Kartones Blog

Walking back from work to home I recently listened to a Rework's podcast titled You need less than you think, which made me remember of a few technical examples that also fit into that topic.

Agility

When I started studying computer science, we were taught only about the classic and dreaded waterfall model, and although much has changed since then and I also had the luck of learning TDD and XP in 2004 and apply it to my work sometimes, we're midway through 2018 and still too many startups and in general tech companies struggle to generate value fast enough to be really considered agile (in my opinion). I've experienced both small and mid-sized tech teams struggling to deliver products in time, but I've also experienced the opposite: Very small teams (like 3 engineers at Minijuegos.com counting the CTO) and workforces of +100 engineers (like Tuenti when it was a social network), where we were able to deliver what I consider high quality and complex products in very short time periods.

But those two examples I mentioned are outliers. Usually you either get into big, long projects, or instead accomplish tiny projects without an ambitious scope. At a previous job, we had a real need to be agile: We were an early stage startup, with some initial funding but the need to build the product and start generating money [1], a small team (we peaked at ~10 engineers IIRC), and some "critical" requirements like being "highly scalable" from day 1.

I had the luck of working with eferro, who tries to be agile, pragmatic and iterative when building products, and he seeded us with the concept of building MVPs (Minimum Viable Products). I'm not going to enter into details of how it works but instead use a classic picture that perfectly represents it:

We tried to be extremely pragmatic whenever possible, and even iterated through some existing services we had built in order to simplify them, as we moved towards a fully automated platform (from infraestructure to every service, everything was triggered through code, had no intermediate manual steps). I'm going to talk about three scenarios where we built MVPs that some people would consider almost "hacks" but worked so well in our scenario.

#1: You don't always need users

When we got our first paying clients, we not only manually billed them, but also didn't monitor usage of the platform per user, because we didn't actually had users.

We reached the point where the platform could work as an API-based self-service so product came with the need of "adding users so we can bill them". But we still had still lots of critical pieces to build (like an actual web!), so we discussed a bit around what was needed, and came upon the real need: "we need a way to track usage of the platform per customer to charge them appropiately". Look at the tiny critical detail: If we were able to somehow track that usage without actual users, as long as we provided accurate metrics, it would be fine.

We had the following data pieces:

• we knew the email of the customer as we were sending them a notification when the job was done
• each customer had an API key (which was a simple config python dictionary with an api key -> email mapping)
• we were gathering metrics, just per job instead of per user
• our AWS SQS message-based architecture allowed to easily add any new field to the messages without breaking existing services (e.g. add a correlation id that travels and marks the full journey of a job)

What we decided to do is, at the API, build an SHA hash of the API key per job as our "user id", add it to the messages, and implement a quick & simple CSV export job that would be manually triggered and would return a list of all the job metrics for a given user email and start-end datetime range.

This approach allowed us to keep building other pieces for a few months, until we really had to add a user service to the platform.

#2: You don't always need a database

The platform we were building allowed to customize some parameters based on templates. Those templates were displayed at a small website, like a customer-facing catalog, and also could used to do single task jobs as demos.

• Some data was stored at PostgreSQL, while other was read from AWS S3. You always had to query the DB to just display a few items, but you also always had to fetch metadata files plus the template actual data.
• Having to work with a Python ORM (SQLAlchemy in this case) to perform such trivial queries (we didn't even had search) was overkill
• We had sample videos showcasing some templates, which were created by the template builders but needed to manually be resized (and weren't optimized)

None of it would initially be a deciding factor to rewrite the internals of the service, but combined made this apparently trivial system a huge source of pain for our "internal users" (the template makers), as they would had changes made but not reflected on this site and had to do lots of trial and error an manual corrections.

We also had less than a hundred templates, with not so many variants available, so why having to mess up with a DB for a few hundred "rows" of total data?

What we did was:

• Revisit all the S3 policies to ensure consistent metadata + data files. Either you got the newest version "of everything", or would get the previous version when calling the service from jobs.
• Create a script that, when (manually) run, would reencode the chosen FullHD sample video at a configured web resolution and optimize it a bit (mostly remove audio track and reduce some frames)
• Remove the database, using a JSON file "per table"

S3 scales insanely well so we got rid of the ORM and of having to setup and use any database engine... And the code got really simple, up to the point that data reading methods became mere "dump this json file contents to the output" or "load this json and dump item X".

Local development also got faster, now being so easy to understand, test and extend.

Later this demo website was removed and a template service was developed, both to serve the main API and the would-be self-service webpage. I proposed for it to be also DB-less but the service owner decided to build and keep it relational just in case.

I like relational databases and think they are quite useful in many, many scenarios, but I've also realized that sometimes, if you can rely on something that "scales well", maybe there's a simpler solution removing the need of adding a DB, at least for the first MVPs.

#3: You don't always need a relational database (nor a NoSQL one)

This was an evolution of the second example. We had a distributed job coordinator, a single process that had to read and manage state of thousands of messages whenever the platform had work to do. The state was stored in a PostgreSQL database, and while the DB wasn't the main problem, it was also quite overkill for a single state storage.

We were also doing on-call, so after suffering a fun night with the service crashing multiple times, we decided to rewrite it, and came up with a much simpler solution: Keep a simple structure of general job data and individual job items/tasks, wait until every item has either finished or failed X times (we had retries for some tasks) and just persist everything into AWS S3 (taking care of the by default eventual consistency I/O) in plain JSON files.

Something like this:

job {
    id: "...",
    ...
    tasks: {
        "task-id-1": null,
        "task-id-2": "ok",
        "task-id-3": "ko",
        ...
        "task-id-N": null,
    }
}

This allows you to both know the status of the general job (if count of null > 0 still ongoing) and know if a finished job had errors (if count of ko > 0 has errors), without keeping an explicit general state. I've come to dread state machines when you can use actual data to calculate on the fly that same state.

We could have used Redis to keep the states, but JSON files worked fine, allowed us to TDD our way in from the beginning, and also eased bugfixing a lot, as we could just grab any failing job's "metadata" and replicate locally inside a test exactly the same job.

[1] : Actually we failed to achieve the goal, as the platform itself was working really well... but cool technology without money usually doesn't lasts.

UPDATE: A colleage from that company pointed out that my memory has issues. Corrected the second example to reflect which service we removed the DB from (the demo website), I proposed to do it also later at the template service when we built it and mixed both.

Posted on 2018-06-23

Continuing with my "english workout" plan, another course from Udemy I've recently finished is Master The English Verb Tenses.

2 video hours and 1 audio exercises hour in, it serves as a good way to fortify the english verb tenses. It describes them, including handy timelines to more easily understand when the action took/takes/will take place, gives some examples, scenarios of common mistakes/misuses of each tense, and some exercises for you to do.

Small but effective, it met my expectations.

Posted on 2018-06-11

Part I: The Experiment

I love retro systems, and always have been using emulators since they exist. The main caveat with that many of those emulators is that they tend to get outdated and stop working on newer operating systems. With Windows each major version scared me up to the point that my gaming PC is "frozen" on Windows 7 to avoid losing performance and compabitility. Since I switched to Linux, I've been trying to use emulators, with not so good results. So, when I read about the RetroPie project I felt like could be the solution: a dedicated but small gaming machine. I had a Raspberry Pi 2 not being used for anything so... why not?

I used the RPi 2 as a testbed with a spare 8GB SD card. Just following the official instructions and using the official image was enough and I didn't have a single issue. I love how it allows you to setup a USB-drive to add new content, by just setting up some folder structure on it, so I can just place new games and after plugging they get installed automatically.

As an alternative, Ars Technica has a detailed DIY guide, although as I mention later, careful if you play PSX or NeoGeo as their setup won't cool at all and the CPU will heat and lower the speed.

Everything went smooth and I could play some old console games, so I copied some MAME and NeoGeo romsets... and here I got my only issues:

• For NeoGeo, read the appropiate section and ensure you have the correct BIOS downloaded
• For MAME, documentation is not bad but I didn't read it so much and found the hard way about the concept of ROMset rebuilding. ROMs are dumped and emulated at a certain version, but as time goes by newer dumps might be achieved, and those usually are not backwards compatible. Combine that with the RPi MAME emulator supporting only until 0.78 ROMsets, and you get the answer to why most games didn't worked at the system when always worked for me at the PC. So either you rebuild the ROMsets for v0.78, or (the way I went as I'm lazy) directly search online for some full 0.78 ROMset to download and then filter.

Part II: Going to production

Emulation issues solved, the experiment was a success so I decided to buy a Raspberry Pi 3. After Nintendo's Mini-NES, there are many clones to use as Raspberry Pi cases. I didn't planned to buy any, but a friend read my tweet about setting up the RetroPie and instead of buying anything he gifted me not only with a case but an actual pack of a Raspberry Pi 3 + NES-like case + SD card + USB gamepad!

It came with some MAME games preinstalled but I preferred to do a clean install of the latest RetroPie. After installing games including the oldie but goldie Gran Turismo 2 for the original Sony Playstation, I noticed that the game slowed down after a few minutes of playing. Some research and touching the CPU to confirm it taught me that when gets hot, RPi lowers the CPU speed to avoid thermal issues. So, the case might be cool but wasn't good for CPU-intensive usage, despite having some heatsinks installed like the following:

Some more reading after it looked like the best solution was to add a fan to cool the CPU:

The fans can be setup at two different voltages. Being so small and already used to a semi-tower gaming PC, I directly went for the 5V voltage connection.

I originally had made additional ventilation holes to the case, hoping would be enough to let the hot air go out, but as it didn't worked I had to modify those holes to place and hold the fan:

Everything finally assembled, I played through a few levels of Aliens vs Predator (MAME version, good benchmark), a few races in PSX Gran Turismo 2 arcade mode and the first full level of NeoGeo's Metal Slug. Not a single slowdown.

Part III: Replicating the success

I liked the system it so much that I actually bought another Raspberry Pi, a 3 B+ model, with an official case. This is the one that I'll keep at home to squeeze those extra 200MHz and better network speed it brings. I initially thought about just leaving the case open, but as the fans came in a 2-pack, I decided to also install the other one on it:

And after some patience and plastic cutting, this is how it looks fully assembled:

As you might notice the hole is not centered. This is on purpose to place the fan exactly above the CPU. Less aesthetic but I prefer pragmatism.

Even with the fan, the official case doesn't have any ventilation hole/grid, so when playing I open one of the side lids (the one without connectors) so the air flows out from it instead of being kept inside.

I'm only missing setting up the second gamepad for the system, as I have a handy original SNES to USB adapter that allows to plug two pads, but joystick configuration is so easy that I don't expect any trouble.

Closing thoughts

I'll use the NES-like system as a "portable arcade", for vacations, events, etc. as I just need an HDMI plug and I have an extra USB gamepad.

I haven't tested anything more powerful than Nintendo-64 emulator, but people seem to be using it to play even PSP games, so this 3.5 generation of the Raspberry Pi is already quite powerful, despite not having a decent GPU. RetroPie 4.4 feels quite stable and my plan is to stick with the system for as long as possible, as my only wish would be more MAME ROMs support, but even with the actual compatibility is fine by me.

I only tried the Raspberry Pi 2 with few games and then gifted it to my sister, so I really don't know the performance cap it has compared with a Pi 3 or 3B+.

Appendix

Other useful software I've installed will get listed here.

• Kodi: An amazing media player from the creators of XBMC, highly configurable and supporting plugins (although I haven't tried them).

Changelog

Update #1: Added Appendix section with Kodi software.

Update #2: Added a link to an Ars Technica guide which contains very detailed installation instructions.

Posted on 2018-06-02

Last christmas I decided to try to improve my english, so work lessons aside, I enrolled into a university course (B2 European level-equivalent), and now I'm also taking some Udemy english-related courses. This is the review of the first one I've fully studied (handy also for my incoming university exam).

Note: I'm not going to judge the price of courses because we now have at work Udemy for Business accounts so I get access to most of them "for free" and thus I cannot be totally objective regarding price/value. I prefer to focus on a small review of the quality and contents.

So, the first course I've finished is Essential Business English, which contains 2 hours of video with work-related conversations: How to hold a meeting, discuss, interrupt, making business calls, scheduling, complaining about delivery problems, introducing new employees... It also includes some exercises, both inside the videos (showing you the correct answer after a while) and in companion PDFs, online crosswords, quizs and other resources. Videos contain funny but well drawn cartoons and the pronunciation and quality of the audio is excellent.

It feels a bit short but well organized and easy to follow and study.

Posted on 2018-06-02

I value a lot my privacy, much further than the mere act of adblocking half of the internet to avoid targeted advertisement and tracking. While my specific methods and tools evolve over time (although are still similar to those I wrote about in 2015), sometimes you get "vendor locked-in" and becomes hard to break free from those restrictions.

While I think Google is awesome as a technical company, they also worry me a lot because of the power to store, infer and correlate information about mostly everything. And for many years I've been using Google Apps for Domain and many of their services... They are generally great, convenient and powerful. But, at the same time, you feed more info and even leave private bits (emails, appointments, documents) inside them. And that was something I wasn't comfortable with.

So, a few months ago I decided to build a plan on how to cut my ties with GApps. This are the results and the services I use instead of Google's. There are "cheats" and I'm also restricted to use Linux so others using Windows or Mac will probably have better (paid) alternatives.

That said, let's go with the list:

GMail and mail Contacts: I'm a happy paying ProtonMail user. I exported all my old emails to Mozilla Thunderbird just in case I need to check something but I've decided to keep a "sliding window" of a few years of emails (I think is around 6) and wipe out older stuff.

GDrive: I decided to use Dropbox after getting tired of synchronization conflicts using Box, with a third-party sync script as there isn't even official Linux support. Dropbox Linux client works flawlessly.

Documents and spreadsheets: I combine Dropbox with LibreOffice. LibreOffice is painful to use (feels and works like a bad copy of MS Office 2000), but I haven't got anything better and don't want to need to boot up a VM with a proper MS Office inside for editing documents.

Keep/notes: I use Dropbox Paper, which is really nice on the desktop and works from mobile, although sometimes feels slow responding to typing.

Search: I've been using for years DuckDuckGo and don't miss at all Google's previously-incredible-but-now-increasingly-biased search results.

Presentations: Here I suffer, because despite not being great, Google Slides were a much better alternative than the terrible LibreOffice Impress. So I sometimes cheated and used my Google Apps account to create the slides, and now I just use a Windows VM with MS Powerpoint. Even a default template in PPTX already has conversion and visualization issues at LibreOffice.

Calendar: I didn't found anything fully satisfying so I built my own crappy alterantive, and being web-based, one app less to install and keep updated.

Chrome/web browser: Firefox, of course. With a few extensions and tweaks. Always loved it since exists, just left it when it got bloated and slow, but it again works amazingly well.

Hangouts: WhatsApp or Telegram, but if needs to be Hangouts there's no alternative but to use it (but only from a desktop browser).

Maps: Can't fully avoid it from mobile, but whenever possible I use CityMapper.

Youtube: Don't use it much and never from mobile, so I just watch whatever others send me being always logged out.

Google+: Only use I can think about this service is as a secret vault, as only Google employees use it and would read them. Bad jokes aside, Twitter is a much better alternative to share links and blog posts.

And then comes the big catch... What to do if you use an Android phone? Well... here basically you're screwed up. You have to keep using it, and somehow manually synchronizing your phone contacts (which are in fact GMail ones) with whatever system you use [1]. This is the only real setback I have... I ended up using a different domain name for my new email, so the account is not even Google Apps enabled. I left the old one mostly to use the phone and redirect emails.

[1] In my case I just manually add new contacts to ProtonMail, so it doesn't gets full of clutter from people who wrote or called me just once (as happens with GMail).

Posted on 2018-04-16