This brief article shows you the quickest way to trying out Jupyter Notebooks.

Edit (22 November): since writing this article I learned about colab — a Google site that allows live Notebook authoring and exploration. Colab provides and even faster way of trying out Jupyter notebooks. Not on your own environment, not with a Docker container based environment that you can fully control. But an environment that is even more readily available. For an example — open this link to colab & my introductory Emp/Dept notebook on GitHub and start playing:

The original approach:

It will not try to persuade you that you should try them out. You probably know that already. It will not show a complex Notebook in detail — plenty of those are available. It simply tells…

Azure Static WebApps is a fairly new Azure service, currently in preview. Azure WebApps is a managed, serverless service that allows us to quickly deploy and publicly expose a static web application (from a global content delivery network) — such as single page applications as created using Angular, React, Vue and others with client side resources such as CSS, images, JavaScript and HTML and using backend APIs implemented using Azure Functions.

The code for web app lives in a GitHub repository. The repository is configured with a GitHub Actions workflow that builds the application and deploys it to the Azure service. Under the hood, a Docker container image is built and handed to the “serverless” framework. Before this can be done, a Static WebApp instance is created in Azure Portal and associated with the GitHub repository. …

Today I read the announcement of OpenAPI (fka Swagger) support in API Gateway on OCI. I was wondering what that entailed and I decided to try it out.

In short, this support means that an API definition can be uploaded to API Gateway, is validated for correctness and can be shared among people accessing the OCI API Gateway definition on OCI. Furthermore, an API Deployment can be created from the imported OpenAPI definition, with routes (of type Stock Response) for the paths in OpenAPI definition. I will demonstrate this in this article.

Robert Wunderlich in his announcement wrote: Faster prototyping: A stock response API can be automatically created for developers and their consumers to test the APIs ahead of the implementation. A developer can add policy configurations around the stock response for deeper prototyping. …

The Oracle Developer Cloud Service was probably the very first service on Oracle Cloud, as early as 2015 if I remember correctly. This service has been repositioned and relabeled as Visual Builder Studio. This service supports agile project management, source code control, artifact management, automated builds, software quality checks, CI/CD pipelines and other actions to take code from the programming phase to subsequent stages. Visual Builder Studio is the Oracle counter offer to the Azure DevOps service that seems to have become more or less an industry standard.

It is available for free for anyone who is a paid Oracle Cloud customer for any other service. Customers do have to pay for the compute instances that are engaged for builds and other actions . …

In this article I want to describe how I run a SonarQube instance (that I intend to use from my automated CI/CD pipeline) on OCI, using a simple VM and a simple Docker container image. The VM gets a public IP address and I need to SSH into it in order to install Docker and run the SonarQube image. Note: SonarQube automatic is a static code analysis and review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells in code programmed in one of the 20+ supported languages. …

My objective: show a video feed in MS Teams that consists of me and a combinati0n of other sources — such as desktop applications like Powerpoint, images, videoclips etc. Without using a green screen or other tools — with nothing more than a laptop with webcam.

I made this work with the use of two free tools: OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) 26.0.1 and the Zoom client application. This next picture shows what setup I used.

A regular Windows 10 laptop with webcam and the following software tools: Zoom Client, Powerpoint (as an example source), OBS and MS Teams. To prepare, I created an image file (green.jpeg) …

Oracle Functions are the Functions as a Service (or FaaS) offering on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Functions are the serverless, stateless execution engines that play such an important role in cloud native applications. Functions handle requests and events, contributing to live application behavior, streaming activities and integrations. Functions are also used in automation tasks performed as part of the Ops half of DevOps, for example for log processing, monitoring and incident resolution.

The mental picture for functions is one of ‘serverless-ness and stateless-ness’. …

My colleague pointed the open source code-server project to me. This project allows you to run Visual Studio Code just anywhere — and to develop on any device.

He already had it running — showing off his code development skills on a mobile phone. Of course I had to try it out for myself. And the steps are very simple. As is demonstrated below. My environment is in this case is Ubuntu 20.4 running in Windows 10 WSL2. I also tried to several other environments, including a Docker container.

The steps (on a Linux environment)

Git Clone the code-server from…