Tag: heavy metal

TRIP REPORT: QCon SF 2019, Amtrak Coast Starlight, #Bikelife in San Francisco, and Thoughts

This past week has been QCon. I departed last Sunday on the Coast Starlight. My preference is to take the train when it’s possible. Sometimes the schedule allows it, sometimes it doesn’t. This trip, the schedule was perfect for a little coding time on the train, reading, and introspection. Taking the train always gives me a bunch of time to do these things uninterupted while being comfortable and enjoying the countryside rolling by.

The train got out of the station and I cut some video for a VLOG episode or two. To note, I’ve got more than a few, some linked in this post, VLOG’s of the week and the various adventure. I hope they’re interesting and in some cases informational! Feel free to ask questions, I’m more than happy to elaborate on any of the videos, content, and the related topics.

Departing Seattle for San Francisco to attend QCon

The train departs at 9:45am from King Street Station. If I had to drive or take transit I’d have to get up at about 6am to get there and fiddle with luggage and all that, but since I was cycling bikelife style to the station, I got up around 7:15. However, I didn’t follow that schedule a made a coffee stop on the way.

When I arrived at the station I saw one of those post boards that showed the old Union Station near the King Street Station and I point out a few details about the two. I included some tips for bike life traveling via the train too. Rolled on out to the platform and boarded. Watch the video for a shrot summary of my departure and boarding the train.

The countryside is beautiful on this trip, and getting into Oakland and the ferry ride across the bay is spectacular. I had to, of course, VLOG a bit of that too.

After getting in I made my way back down via Valencia onto Market Street to the Hyatt for QCon Day 1 events. A VLOG on that run with a little montage and then some thoughts.

First thoughts, it won’t be soon enough that get get SOV (Single Occupant Vehicles) off of Market Street altogether. The street is used in a vastly superior way having transit, active transport, and work vehicles as is. Having SOV’s plying the streets just makes it dangerous and clogs up the whole thing, but alas, that’s just a first though.

I got into QCon and was super stoked to catch a few talks and talk to fellow data folks. I had noted though, even as a sponsor, our badges don’t get us access to anything really but the sponsorship hallway. That was kind of a bummer, so in the interim I had to work some magic so that I could catch some talks!

Palumi & Langauges of Infrastructure by Joe Duffy was the first talk I wanted to see. Alas, with scheduling I couldn’t make it. The description read,

“We have all become cloud developers. Every day we use the cloud to supercharge our applications, deliver new capabilities, and reach scales previously unheard of. Leveraging the cloud effectively, however, means navigating and mastering the ever-expanding infrastructure landscape, including public cloud services for compute, data, and AI; containers, serverless, and Kubernetes; hybrid environments; and even SaaS — often many at once.

Join us to learn about the modern languages, tools, and techniques that leading-edge companies are using to innovate in this world of ever-increasing cloud capabilities. We will explore: how to create, deploy, and manage cloud applications and infrastructures; approaches for cloud architectures and continuous delivery; and how modularity and reuse is being applied to infrastructure to tame the complexity, boost productivity, and ensure secure best practices.”

Hopefully we can get Joe to come speak at Seattle Scalability in the coming year! I’d even like to setup a hack day akin to a workshop to try out some of these techniques and related languages for infrastructure for the meet! Ping me Joe and we’ll make it happen!

The next talk I really wanted to catch too was Lachlan‘s “Helm 3: A Mariner’s Delight”.

“Adjusting your spyglass and looking out over the water, you can see how useful a package manager like Helm is. Perhaps you’ve used it to manage the fractal complexity of packages on your Kubernetes clusters (without losing track of versions stashed in the hold). But Helm 3 is rumored to be different, and you’re ready to get started on this exciting voyage – as soon as you have some idea of what’s port and what’s starboard!

In this story-fueled session, we’ll take you through differences from the Helm of yore, tips for a successful rollout or upgrade, and opportunities to shape the project’s future. The cloud native waters can be choppy, but a technical deep dive powered by open source tooling will steer you right!”

But again, my scheduling and access prevented this but I’m hopeful. This next week is KubeCon and I should be able to catch up with a number of people, maybe even Lachlan, on the Helm 3 bits!

Other talks that I might have or might not have officially attended included “Beyond Microservices: Streams, State and Scalability”, “Better Living through Software at The Human Utility”, and “Parsing JSON Really Quickly: Lessons Learned”. I hear they were all spectacular talks! 😉

Day 2 rolled in. Talked with Auth0 and Solace at their respective booths, if you’re curious.

After all that, another solid QCon, I’ll make sure to get a full pass next time if I can make it. Unless of course they fix that ranked access sponsorship pass mess, then I’d happily opt for that again. It is after all rather interesting to speak with all the companies.

After the conference I put together an exit VLOG. Enoy! Catch everybody next time!

Next week, on to KubeCon, cuz two conferences in two weeks is like a two-fer!

 

A Little Monday Help for Monday the 1st of July, 2019!

Ever wake up on Monday and just feel like you aren’t gonna be able to handle anything? Well here, open your mind and prepare to get woken up with an unstoppable energy that’ll drive you through the day and breath life into those lungs of yours! For starters: Parasite Inc.

Then, make sure to give a listen to some Words of Wisdom.

To calmly then move on with the rest of the day now that you’re awake. At The Gates has The Mirror Black to pace yourself!

Enjoy the Monday another day to happily code, and may you thrash the code to your demands!

Your Wake Up Lagniappe Dose!

Welcome to another metal Monday morning wake up call. Here’s your dose, get going, may your thrashing code be the best ever!

Unearth is back with some Incinerate!

If you dig Adele, here’s a version of the song Hello that’ll go over better for the metal inclined.

Then for a little melodic death metal, check out the this Deadtide.

For a little extra, check out this Behemoth cover by Ada Kaczanowska.

Thrashing Metal Monday for Week of the 13th of May.

A new band I just learned about this last week is Bloody Hammers. Listen to those vocals, traditional dark prodding rhythms and melody. It’s eerie in the best of ways and provides that melancholy horror movie feel so well! Beautiful!

You can check out their website which has good details and information, but their material is of course out there on Bandcamp too so check that out and pick up some tunes!

Not new for regular readers of Composite Code or viewers of Thrashing Code listening sessions, but I felt another Spoil Engine tune showing some of their range would be a good kick to Monday. May it light your mind up for the week!

To wrap up the trigonous edges of metal for today, part one of the new Amon Amarth saga!

Coding, WTF Twitter, Twitch FTW, Getting Shit Done, Twitch Hacks, Tips, Tricks, and One Excellent Jazz Influenced Tune

WTF Twitter

I’ve been doing a lot more coding, thanks largely to the discipline that Twitch has brought to my day. It seems almost surprising to me at this point because Twitch started similarly to the way Twitter did for me. You see, I thought at first Twitter was the dumbest thing that had happened in ages. Arguably, it’s come full circle and I kind of feel the same thing about Twitter now, but during the middle decade in between that (yes, Twitter is over 10 years old!) Twitter has brought me connection, opportunities, and so much more. I couldn’t have imagined a lot of what I’ve been able to pull together because of Twitter. It’s still useful in many ways for this, albeit I like all of us are at risk of suffering the idiocy of today’s politics and political cronies, and the dog piling trash pile that follows them onto Twitter.

I’m not leaving Twitter any time soon but I’ve definitely put in on a very short leash, and limited what impact it does or doesn’t have in my day to day flow.

Twitch FTW

Amazingly however a new social and productive tool, not that it intended both, has come into being. Coding on Twitch. Don’t get me wrong I game, I just don’t game socially or on Twitch, what I do is code on Twitch. With a fair dose of hacking, breaking things, and then figuring out how to make them work. All at the same time I along with others have created a pretty excellent developers community there on Twitch. It seems to be growing all the time too. Twitch, at this point has become a focal point that has the benefits without all the annoying garbage that Twitter does these days, while adding the vast and hugely important fact that I can do things, be productive, chit chat, and generally get shit done all while I’m Twitch streaming.

VidStreamHacking

@ https://github.com/Adron/VidStreamHacking

With that, let’s talk about some of the recent notes and information I’ve been working on putting together to make Twitch even more useful. My first motive with this was to keep track of all the things I was doing, hardware I was putting together, and related things, but then another purpose grew out of all this note taking. It became obvious that this repository of information could be useful for other people. Here’s a survey of the things that I’ve added so far, hope they’re helpful to those of you digging into streaming out there!

I added some badges to identify various elements of information about the repo in the README.md.

badges

Is it maintained, yup, contributors, so far just me, zero issues filed but please feel free to add an issue or two, markdown yup, and there is indeed a Trello Board! The Trello Board is a key to insight, inspection, and what I’ve got going on in a number of my repositories. It’s where I’m keeping track of all the projects, what’s next, and what’s up in queue for the blog (this one right here). At least, in the context of the big code heavy or video reviews of sessions with code, extra commentary, and related content. If you want to get involved in any of the repos just let me know and I’m happy to walk through whatever and even get you added to the Trello board so we can work together on code.

Streaming Gear

https://github.com/Adron/VidStreamHacking/blob/master/hardware.md

My main machine is now a Dell XPS 15, which I fought through to get Linux running on it, and now that I have it’s been an absolutely stellar machine. I’ve also added additional monitor & port replicator/docking station gear to get it even more usable. The actual page I’ve got the details listed on are in the repo on the Dell XPS 15 item on the hardware page.

Along with the XPS 15 I wrote up coverage of the unboxing via video and blog entry. After a few weeks I also wrote up the conflict I had getting Linux running and removing Windows 10. In addition to the XPS 15 though I do use a MacBook from 2015 as my primary Mac machine, with an iMac from 2013 available as backup. Both machines are still resoundingly solid and performant enough to get the job done. Rounding out my fleet of machines is a Dell XPS 13 (covered here and here with the re-review).

For screens I have one at my office and one at home. They’re almost the same thing, ultra-widescreen monitors, curved displays, running 3880-1440 resolution from LG. These make keeping an eye on chat, OBS, and all sorts of other monitoring while coding, gaming, or whatever a breeze!

shotone.png
Ex 1: Just viewing a giant OBS view to get everything sorted out before starting a stream.
shottwo
Ex 2: OBS w/ VM running w/ Twitch chat, dashboard etc to the right. This way I can work, see the stream, and see chat and such all at the same time.

The docking stations and/or port replicators, whatever one calls these things these days also bring all of this tech together for me. There’s a couple I have tried and retired already (unfortunately, cuz dammit that cost some money!) and others that I use in some scenarios and others I use in others.

My main docking station contraption, shout out to James & others suggestion the Caldigit TS3. I got to this docking station through the Dell TB16 which for Linux, and kind of for Windows, is an unstable mess. Awesome potential if it worked, but it doesn’t so I tried out this USB-C pluggable option (in the tweet) which had HDMI that was unfortunately limited in resolution. Having a wide screen made this – albeit it being super compatible with Linux – unusable too. So I finally upgraded to the Caldigit TS3 and WOW, the Caldigit is super seriously wickedly bad ass. Extra USB-C ports, USB 2/3 ports, power, and more all rolled into one. It even supplies some power to the laptop, however I keep it plugged in since it’s kind of a power hog when the processor start chomping!

After trying out this USB-C pluggable (the tweet) I got the CalDigit into play. It’s really really good, here’s a shot of that from various angles with the extensive cables that I don’t have to plug into my laptop anymore. Out of this also runs a 28 port USB powered hub too, no picture, but just know I’ve got a crazy number of devices I routinely like to use!

That’s my main configuration when using the ultra widescreens and all. Good setup there, very usable, and the 32GB of memory in the laptop really get put to use in this regard. As for storage, that’s another thing. I’ve got 1 TB in my laptop but another 1 TB in a USB-C Thunderbolt Samsung Drive which is practically as fast for most things. So much so I attach it via the TS3 via USB-C and it’s screaming fast and adds that extra storage. So far, primarily I’ve been using it to store all of my virtual machines or use it as video storage while I do edits.

There’s other gear too, check out the list, like the Rode Podcoster and other things. But that gear I’ll elaborate on some other time.

Meetup Streaming Gear

https://github.com/Adron/VidStreamHacking/blob/master/meetup-streaming-kit-gear.md

Another effort I’ve undertaken is recording meetups. To do this one needs to be able to stream things with several screens combined – i.e. picture in picture and all. To do this, one needs a camera that can focus on the speaker, ideally at least 1080p with at least some ability to work in less than ideal light. Then next to that, a splitter and capture card to get the slides! Once all those pieces come together, with a little OBS finesse one can get a pretty solid single pass recording of a meetup. An example of one of my better attempts was the last meetup “Does the Cloud Kill Open Source” with Richard Seroter. If you take a look at past talks in the Meetups Playlist you can see my iterative progress from one meetup to another!

Here’s the specific gear I’m using to get this done. At least, so far, and if and when it becomes financially reasonable I might upgrade some of the gear. It largely depends on what I can get more use out of beyond just streaming meetups.

Cords and Splitter – I picked up a selection of lengths and types so that I’d have wiring options for the particular environments the meetups would be located in. Generally speaking 25ft seems to be a safe maximum for HDMI. I’ve been meaning to check out the actual specifications on it but for now it’s more than enough regardless.81fhh-w-DeL._SX679_

The splitter wasn’t expensive at all ($16.99), and kind of surprised me considering the costs of the cables. Picture to the right, or above, or somewhere depending on mobile layout.

I needed capture cards for this, one for the line out of the splitter that would capture the slides. The first I had picked up based on suggestions focusing around quality and that was the Avermedia Extreme Cap HDMI to USB 3 Capture Card. It’s really solid for higher resolution and related capabilities. For the USB 3.0 HDMI HD Game Video Capture Card I picked it up based on price (it’s almost a 1/3rd of the price) but not particular focused on quality. However, now that I’ve used both they are capable and seem fine, so I might have been able to just buy two of the cheaper options.

The camera, ideally, I’d have a much higher quality one but the Canon VIXIA HF R800 Camcorder has actually worked excellently. A little less feature rich for audio out and related things, but it zooms in good and can record at the same time I’m getting the cam feed into the stream. So it’s always a nice way to have a backup of the talk.

The last, and one of the most important aspects is getting good audio.

Streaming Meetups

https://github.com/Adron/VidStreamHacking/blob/master/meetup.md

At first thought, I made the mistake that just the gear would be enough but holy smokes there were about a million other things I needed to write. I created meetup.md to get the list going.

Jazz Influence Amidst the Heaviness!

As promised. Some music, not actually jazz, but heavily influenced by some jazz, progressive instrumentation, and esoteric, expansive, exquisite playing skills by the band. As always, be prepared. My music referrals aren’t always gentle! Happy code streaming!