments

As developers, we spend a ton of time typing, so any small improvements in speed or comfort are well worth it.

If you’re anything like me, then you spend a full day typing at work only to come home and continue typing into the wee hours of the morning. With so much of my life spent typing, things like RSI are a serious concern. I’ve tried a variety of different ergonomic keyboards and I’ve even switched to Dvorak, but none of it made any significant difference in speed or comfort.

In my search for alternative text input methods, I discovered stenography. In this blog, I will give an introduction to stenography and how programmers (like me) have implemented it in an effort to make typing more comfortable and efficient.

Containers For .NET Developers

Chase Aucoin .NET, .NET Core, Articles, Development Technologies & Tools, Docker, Microservices, moderntoolingseries, Python Leave a Comment

This is going to be the first post in a series of articles about modern tooling and techniques for building distributed systems. In this post, I will show how to use Docker for Windows to set up an ELK (Elasticsearch, Kibana, Logstash) server that we are going to use in future articles. The series is particularly geared toward traditional .NET developers. Let’s get started…