When I was first learning software development, I remember needing to test a payment processing flow without using real card numbers. I did not want to risk processing a live transaction, and I did not want to store real card data on my test server. That is exactly the problem a credit card generator solves. In this article, I will walk you through how to build a credit card generator in Python from scratch. You will learn how card numbers are structured, how the Luhn algorithm validates them, and how to generate numbers that pass that validation for testing purposes.…
Author: drweb
There was once a trend toward becoming a full-stack software engineer. Today, full-stack engineers are not limited to UI (User Interface) and DB (Backend Databases), they are adapting to cloud-native applications, managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC), automating CI/CD pipelines and using tools like GitHub Actions, Docker, and Terraform. Full-stack engineers are using these DevOps practices as a core part of their workflow. This shift enables engineers to own the complete software process—from code to cloud. By taking on the role of DevOps, full-stack engineers are not just responsible for writing code, they must ship it, deploy it, scale it, and…
A short blog post about an issue with Fabric Mirroring (with Azure SQL DB as the source) that I’ve managed to run into, twice. I’ve set up mirroring by creating a connection using a service principal and this principal has the proper permissions on the source database. Configuring the replication was without issues, and the replication status went from “starting” to “running”. However, no rows were being copied. The tables were all listed in the monitoring pane, but the counters of “rows replicated” remained at zero. There were no errors in the logs (in OneLake) and nothing suspicious was mentioned…
When I first saw a list comprehension in Python, I thought it was some advanced wizardry. Turns out, it is just a cleaner way to build lists, and once you understand the pattern, you will never go back to writing verbose loops. In this guide, I will break down list comprehension from the ground up so you can use it confidently in your own code. What Is List Comprehension in Python? List comprehension is a concise syntax in Python for creating a new list from an existing iterable. Instead of writing a multi-line for loop and appending items one by…
If you work in DevOps, you’ve probably had this experience: You ship something. It works. Performance looks good. Deployment is clean. A few weeks later, someone from finance shows up asking why costs spiked 30%. Now you’re digging through logs, trying to reconstruct decisions you made weeks ago, in a completely different context. That’s not a FinOps problem. That’s a workflow problem. The Real Issue: Cost Lives Outside the Pipeline Most DevOps teams have spent years tightening feedback loops: Code quality → caught in PRs Security → caught in CI Performance → caught in testing Cost is the outlier. It…
GitHub’s new Stacked Pull Requests feature restructures how developers submit and review changes by allowing large code updates to be broken into smaller, interdependent units. With Stacked PRs, each unit can be reviewed and merged individually while still contributing to the overall feature set. The approach helps developers shift away from monolithic pull requests, which have become increasingly difficult to manage as development continues to move faster. The release of Stacked PRs is a response to the rise of AI-assisted coding tools, which have greatly increased the volume and scale of code submissions, placing new pressure on review workflows. While…
I wrote an article recently on the JSON_OBJECTAGG function, but neglected to include an example of why it can behave weirdly. This post looks at something you might not realize unless you remember this is an aggregate function.Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.A Strange ResultI have some data, which I show below. Some teams, cities, and years. If I ask for this data in a JSON_OBJECTAGG query, I get one document back. Which is fine. You can see this belowHowever, if I were to add…
Broadcom today revealed it has added a runtime to its Tanzu platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment that makes it possible to securely build and deploy artificial intelligence (AI) agents. Based on the open source Cloud Foundry PaaS environment being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Tanzu PaaS is optimized to be deployed on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) that Broadcom also provides. Purnima Padmanabhan, general manager for the Tanzu division at Broadcom, said the runtime extension will make it possible for software engineering teams that have adopted Tanzu to use the same tools and workflows they…
You write a lot of classes in Python. Most of them exist just to hold a few fields, maybe print nicely, and compare with each other. If you have been doing this manually, you are wasting time. The @dataclass decorator handles all of that for you, and it has been in the standard library since Python 3.7. I use it in virtually every project I work on, and in this guide I will show you exactly why, and how to use it the right way. You will know what dataclasses are, how to create them, every field option available, how…
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 10 job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and…