I built my first CNN a few years ago and kept seeing Conv2D pop up in every tutorial. It took me a while to understand what was actually happening under the hood when the filter slides across the image. This article is what I wish I had back then — a clear walkthrough of Conv2D, its parameters, and how to use it in a real Keras model. This article covers what convolution means in the context of neural networks, how Keras implements it through Conv2D, the key parameters that control behavior, and a full end-to-end example with CIFAR-10 images. By…
Author: drweb
DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it just that much easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role, it tends to create opportunities for others.The ten job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and naturally, the pay…
I write a lot of small Python utilities that peek at the filesystem, read env vars, or spin up processes. Every time, I reach for the same module first — the os module from the standard library. It has been around forever, covers all three major platforms without changes, and genuinely makes scripts more readable than if I tried wrapping raw system calls myself. After using it for years I still find functions I underused, so let me walk through the ten I reach for most. This article covers filesystem navigation, directory listing, file and folder creation and deletion, path…
I ran into a situation last year where I had a pandas DataFrame with 50 columns and needed to pull out specific columns by their numerical position. The column names were generated programmatically and I had no way to know them ahead of time. That’s when I reached for iloc. This article covers how iloc() works, how to select rows and columns by integer position, and the common mistakes that trip people up. By the end, you’ll be able to slice any DataFrame precisely without knowing its column names. The pandas library provides iloc as part of its standard API…
You’ve been copying files with cp for years, and if you’re moving a 50GB backup or syncing a directory tree to a remote server, that habit is quietly costing you time, visibility, and recoverability every single day. The cp command does exactly one thing well: it copies files, but it gives you no progress indicator, no rate limiting, no resume support, and no built-in checksum verification. On a local copy of a few megabytes that’s fine, but the moment you’re pushing a 40GB database dump across a network link or copying 200,000 small files to a new disk, you want…
Every team deploying AI agents in DevOps eventually faces the same design question, and it’s more consequential than it first appears: How much should the agent do on its own?The question sounds like a settings dial — more autonomy here, less there. In practice, it is a governance question, an engineering question, and an organizational trust question bundled together. This article gives you a framework for thinking through the autonomy decision — what factors actually determine where on the copilot-to-autopilot spectrum a specific action should sit, and how to build the guardrails that make the decision defensible. The Spectrum Isn’t Binary The…
The error stopped my script cold. I had a list of user inputs — some numbers, some not — and I was passing them straight to math.sqrt() without checking. Python threw ValueError and the whole pipeline froze. That was the moment I learned why type-safe input handling matters in Python. Handling ValueError in Python comes up whenever a function gets an argument that has the right type but the wrong value. The function cannot do anything with it, so Python stops execution and raises an error. This article covers what ValueError looks like in practice, how to catch it with…
A survey of 954 IT decision-makers suggests more resources are now being allocated to reducing friction across the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Conducted by CDW, the survey finds more than two-thirds of respondents (68%) report their organization has adopted an internal developer platform (IDP). The primary goal is to improve operational efficiency (57%), provide better user experiences (48%), and improve observability and security (47%), the survey finds. However, a significant percentage of respondents also noted that their development teams are still encountering friction, with systems integration (25%) and security and compliance restrictions (23%) identified as the two primary sources. Additionally,…
Security has long been the last item on the checklist. Code gets written, reviewed, merged—and then, somewhere down the line, a security team takes a look. That model worked when development moved at a human pace. It doesn’t work as well when AI writes and refactors code faster than any team can keep up with. Vercel is taking a direct shot at that problem with the open-source release of deepsec, an agent-powered security harness that runs on your own infrastructure and surfaces hard-to-find vulnerabilities in large codebases. How It Works Deepsec uses Claude and Codex to conduct a tailored investigation…
PlanTrace Now Supports PostgreSQLThe same plan analysis you know from Redshift, now for PostgreSQL — including EXPLAIN ANALYZE, buffer stats, and JSON format. When I built PlanTrace, it was a Redshift-only tool. Paste your EXPLAIN output, get an interactive graph, cost heatmap, and tuning insights — all client-side, nothing stored. It worked well, but Redshift is only part of the picture for most teams. PostgreSQL is where most development happens, where staging environments live, and where a lot of production workloads run. So I extended PlanTrace to support it — same interface, same zero-friction flow, automatic engine detection.How it works…