I'm building a small application to give treats to my dog in a remote manner. I setup a Raspberry Pi with a very basic HTTP server connected to a servo motor that will open or close the deposit where the treats are stored. In this article I'll explain all the challenges I found to make this application standalone.

Currently we’re investigating usage of SNS to send Push notifications. We have some friends working already with Firebase and recommend us to check it out. We discovered that SNS supports sending messages to Firebase. However, not everything is as easy as it looks like.

Gitlab or any other CI/CD system works really great to have an automated build system. However, you can waste lots of time if you don’t think about carefully. Every job needs to download the build tools and dependencies, so that’s a lot of time that could be reduced. In this article I describe two techniques to avoid wasting that much time. First one is using a cache for the dependencies and the second is using a pre-built Docker image with the required build tools.

I’m currently developing an application based on maps. In that application I want to represent a set of markers. In order to do so, the map library I’m using it has a fitBounds method. However, you need to compute the bounds of the map that allow all the markers to be visible. I describe in this article the implemented algorithm.

While at work, we were fine tuning some java application, to do that, we were setting up jvm options, such as -Xmx, -Xms and so on. That lead me to asking me the following question: What would happen if you start the jvm with the minimum memory to be higher than the computer memory?