Xavier Geerinck

Creating a Dapr Project with Node.JS and the Dapr-JS SDK

Dapr is simply amazing, allowing you to interact with libraries that otherwise take a couple of hours to implement or even days depending, on your level of comfort with them. Next to that, when you would utilize libraries, you also need to take care of correct authentication, error handling, and more.

Tutorial - Creating an Email Microservice with Typescript and Dapr

How to set up a Typescript Project with Yeoman

Typescript is quite cumbersome to set-up... it's not built in in Node.js but it is important to write stable code with type checking. Since I write a lot of Typescript projects, it's quite handy to have an explanation on how to set-up a typescript project quickly.

Running CUDA on Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)

Running CUDA on the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is not a trivial task seeing that it requires the GPU to be available on a Virtual Machine. In this article I go in more detail how you can get your GPU working in WSL through something NVIDIA calls "Paravirtualization"

How to set up a Python Development Environment Setup on Windows (with WSL)

Setting up a Python Development environment on Windows might be a daunting task to do right. Especially since a lot of tools cause confusion or might not work out of the box.

Setting up Stable Baselines with Python 3.7 and WSL 2

I've been playing around a bit with Stable Baselines lately for an upcoming project. However while playing, I encountered some issues seeing that Stable Baselines currently requires Tensorflow <= 1.14 which is only supported through Python < 3.8. Due those difficulties, I thought it would be interesting to share how I set up my personal development environment from scratch to play around with Stable Baselines.

Autonomously Landing a Lunar Lander with an Xbox Controller Robotic Arm - Part 2

Training the Continuous Lunar Lander with Reinforcement Learning, RLLib and PPO

Autonomously Landing a Lunar Lander with an Xbox Controller Robotic Arm - Part 1

Getting Xbox Controller inputs through Node.js

For an upcoming Blog Post I wanted to connect my Xbox controller and start reading the input values through a simple node.js script that I could send back to an Arduino Nano. This entire process however seemed to be quite "interesting" to find suitable libraries and long-term supported solutions.

Digital Twins - Creating an Open-Source Platform

Digital Twins - Utilizing Virtual Actors through Dapr

As stated before, "A Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a physical object". This virtual representation should strive towards being an exact copy of the physical object in both state and logic associated with it.

Roadwork RL - A Multi-Language Reinforcement Learning Environment

A Multi-Language Reinforcement Learning Digital Twin Environment

One of the ideas I have been playing around with the last couple of months is the combination of Digital Twins and Reinforcement Learning. This is an experimental idea where I would love to hear your opinions about it (feel free to comment below, send me an email or reach out to me on Social Media such as Twitter / LinkedIn), and that will be refined over the coming months.

Internet Of Things - Digital Twins Explained

Looking at the history in manufacturing, we saw that many manufacturing companies were deploying statistical models on-edge (e.g. based on parameters such as temperature, pressure and speed, do we send an alert or not), having the main impact on their production volume. If they can then squeeze out this extra bit of improvement, they would thus be able to optimize this process and have a growth in production volume (and net earnings accompanied with it).

Dapr - Creating a User Login/Register Microservice

In an earlier post, I went in more detail how you can utilize Dapr to create a Microservice that communicates over gRPC for quick Inter-Process Communication (IPC).

Revamping my Blog with NextJS (2020)

Due to the current COVID crisis I had some time to start revamping my blog, focusing on achieving features that were not possible before. All while still keeping the costs to a minimum (or even free). Here I would like to explain how I achieved just this, with the focus on adding the following features:

Create a script to deploy a container automatically with Azure Container Registry

Currently I am working on a new web application that will require a server for signaling purposes. Now to run this server, I would like to utilize Azure Web Apps together with a container. Since I would like a low barrier to entry, I want to be able to run a command that takes care of:

Sampling a real-time stream

A common problem when working with real-time streams is that you are unaware of the data going in there due to the vast amount of systems connected to it and producing data. Therefor it is interesting to be able to "sample" a stream, where you will connect to the stream with your credentials, wait till an event comes in and then end the connection.

Building a Minecraft Puppet Scanner with Event Hub, a NFC 522 Reader and a Raspberry PI

Getting Tweets of multiple people on Twitter

For a new project of mine, I wanted to get the different tweets of multiple people at once and save those as a CSV and JSON for further processing. But how can we do this easily in just a couple of lines?

Predicting Instagram Pictures Likes and Comments with .NET Core and ML.NET

For a new fun Project, I wanted to create an Artificial Intelligence model that will allow me to predict the comments and likes of new pictures that a user can post on Instagram based on their own historical data.

Creating a throttled REST API Consumer

A common thing in Node.js is to create a REST API consumer that will perform a REST call. Due to the rise of many REST APIs, you might find yourself in the situation that you want to execute 1000s of calls (for example: Azure Cognitive Services).

How To Bind C++ Code with Dotnet Core

While you are working with compiled code, you often find yourself in the situation that every bit of performance count (just think about GPU intensive operations or even game engines). For this reason, we often turn back to coding C++ coding to be as low-level as possible (seeing that writing pure ASM is just too hard).