Software Engineering

Industrial insight and articles from Winder.AI, focusing on the topic Software Engineering

Early Adopter Release of Kodit: MCP server to index external repositories

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

A lot of my work today is assisted with AI. From editing blog posts to developing proposals. But the number one use case is AI-assisted coding. Tools like Cursor,l Cline, Roo, Aider, Claude Code, etc. have disrupted software engineering to levels I hadn’t anticipated. But still, it’s not perfect.

This post is about one particular set of problems and a new open source tool I developed to alleviate it.

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Explain, Enhance and Enrich Your Data with Bacalhau Amplify

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

Bacalhau is a project started under Protocol Labs, but has now spun out into Expanso, Inc. Expanso is a leading Web3 innovator specializing in developing next generation decentralized commodity services. This case study, which includes a video presentation, describes the proceeds of this collaboration. The Bacalhau team asked Winder.AI to help them develop a new AI product designed to perform data engineering at web-scale, backed by Web3 technologies.

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Do you like DAGs? Implementing a Graph Executor for Bacalhau

Published
Author
Enrico Rotundo
Associate Data Scientist

Winder.AI helped Protocol Labs, a technology company in the crypto space, to help develop Bacalhau, a novel decentralised computational platform that focuses on the AI lifecycle. This case study describes some of our work to develop this project but for more information view the Bacalhau website.

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GitOps for Machine Learning Projects

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

Not so long ago, developers used clunky consoles to provision infrastructure and applications. It wasn’t long before someone realized it was better to automate such a process via scripts and APIs. But it wasn’t until Hashicorp showed that APIs were not enough. Their insight was to declare a canonical representation of the infrastructure. You can then reconcile this declaration against the live view of the infrastructure.

In 2015-16 we helped WeaveWorks develop their cloud monitoring platform. We targeted Kubernetes but lamented the hackiness of our script-based deployment pipeline. The common pattern at that time was to run a script that ran kubectl apply over and over again.

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Developing a Real-Life Project

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

I’m often asked questions in the vain of “how did you figure that out?”. Other times, and I’m less of a fan of these, I get questions like “you estimated X, why did it take 2*X?”, which I respond with a definition of the word estimate. Both of these types of questions are about the research and development process. Non-developers, and especially non-engineers, are often never exposed to the process of research and development. It’s highly non-linear; when it’s going well progress is rapid, but other times you get stuck after falling down a rabbit hole.

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Local Jenkins Development Environment on Minikube on OSX

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

Developing Jenkinsfile pipelines is hard. I think my world record for the number of attempts to get a working Jenkinsfile is around 20. When you have to continually push and run your pipeline on a managed Jenkins instance, the feedback cycle is long. And the primary bottleneck to developer productivity is the length of the feedback cycle.

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How to Test Terraform Infrastructure Code

Published
Author
Dr. Phil Winder
CEO

Infrastructure as code has become a paradigm, but infrastructure scripts are often written and run only once. This works for simplistic infrastructure requirements (e.g. k8s deployments). But when there is a requirement for more varied infrastructure or greater resiliency then testing infrastructure code becomes a requirement. This blog post introduces a current project that has found tools and patterns to deal with this problem.

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