At our dev meeting this week, Rich talked about ‘Designing Data Intensive Applications‘, that he’d been reading, and Inigo talked about ‘Talking to your TV using Rust‘.
‘Designing Data Intensive Applications’, from O’Reilly, describes various tools and approaches for storing and processing data. It’s split into four sections. Section 1 discusses the basics of databases and how they store content, for SQL databases, NoSQL databases, flat file stores. It covers in-memory stands, b-trees, indexing structures, and the best approaches to use in various situations. Section 2 talks about distributed databases – clustering, transactions, serializing commits at a point in time so shared logs can work, and so on. Section 3 discusses distributed batch processing, using tools like Spark. The first three sections were all very interesting and informative. The fourth section was not as good – it covered the future of data, and was a lot woollier than the previous sections. Rich found the book on the whole good.
To talk to his TV using Rust, Inigo used a Google Home Mini, an RM 3 Mini IR blaster, an Open Source library to interface with the IR blaster, and some Rust on a Raspberry Pi. The Google Home part was setting up a Google Home App via https://developers.google.com/actions/building-your-apps – you configure a set of actions and intents online, and then assign a ‘fulfillment’ to it, which is a web service you make available via HTTPS. This part is fairly straightforwards – it requires filling in various web forms, and it’s easy to publish a test version of an app that’s only available via your own Google account.
To actually use this for a home application, you need to have SSL, so you need a domain name and a certificate. Inigo used Amazon Route 53 for the domain name, and Lets Encrypt for the certificate. There are various other services that will provide a domain name for a dynamic IP address for free, although the original dyndns is no longer free.
THe ‘fulfillment’ part is a web service that Inigo wrote that accepts JSON from Google, and then calls out to a Python library that interacts with the IR blaster. He wrote the first version in Scala, to get something simple working fast, and then rewrote it in Rust. He learned from O’Reilly’s Programming Rust book, and used IDEA’s Rust plugin. The experience was positive, although it was a bit tricky to get some of the memory management working correctly as a first-timer using Rust. The code is on Github at https://github.com/inigo/googlehome-remotecontrol.