The original title of this blog post was "Building a Generative AI application to fight WhatsApp vocal messages". I hate WhatsApp vocal messages, and I am not hiding it: As I try to experiment more with what the good Gen AI can do for this world, I thought I'd start by solving a use case that have been …

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I have worked in IT for almost 30 years and I have experienced first-hand tectonic shifts in this industry. Some of them have been more profound and impacting than others. Given my recent re-focus on Generative AI, I am going to go through my experience trying to imagine the implications of Gen AI and its potential …

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In the last few months, the "generative AI" discussions have been dominated by LLMs (or Large Language Models). We ended up short-cutting the (magical) experience you can get and the models that make it possible... as if there was nothing in between. I am going to argue that there is a ton in between (that is …

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I spent the last 30-ish years of my professional life working on what I generally refer to as "compute systems abstractions". I started in 1994 at IBM working on "the PC" (Personal Computer) almost by chance and I specialized, over the years, on physical servers, operating systems, hardware …

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In the last few months, I have talked to a couple of Beanstalk customers that wanted to explore ways to modernize their deployments. They like Beanstalk but they see the value of moving to a more container-native deployment to intercept more modern development tool-chains. This did not surprise me. Beanstalk customers …

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I know, I am boring. Some people relax doing Sudoku. I relax writing Step Functions state machines. Not that I am any good, I just enjoy doing it (I am that weird). As I was searching for my next Sudoku state machine challenge, I bumped into this Amazon ECS roadmap request to introduce support for tasks timeouts. The …

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In (virtual) part 1 of this blog post (yes it has a different title) I have shown how to use a combination of AWS Step Functions and Amazon EventBridge to modify the behaviour of Amazon ECS and virtually adding a new feature that doesn't exist in the product itself. Ok this may sound a big hyperbolic, and it probably …

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In an effort to dive deeper into event driven architectures, I have lately been experimenting with AWS Step Functions as I have documented in this blog post where I have refactored the application logic of my demo application Yelb into a set of state machines. As I wanted to dive deeper into Amazon EventBridge, I was …

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Code is a liability. That’s not only the code you write but also (and predominantly!) the code that you need to operationalize for your own business logic to work. In this blog post I would like to demonstrate how it is possible to reduce, for relatively simple use cases, that liability by many orders of magnitude. …

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Yelb is the demo application I use to experiment with and learn technologies. A few years ago I have refactored the yelb-appserver component to work with Lambda and the yelb-ui component to be hosted on S3. At the time of this writing, this folder in the Yelb repository describes the architecture for this deployment …

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