DEV Community: Marco Lamina

Why pinning your dependency versions matters

Marco Lamina — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 21:29:32 +0000

This is what my potential first customers saw when I launched the first email campaign for my latest project, all due to a crash that was not only unpredictable, but entirely avoidable. And it could happen to you too.

What happened

I have Postgres running as a Kubernetes deployment. In my values.yaml, I had set the following:

postgresql:
  image:
    tag: 15

It worked perfectly for months until this morning, when I woke up to my database in a crashloop and my service completely unavailable. Why? It turns out K8s had to restart the PostgreSQL pod, which then loaded the latest 15.* version of the Docker image. Unfortunately for me, that image was buggy and sent my database down to into oblivion.

The impact

Half of the recipients of my email campaign opened the link and were greeted with a 500 error before I could identify and fix the issue. Apart from the fact that it is embarrassing, I probably lost a few potential customers due to this.

Why you should care and what you can do

Pin. Your. Dependencies.

The main thing here is that you don't want any devops or dependency management systems to have control over which versions are pulled into your system. No matter if it's Docker, Python, Maven, Gradle, NPM or whatever system you are using to manage your dependencies - Specify all versions down to the PATCH version.

Semantic versioning

If you don't know what semantic versioning is, I suggest you read up on it. In a nutshell, it is a standard/guideline for defining version numbers and how to increase them:

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the:

MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes
MINOR version when you add functionality in a backward compatible manner
PATCH version when you make backward compatible bug fixes Additional labels for pre-release and build metadata are available as extensions to the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH format.

"Pinning" and why it matters

In my case, by setting the Docker image version to 15, I gave Kubernetes the freedom to download any minor or patch version of it - at any time, without warning. By "pinning" the version - in other words specifying MAJOR, MINOR and PATCH version explicitly - I regained control and the ability to update the image version on my own terms and test it thoroughly in my setup.

To summarize, this is bad:

postgresql:
  image:
    # Will potentially crash your application at any point
    tag: 15

Stay safe by only allowing the latest PATCH version:

postgresql:
  image:
    # This will pull the latest 15.7.x patch version
    tag: 15.7

Final thoughts

Even with 15 years of experience, rookie mistakes creep in. Not pinning your dependencies is an easy mistake to make, but can have dramatic consequences for your product and your company.

Ironically, the product I was about to launch could have actually helped me catch this issue before merging it into production 🤦‍♂️ Check out PR Manager, where you can generate reviews for your code changes before merging them. It allows you to catch issues like the one in this post and lets you fix them with the click of a button.

Let me automate your Github project to showcase my platform!

Marco Lamina — Tue, 10 Sep 2024 00:30:24 +0000

I'm working on a platform that enables developers to write powerful AI automations for their Github repositories.

To spread the word and showcase the platform's features, I'm looking for open-source Github projects to automate.

Send me your project and I will:

Fork your repository
Add knowledge for the AI agent
Write project-specific skills for the agent to use
Open a PR with my changes for you to review and discuss

Do you have a project that could benefit from AI automation? Let me know in the comments 👇

Mastering PR Descriptions: Make Your PRs Stand Out

Marco Lamina — Sat, 07 Sep 2024 00:02:21 +0000

TL;DR

Learn how to generate beautiful and comprehensive descriptions effortlessly for even the largest pull requests in minutes using PR Pilot.

Introduction

Good PR descriptions are crucial for effective collaboration and project management. But they can be time-consuming and tedious to write. Enter PR Pilot – your new best friend for creating consistent, clear, and beautiful PR descriptions effortlessly.

What it will look like

Here is a real-life example with 14 commits and 19 changed files:

The title and description were generated by PR Pilot in seconds. The PR description is clear, concise, and informative, making it easy for reviewers to understand the changes made.

Benefits of Using Generative AI for PR Descriptions

📝 Consistency: Ensures that all your PR descriptions follow a consistent format by storing the instructions as part of your code.
⏱️ Time-saving: No more spending hours crafting the perfect PR description. PR Pilot does it for you in seconds!
🎨 Customizable: Use our customizable prompt template to tailor PR descriptions to your project's specific needs.

How it Works

It's dead simple. All you do is run pilot run pr-description and:

The agent asks you for the PR number
It will read the PR description, comments, commits and code changes
It will generate a new PR description based on your preferences

See customizable prompt used for generating the description

I've made some changes and opened a new PR: #{{ env('PR_NUMBER') }}.

I need a PR title and a description that summarizes these changes in short, concise bullet points.
The PR description will also be used as merge commit message, so it should be clear and informative.

Use the following guidelines:

## PR Title
- Start with a verb in the imperative mood (e.g., "Add", "Fix", "Update").
- Put an emoji at the beginning that reflects the nature of the changes

## PR Body

- At the very top, provide short paragraph summarizing the changes and their impact.
- Below, list the changes made in bullet points.
- Use bold text instead of sections/sub-sections to separate the bullet points into topics
- There should be no more than 3-4 topics
- Use the present tense and the active voice.
- Be specific - Include names, paths, identifiers, names, versions, etc
- Where possible, make file names/paths clickable using Markdown links. Use this format for the URL: `https://github.com/<github_project>/blob/<pr_branch>/<file_path>`


# Your task
Edit PR #{{ env('PR_NUMBER') }} title and description to reflect the changes made in this PR.
Respond only with a link to the PR.

How to Get Started

Getting started with PR Pilot is a breeze! Follow these simple steps:

1️⃣ Install the CLI via Homebrew

brew tap pr-pilot-ai/homebrew-tap
brew install pr-pilot-cli

2️⃣ Grab the prompt: Download the prompt template from our core repo:

pilot grab commands pr-pilot-ai/core

3️⃣ Customize the template: Adjust the downloaded prompt template to suit your project's needs.

4️⃣ Run the prompt: Generate a PR description with a single command:

pilot run pr-description

Links / Resources

Ready to transform your PR descriptions? 🚀 Give PR Pilot a try today and experience the difference! Share your experiences and tips in the comments below. Let's make PR descriptions beautiful together! 💬✨

How I ended up building my own AI Dev Assistant from scratch

Marco Lamina — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 04:31:47 +0000

Remember the first time you saw an LLM write code?

Yeah, me too 😲

When I learned I could use this technology to build things, I got pulled into an endless stream of ideas and side projects - The kind of excitement I hadn’t felt in years. I started experimenting with small scripts and had tasted blood. I wanted more.

TLDR;

This is the story of how I built PR Pilot, a virtual agent designed to assist development teams in their daily work by interacting with code repositories, wikis, chat platforms, and ticketing systems.

The Gap

The LLM-based tools at the time (mid 2023?) were powerful, but not tailored to my workflow. Sure, ChatGPT could answer questions, and GitHub CoPilot could generate code. But I needed something that was more integrated, something that understood not just my code but also my tools and daily routines. Something I could control from the CLI and with config files. Something that speaks my language. 🖥️

The Turning Point

In my day job, I am the technical lead for a team with 8 engineers and my little side project started to change how I viewed our workflows at the company. I saw inefficiencies everywhere — especially in large teams. Big orgs (we are but one of many teams) are a maze of systems and isolated knowledge pools that we all have to navigate to get our jobs done.

We have source control in one place, ticketing systems in another, CI/CD pipelines elsewhere, and internal knowledge scattered across multiple platforms. On top of that, each team member has unique needs. QA engineers, DevOps, junior devs, senior devs — everyone has their own way of working and different environments.

Shaping PR Pilot for Real-World Teams

To be useful for the average team in my organization, the ideal assistant would have to navigate these complexities seamlessly. It couldn’t just generate code or assist with a single task — it had to connect the dots across different roles and workflows. It needed to act as a bridge between siloed information and team-specific processes.

This realization shaped PR Pilot into what it is today: a tool for developers, QA engineers, DevOps, and everyone in between. It’s designed to integrate with your specific workflows and help you get work done faster.

Showcase: Agent-Driven Bug Reporting & Analysis

Let's look at a simple scenario from may daily work:

We collect errors / stack traces in Sentry
To get them fixed, bug report tickets need to be created
The tickets need to have a specific format
The QA team wants to be notified on Slack

The Problem

This would involve me juggling 3 different systems, switching between apps and browser tabs, etc... Lots of context switching, remembering, copy/pasting information.

The Solution

With the CLI, I can run this scenario in a few minutes without leaving my terminal:

🤩 How amazing is that! Here is a breakdown:

Integrations

You can see that the agent interacted with Sentry, Github and Slack intuitively. PR Pilot makes it super easy to connect the services and tools you use every day.

Knowledge

This part almost seems like magic:

However, it knows where to look because:

I've connected my Sentry account to PR Pilot
I taught it which project that particular Github repo belongs to

It's as simple as dropping a Markdown file into your project and the agent will use that knowledge to run your tasks (Learn More).

Skills

You may have noticed the "Bug report skill":

PR Pilot also makes it easy to codify repetitive workflows by dropping a YAML file into your project. These skills are automatically picked up and used by the agent, so when I say Report this as a bug, it will automatically:

Read the relevant code
Create a new Github issue and write a report according to my preferences for structure and formatting
Post a message with a link to the issue into #qa-team on Slack

Knowledge + Skills + Integrations = Magic

Put it all together and what you get is an assistant that:

Has intuitive, developer-friendly interfaces
Is controlled with config files in my repositories
Can autonomously navigate the services I use
Has domain knowledge of my project(s) and organization(s)
Can automate some of my daily work efficiently and with confidence

Most importantly, it is an assistant that I can trust to produce predictable results and behavior.

Why I Built PR Pilot

PR Pilot is now an AI-powered assistant that integrates with GitHub, ticketing systems, and chat platforms to streamline workflows and reduce context switching. My mission? To help developers stay in the flow by providing the right assistance at the right time with minimal friction. 🚀

Learn More

Of course there's a lot more to discover:

Check out our demo repository with more show cases
There's also a REST API and a Python SDK
You can build powerful, dynamic prompts with Jinja templates
We have a comprehensive User Guide

Automate your own project!

It’s been a wild ride from hacking together scripts to launching a full-fledged product. If you’ve ever felt bogged down by manual tasks or that context switching is killing your productivity, I’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas. Maybe PR Pilot can help make your dev life smoother too. 👇

🎧 Code Noise: The Ultimate Background Noise Generator for Programmers

Marco Lamina — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:31:55 +0000

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm super excited to share a project I've been working on: Code Noise! 🌟

Why I Built It

I'm very sound sensitive and often find music too distracting while coding. I wanted a tool where I could create the perfect background noise to help me focus. That's how Code Noise was born! 🎉

What is Code Noise?

Code Noise is a web app that allows you to generate and play various types of background noise, customizable with sliders and knobs. Whether you prefer pink, white, or brown noise, or even a select number of YouTube videos for ambience, Code Noise has got you covered! 🎶

Key Features

Free, in browser: No need to download anything!
Multiple Noise Types: Choose from pink, white, and brown noise.
Add Ambience: Add sounds of nature from a select number of YouTube videos for that perfect background vibe.
Fine-Tune: Mix all sounds together using intuitive sliders.
Share: Easily share your perfect noise settings with others.

Under the Hood

The app is built using Python & FastAPI for the backend, with Jinja2 templates for rendering. We use BulmaCSS for styling and jQuery for JavaScript functionality.

Built in one day

I built this in less than a day using the Rapid Prototyping Template I've been working on.

Try It Out!

Ready to create your perfect coding environment? Check out Code Noise and let me know what you think! Your feedback is invaluable and will help make the app even better. 💬

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions or suggestions. Let's make coding a more pleasant experience together! 🌈

My first post - Hi, dev.to

Marco Lamina — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:09:01 +0000

👋 Hi dev.to,

After many years, I've grown tired of working for other people and started a new journey towards financial independence last year. This community has been recommended to me, so I thought I'd say hi 🙂

About me:

🌍 Born in Berlin, moved to San Francisco in 2016
💻 Coder, 🎵 musician, 🥋 martial artist
🏢 Currently working for a very large software company
🚀 Working on my own AI software to gain financial independence

Would love to get in touch with other like-minded folks in this community!

📚 Which blogs do you recommend?

📝 What would you like me to write about?