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Pitwall is my Formula 1 stats app. It lives at pitwall.chrisdevcode.com, talks back on Telegram via @pitwallBycdc_bot, and the source is on GitHub. I built it because the public F1 APIs are great, but nobody had stitched them together with the views and the chat surface I actually wanted to use during a race weekend. This article walks through how it’s put together: the architecture, the two data sources, the rate-limit budget, the idempotent ingest, the cache invalidation trick, and the Telegram bot that shares everything with the web app. ...

day 2 of Ubucon Kenya leaned a little different from day 1. fewer infra-heavy walkthroughs, more talks about building, breaking, and belonging. by the end of it, the running theme was clear: the Ubuntu community in Kenya is figuring out how to grow the people alongside the projects. bridging native C++ infrastructure with distributed data platforms speakers: Irfan M. Ghat, Rodgers W. Simiyu, Paul Sanga Nyamawi the trio opened day 2 with a deep dive into spark-connect-cpp, a C++ client for Apache Spark that uses Spark Connect’s decoupled client-server model to let native systems talk to Spark without dragging the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) along for the ride. their argument is simple: if you want a Raspberry Pi or a factory sensor to push data into Spark, you should not need a full Java install to do it. spark-connect-cpp uses gRPC for transport, Protobuf for serialization, and Apache Arrow for zero-copy data transfer, which together give you low-latency, high-throughput communication suitable for real-time trading systems, edge devices, and scientific workloads. ...

i prepared this for an AI workshop at TUM Innovation Week 2026, long story short, it did not happen, they moved my session to a later time and i wasn’t gonna make it anyways. so here’s the two hours of me talking stuff, in words. fair warning: there are some dad jokes in here. i refuse to remove them. what is AI, really? artificial intelligence is systems that can learn from data, recognize patterns, and make decisions — tasks that normally require human intelligence. three things: learn, reason, act. ...

google just shipped a feature many of us have been asking for since forever: you can now change your primary Gmail address without losing your account, your emails, or your data. if you created your account back in 2009 with something like [email protected], today is a genuinely good day. what changed before this update, you could add alternate email addresses to your Google account as aliases, but your original address was locked in as the primary one. Google has changed that. you can now switch to any available @gmail.com username, and your old address automatically becomes an alias, so it still works for receiving mail and signing in. ...

day 1 of Ubucon Kenya was packed. like, properly packed. the kind of lineup where every talk makes you want to go home and spin up a new project. here’s a rundown of everything that went down. Ubuntu cloud-init: from development to production with Multipass speaker: Duncan Njoroge (@guyfromtheke) Duncan kicked things off with a practical walkthrough of cloud-init and Multipass for local development workflows. the core idea is simple: you define your entire server configuration in a YAML file (packages, users, SSH keys, scripts) and cloud-init applies it when an instance boots. Multipass lets you spin up Ubuntu VMs locally with that same cloud-init config, so your local dev environment mirrors what you’ll deploy to production. ...

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