Category Archives: Conferences

[uberconf 2023] Practical AI Tools for Java Developers

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Speaker: Ken Kousen

@kenkousen

For more, see the table of contents

Prompt Engineering

  • Tools are improving fast, might not be needed as job
  • Suggest context (ex: “pretend you are”)
  • Give example of what you want

Chat GPT

  • Free version is GPT 3.5 Turbo (improved performance over original 3.5)
  • $20/month for GPT 4. Can make 25 requests in a three hour block.
  • Have not noticed quality control over plugins.
  • Plugins change rapidly.
  • Apologizes when you correct it.
  • Warning about pasting your company’s code in
  • Trained thru summer 2021
  • Can’t read files on local file system (Bard can). Can read link but doesn’t know it can
  • Often wrong if you ask it about whether can do something. Like talking to toddler; says want thinks want to know.
  • Temperature – tweaks creativity vs precision
  • REST API docs
  • REST API: cookbook has examples
  • Must give credit card to call REST APIs. Pennies are for 1000 tokens (about 750 words). Charged for both input and output words. Also limits on context (amount GPT remembers). Not expensive if don’t use it much. Ken’s bill has been pennies and too low to be sent a bill.
  • REST API JSON response says how many tokens used. Can also see graph when log into account
  • Had it make multiple choice questions on a topic

Chat GPT Code Interpreter

  • Code Interpreter beta feature.
  • Need to explicitly enable under settings.
  • From OpenAI, not third party
  • ex: can convert Groovy to Kotlin DSL for Gradle

DALL-E

  • First popular text to image generation tool
  • A generation behind text/GPT.
  • Stable Diffusion free, but behind on quality
  • Prefers MidJourney, more realistic

Whisper

  • Audio to text
  • Takes audio or video and writes transcription.
  • Free (unless use REST API)
  • Mac Whisper – $20 on time fee for larger models. Good for transcribing videos of talks. Slow first time. After that (including other videos, fast. [caching?]
  • Creates .srt file (Subtitles)

Claude.AI

  • Free beta
  • Only available in US and UK
  • Can hold 100K tokens. ex: can summarize a novel
  • Quality comparable to ChatGPT 3.5, but not as good as 4.0
  • Can upload many file types
  • Harder to get back to previous conversations than ChatGPT. Need to click on “A” icon on top to see them
  • Doesn’t do image

Bard

  • Can upload answers to Google docs on Ken’s personal account, but not business account
  • Used to be able to answer who Venkat is but can’t anymore.

Llama 2

  • Meta announced today
  • Pretrained language model
  • Free unless large company (aka: competitors)

Descript

  • Transcribes and edits video
  • Can give instructions – ex: shorten gaps in video, remove filler words
  • If don’t move around much, will make it look like you are looking at camera
  • Can give text and select a voice. With 30 minute sample, can train on your voice

Canva

  • Can describe presentation want and Canva makes a draft
  • Can choose theme from list of choices
  • Magic eraser – brush over part of image don’t want and replaces with background nearby
  • Beats Sync – line of slide transition to beats of music
  • Magic Write – like GPT 3.5
  • Magic Design – give own image and make presentation around that

GitHub Copilot

  • Virtual pair programmer
  • Plugins for VSCode and IntelliJ
  • If hesitate, suggests code
  • Can’t agree to part of suggestion. Need to accept it all or delete
  • Guesses right a lot because knows what have done before in a training class
  • Always looks plausible because trained on own code. Need to look carefully
  • Next generation is GitHub CopilotX. Only available via wait list. VS Code only at this point, can use for pull requests.
  • GitHub Next – tools in a variety of states – https://githubnext.com. “Visualizing a Codebase” runs as github action to see packages

IntelliJ AI Assistant

  • Not much documentation on how it works. Only one blog post
  • In Ultimate, not Community
  • In beta edition
  • Can highlight code and ask to explain it
  • If don’t like suggestion, can request it suggests something else and get more choices
  • Can write commit message for you
  • Find issues with code when know language well
  • Helps in language know less well because it knows the API/syntax
  • Good for nuisance tasks that would take a lot of time

YouTube Summary

  • Get summary or transcript of video
  • Free
  • Up to 20 minute video

My take

I was doing my interview with the Build Propulsion Lab so was a few minutes late. It was a full room so my seat was on the floor. Luckily, the room had a large aisle so I could sit near the front instead of in the very back! And the carpet was comfy.

As far as Ken’s actual talk, it was great. I liked the overview of a bunch of tools and seeing the REST APIs for calling OpenAI. Great breath of topics and fun examples! I learned a lot including some tools I hadn’t heard of. And some very cool functionality!

[uberconf 2023] Structured Concurrency in Java

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Speaker: Venkat Subramaniam

@venkat_s

For more, see the table of contents

Warning

  • Incubator phase feature
  • Anything can change.
  • Will be a year or more before release
  • use –enable-preview flag
  • Java prints out warning using incubator feature whenever run program

Executor Service

  • Since Java 5
  • Executors.newFixedThreadPool(x)
  • executorService.submit() -> logic()) – returns future. Call future.get() when done
  • executorService.shutdown()
  • executorService.awaitTermination(10, TImeout.SECONDS)

Structured Concurrency

  • Allow control of what happens on parallel
  • Parent handles/processes failures from children
  • Currently import jdk.incubator.concurrent – will move
  • StructuredTaskScopeShutdownOnFailure – invoke all
  • StructuredTaskScopeShutdownOnSuccess – invoke any
  • try (var scope = new StructuredTaskScope()) – want autoclose – or scope = StructuredTaskScopeShutdownOnSuccess() or scope = StructuredTaskScopeShutdownOnSuccess<String>()
  • scope.fork(() -> logic()) – makes child tasks, still returns a Future
  • scope.join() – don’t use – better to use a timeout so not unbounded waiting on children
  • scope.joinUntil(Instant.now().plusSeconds(50)) – better, uses timeout. waits for all children up to timeout Nice using Java date math
  • future.resultNow() – get result immediately. (vs get() which waits if not available)
  • scope.throwIfFailed(ex- > handle()) – deal with first failure

Scoped Values

  • ThreadLocal not useful in Spring because thread executing code not the same one that created the value
  • Scoped value, not scoped variable. Immutable
  • Hide the value instead of changing it
  • New value available in inner value. When get back out of that scope, see original value.
  • Doesn’t matter which thread runs the code because matters where you are in code.
  • Useful when calling a lambda which does a callback via third party code
  • Created ScopedValue field in the class that needs the data.
  • ScopedValue.newInstance() – placeholder, doesn’t have value yet
  • state.isBound() – whether has been set to a value
  • ScopedValue.where(state, “test”).run(lamba) – binds the value
  • state.get() – get value if bound. Blows up if not bound

My take

As an incubator feature, I knew nothing about this. It was great to learn about it from a Venkat talk. Different then the usual which is something I do know about and am learning deeper. I also enjoyed the airport code jokes: IAH (Houston – i am here), IAD (Dulles – i am delayed), and ORD (Chicago – ordeal). I’m always impressed Venkat can live code in front of so many people. I’d never seen incubator code in use. Nice it gets a temporary package name; can’t use it by accident. Venkat used IntelliJ to create a module. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him use IntelliJ :). Great audience questions on structured task scope. The scoped value thing made my head swim for a bit, but I get it now.

[uberconf 2023] Jenkins vs GitHub Actions

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Speaker: Brent Laster

@BrentCLaster

For more, see the table of contents

GitHub Actions

  • Several years old
  • Actions = framework, actions – building block (ex: checkout code)
  • Automated workflows, call actions
  • Based on repository operations – ex: push, pull, issues comment
  • Can combine/share
  • Migration tool from other CI providers
  • Repository dispatch events – for things not in github. Good for while migrating.
  • Workflows contain jobs, jobs contain steps
  • All public actions: https://github.com/marketplace?type=actions. Anyone could have submitted. See who created. ex; verified creator. Can see source code of any action ex: last updated date, how many creators
  • Can create Docker, JavaScript or composite (multiple workflow steps) as custom actions
  • workflow_dispatch – can start interactively

Cost

  • Free for public repos or self hosted runners (aka running on your servers)
  • For private repos, 2K free minutes per month and 500MB of storage. Minutes restart each month. Storage includes github packages
  • Multiplier if using github hosted runners – linux x1, windows x2, mac x10

Directory

  • .github directory
  • .github/workflows/*.yml

Key differences from Jenkins

  • GitHub Actions run in parallel by default; Jenkins runs serially by default.
  • GitHub Action jobs like Jenkins stages
  • GitHub Action actions are like Jenkins plugins
  • Less config for GItHub Action
  • GitHub Action can have any name; only yaml extension matters. (action.yaml needed for metadata for reuse though)
  • GitHub Action always in github
  • GitHub Action can have different workflows for different events
  • Jenkins supports othe reports
  • Jenkins pipeline stages can run on different nodes
  • GitHub uses reusable workflow where Jenkins uses pipeline libraries. Use workflow_call trigger to call.

Structure

  • on
  • — jobs
    • —- job
      • —— runner
      • —— steps

Code

  • runs-on – what runner to use. Can be custom runner or a GitHub provided/hosted runner. Steps in a job run on the same runner. Fresh VM per job. Docker runners are self hosted.
  • uses – the code as a relative path to the repo. After path to action can have @label for tag/version #/etc
  • on.schedule to run on a schedule – can use cron
  • needs – set dependency to invoke sequentially
  • if: success(), always(), cancelled(), failure()

UI

  • Actions tab lists workflow. Can see runs over time.
  • Like stage view of Jenkins
  • Don’t know of a way to aggregate reporting on an org level [me neither; but worth asking]

Bonus: Online IDE

  • Going to your repo and pressing the period, changes your URL from github.com to github.dev. This shows your repo in VS Code.

Migration

  • Code – move to GitHub if not there – all code/projects, history? branches? Easy to move from one git to another
  • Automation – all projects? Do people know what the Jenkinsfiles do? Custom scripting/kludges? Old versions?
  • Infrastructure – custom setup/config/os versions? Can you switch from Mac/Windows to Linux?
  • Users – what are appropriate permissions? Informed? Trained?
  • Tips – delete outdated/unneeded, standardize where can/make reusable workflow, allow enough time to migrate, require training, do a test conversion
  • Don’t want to migrate unicorns
  • GitHub Actions Importer – tool for bootstrapping migrations, not complete solutions. Attempts to read AzDO/Bamboo/CircleCI/GitLab/Jenkins/Travis. Migrate what can and access what can’t. Docker container runs as extension to GitHub CLI. Has commands: update (to latest version), version, configure (interactive prompt to configure credentials), audit (looks at current footprint), forecast (predicts Actions usages), dry-run, migration (create initial files). Good for insights. Can be more trouble than it’s worth to use in full. Can write custom transformer in Ruby if need something not built in

My take

I’ve used GitHub actions only a tiny bit, but lots of Jenkins. The phrase “like in Jenkins” came up a lot which was helpful in comparing them and learning faster. As were the tables and the code comparisons. The shortcut of “.” is cool (not about actions, but still useful).