I picked up a Ugreen DXP4800 Pro NAS earlier this year. It’s a 4-bay unit with an Intel Core i3-1315U, 10GbE + 2.5GbE LAN, and dual M.2 NVMe SSD slots. I upgraded the RAM to 2x8GB DDR5-5600 SO-DIMMs (replacing the stock single stick) for 16GB total. The i3-1315U is a chip more commonly found in laptops than NAS enclosures, which turns out to matter a lot when you want to run Plex Media Server.
The Ring smart doorbell does far more than your ordinary wired doorbell; it’s able to deliver audio & video recordings in real-time over a WiFi link connected to the Internet. When your doorbell is pressed or motion is detected, the doorbell automatically begins streaming video to the Ring servers. Ring will send a push notification to your phone and archive the video, where it can be downloaded or viewed through the Ring website or app.
Kinesis is a hosted service from Amazon Web Services that offers the ability to publish & consume durable streams of high-volume data. There’s no limit to the number of sources that feed a Kinesis stream, making Kinesis a convenient ingestion point for a data processing pipeline.
I’ve been using Apache Flink to perform streaming aggregations for real-time alerting across several attributes. It’s a phenomal stream-processing engine with an easy-to-use API, simple switching between local and cluster job execution, and great support for job checkpointing to simplify recovery when systems fail.
For years I’ve been using CircleCI to do the typical CI things: building a project, running tests, packaging & uploading artifacts, and even deploying. Lately I’ve noticed a lot of reliability and performance issues with CircleCI and figured it was time to explore the CI landscape. I used Wercker one year ago to build some Bitbucket-hosted projects that were written in Java. Wercker performed wonderfully, was (and still is) free, and supports both Github and Bitbucket.